Demo Girl

YouTube announced some new features yesterday on their blog. These features include video organization, friends-only comments, video sorting on channel pages, and active sharing. Some of these features are a bit hidden, I thought, so I decided to save you the trouble of trying to figure out how to enable all of these new goodies and just show you. Here’s my screencast tour of some new YouTube features:

Flash Demo 2m37s

Have you ever found something totally outrageous or completely ridiculous on eBay and wanted to share it with your friends or blog readers? Well, if you have a website, blog, or belong to a social network now you can. EBay To Go has three widgets to choose from that allow you to showcase one or multiple eBay items. Here’s my screencast tour of eBay To Go:

Flash Demo 2m53s

(Source:  Techcrunch )

Particls is a personalized news alert and filtering service. You let Particls know what type of news you’re interested in and the websites you want to keep up with and Particls will alert you in certain ways, chosen by you, based on importance. They have a couple of screencasts up showing Particls in action so I decided to made one explaining some of the features. They’re in private beta right now but I have 5 invites for anyone who’s interested. Let me know in the comments. Here’s my screencast tour of Particls:

Flash Demo 3m37s

CozmoTV allows you to watch and create your own channels with shows from sites such as YouTube and Google. I made a screencast for CozmoTV back in December but they’ve changed the look a bit and added some new features since then. One of these features is a customized embeddable widget that you can create with the channels of your choice and put on your website, blog, and of course MySpace. Here’s my screencast tour of CozmoTV:

Flash Demo 4m10s

I decided that since yesterday I made a screencast for well known Technorati that today I would re-post a previous screencast I made for another very popular service, del.icio.us. The social bookmarking site is a great way to find new and interesting articles and websites as well as store your own favorites. According to the del.icio.us blog, they passed the 2 million user mark last month. Wow. Here’s my screencast tour of del.icio.us:

Flash Demo 3m40s

It was one year ago today that I posted my very first screencast. I remember being so afraid of hearing the sound of my voice and I would freak out if anyone was around me while I was recording. I had a little headset mic and had no idea how to use a lot of the features that came with the screencast software I was using, Camtasia. I sort of felt the same way I did when I was 15 and trying to learn how to drive a standard. I knew I could do it but I also knew it would take time before it would just come naturally. The fear of my own voice is now gone and I can navigate through Camtasia with my eyes closed but I still hate the way I sound.

Since then I have created 250 screencasts not counting the custom screencasts I’ve done for various companies. I’ve learned a lot in this year and hopefully helped some of you find cool new web services in a different way. It’s fun to see how much screencasting has grown and to see screencasts created by companies that I previously covered. Thanks to the guys at VPOP Technologies for coming up with this great idea and asking me to carry it out. They also happen to be two of my older brothers and one of them, Joe, helped to coin the phrase “screencast” so it’s only appropriate that we’ve somehow been involved in the growth of screencasting. (I like to think so )

I hope you’re enjoying DemoGirl and don’t forget to check out Screeniac, our previous screencast demo site, which is where a large number of my screencasts are located. If you need custom work then check out this page and don’t forget, “Screenshots suck! Screencasts rulio!”.

Most bloggers know all about Technorati, the ultimate blog search. Like some other well known services that I’ve done screencasts for in the past (Gmail and Bloglines) maybe you don’t take full advantage of all there is to offer. After reading this article today I started thinking about how to generate more traffic to DemoGirl and I started poking my nose deeper into Technorati and finally decided to just do a screencast. So here it is, my screencast tour of Technorati:

Flash Demo 4m41s

Kyte allows you to create your own TV channels and broadcast shows on your website, blog, social network, or mobile phone. You can upload video, photos, add music, and polls. Viewers can chat live about your shows and, if you allow it, other users can produce shows and broadcast them on your channel. I created a channel called “DemoGirl” where I’ll be broadcasting some of my screencast demos. Here’s my screencast tour of kyte:

Flash Demo 5m

Meshly gives you a way to quickly post links to your own space and the Meshly community through your IM client. Users can vote and comment on the posts and you can place posts onto specific channels.

At first, I thought that it was another Twitter, but it’s not really about letting people know what you ate for breakfast. It’s more about sharing interesting links and then voting to get those links on the popular page. So, let’s say I find a cool article on Lifehacker, I can just send an IM to Meshly with the link and a brief description and it’s instantly shared with the Meshly community. Channels are created to help you find what you’re looking for. Here’s my screencast tour of Meshly:

Flash Demo 3m

Found on: StartupSquad

MoodMill gives you a way to manage and share your moods online. It allows you to quickly update your mood and give a brief description why you’re feeling especially happy or especially annoyed. You can subscribe to your friends MoodMill and create a different avatar for each mood you may be feeling.

MoodMill is a lot like Twitter and Jaiku but it’s still in way early development so there aren’t very many features available. I do like the idea of sharing your mood with your friends so I just added my MoodMill feed to my Jaiku account as I did with my Twitter feed. Here’s my screencast tour of MoodMill:

Flash Demo 2m35s