Today TeamSpark passed the 600 videos mark - a great milestone. While we continue to categorize videos, we recommend users start trying the search function to really drill down into an area they want to focus on.
That’s all for now - need to get back to working on getting to 700 by the end of the year!
It’s moving into the classroom - is it a tool for corporate employee development too?
There are two bills currently making their way through Congress that will have a drastic impact on the web as we know it if they become law. Protect IP Act (PIPA - S.968) and Stop Online Privacy Act (SOPA – H.R.3261). Today a number of leading websites have organized “American Censorship Day” to raise awareness of the issues.
If you want to learn more about the bills you can visit http://americancensorship.org/ There is a great video that explains the issue clearly. I’m especially disappointed as the Protect IP Act is sponsored by Senator Leahy of VT. I can’t think of a single company in VT that will benefit from this bill, and can think of many small businesses that may be hurt or shut down.
Please take a moment to look into the details of this bill, visit http://americancensorship.org/, and contact your representative in Congress. Thanks for taking the time to learn about the issues.
Chris Patton
Founder / Cultivate & TeamSpark
PS - One other thing I should point out. The original intent of the bills, which was to stop online piracy, is not what we are against. We completely support that effort - the problem with these bills is the secondary effects. The potential for abuse is too great.
We’ve recently changed our product direction for TeamSpark - here’s where the future product focus is taking us.
Original Product - TeamSpark was originally designed to be something that large companies offered to their entire employee base. We saw the need from Cultivate to provide a broad, open employee development solution that was accessible by all.
The Future…And Beyond!: But along the way we realized that the true users of TeamSpark were different - they were HR and Training professionals who needed to find new content, and wanted to use TeamSpark to save the content they found on their own. The latest features added to TeamSpark address those issues (tagging items and emailing content into TeamSpark.)
If part of your job is finding training & development content for employees then TeamSpark was built for you.
TeamSpark has a lot of great videos, and we add more every week. But what about the professional development content you find on your own? Or content that a colleague emails to you? Now you can email that content directly to TeamSpark, and we’ll attach it to your account.
Here’s an example: You receive an email from a colleague with a link to a training video that would be great for your Leadership Team…..but not for a few months. In the past you might have just put it in an email folder and hoped you could find it in the future. With TeamSpark, all you need to do is forward that email to: content@save.goteamspark.com We’ll attach it to your account and add it to your My Content homepage. When you next log on to TeamSpark you can tag the email with ‘Leadership Team’ or ‘Training Video’ to help you stay organized.
Just make sure you send your email from the email address you are set up with in TeamSpark. Simple! Start using TeamSpark to help organize your web learning content - it’s as simple as sending us an email.
We’ve added a new feature to TeamSpark - the ability to tag videos. Now users can create their own categories and lists of content. It’s simple to do - from any of the video detail pages, there is a ‘My Tags’ section underneath the embedded video. Click on ‘Edit Tags’ and enter as many tags as you’d like. Here’s an example of a tagged video:
Once you have multiple videos tagged, you can filter your ‘My Content’ list by simply clicking on a specific tag. Here are some examples of ways we see people using tags:
-as a ‘read later’ list
-to list content by competencies
-creating lists of content based on internal company teams (Sales, Executive, Customer Service)
Happy August 1st! August has the habit of just sliding by….instead how about trying something different? Try something new for 30 days and start the process of creating a culture of change and improvement in your life. What do you have to lose? It’s only 30 days!
Great blog post from Brad Feld (Boulder CO VC) who has a great riff on the increasing importance of the VP of HR, and how they need to help everyone in the company (including the CEO) improve. He calls it ‘leveling up’ - like getting to the next level in a video game - and really means it as a holistic way of looking at professional development to really include personal, spiritual, emotional, professional development. So true - over 50% of the audiobook rentals from Cultivate were of a ‘personal development’ nature. There was a clear need and desire for that kind of content in the workplace.
An interesting article in the Bits blog of the NYTimes today about how Blip.tv has redesigned their site to help users find the ‘best’ content. It sounds like they consider the best to be the most popular (which can be questionable) but it’s a start. But there was also this line:
To help narrow down interesting content, Blip.tv producers will start picking videos with the best-quality content and then highlighting them on the site.
I know, not exactly shocking…but in this age where everyone seems to think the best algorithm will win it’s nice to see validation that human editors still matter. We agree!
The full post is here:
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/05/17/blip-tv-reintroduces-itself-as-a-curated-video-site/
