Steve Dotto here.
How the heck are you doing this fine day?
Me?
I have the feeling that you and I should take a ride on the cutting edge and look at the
newest of the video conferencing solutions out there, Blab.
Now this is the latest in a series of these new conferencing-type, instant conferencing
applications that are designed almost as broadcast mediums.
First, we had Meerkat then Periscope then whatever the heck Facebook called their thing
and now we have what might be the best of the bunch, Blab.
Blab allows us to create a video stream with four participants broadcasting to as many
as we want.
It kind of looks as the Brady Bunch as we’re having a conversation.
It streams beautifully through your browser.
There’s a mobile side of the app and it is the latest in the evolution of streaming
broadcast conferencing.
So it’s going to Blab today on DottoTech.
Because of my background in broadcast radio and television, I’m really drawn to these
new broadcast applications or conferencing applications, these tools that allow us to
stream over the internet video and audio and allow interaction with an audience.
They’re fascinating and they’re really, I believe, going to change the face of business,
of politics, of entertainment.
They’re just really wonderful engagement tools and the latest in that list is this
one.
It’s called Blab.
It’s free to use.
They’re a fairly new company.
They’re very well-funded because of their history and they are going to be a contender,
I believe.
Now it’s very easy to kind of get your head around what Blab is and what it does unlike
things like Google Hangouts which always had a lot of different barriers to entry, where
there was a bit of a steep learning curve, there was unreliable technology.
My early experiences with Blab is that it is an awesomely simple technology and really
engaging.
Let’s just quickly walk through it.
You sign up through your Twitter account although you can sign up and you can view it without
being on Twitter, which makes you kind of an anonymous lurker in this situation and
it uses Twitter for promoting upcoming broadcasts, etc.
If you visit their page at Blab.im—I hope it’s Blab; some people might call it Blab—you’ll
see that they’ve got basically right now three distinct streams or areas that they’re
talking about.
They have a tech channel which talks about all things technology-related and if you click
on any of these, you’ll see if any broadcasts are happening live right now, which they don’t
appear to be but you can subscribe which will give you notification of upcoming Blab events.
So you can schedule and you can have people subscribe.
There isn’t any way for you to capture the information.
It’s not like with a normal webinar where you’re capturing information and sending
emails, that sort of stuff.
It’s far simpler a process where you just subscribe then you open a window and then
when it starts, it will start playing.
But it kind of gives you a little reminder.
We’ve got one on air right now.
They’re talking social media and you can see the people who are engaged in each of
these conversations.
We see a couple in the business area and then in the general area, in the general tab, there’s
usually a few more.
Yeah, there’s people talking Tartan Talk, which I imagine—I don’t know what tartan
talk is.
It might be talking Scottish people—After-Blab Medical.
They’re got a whole variety of different on-air ones in the general space.
Well, let’s kind of go over to the business space and let’s just lurk and have a listen.
So as soon as you’ve signed up, you don’t have to do anything.
You can go in and you have a listen to what’s happening.
So let’s just jump into this one that’s going on right now.
I just click on the On-Air button, it will find the stream and then it will let them
know here in the chat area on the right-hand side, it has let them know that I am in the
room.
So my name would appear, saying “Steve Dotto entered this chat.”
Somewhere down here, it should say it.
Let me look for it unless things are happening so fast that I’m already through the top.
And along the top here, you see a roster of all of the people that are in the room.
Now when I did my first Blab last night, I did one with a few friends and we promoted
it a little bit by email.
We had about a hundred people in the room which I think was a fairly large number, at
least for the early point of Blab and we could scroll back and forth along this list here
and it will actually scroll to the right so that we could see all of the different people
that are in the room.
Now if you see somebody who you want to follow or you find somebody that might be worth watching,
you can just click on them or hover your mouse over top of them and ask to follow.
Now for some reason, my screen is not resolving perfectly but that’s probably because this
is still beta but if I just click on Follow here now, I’ll start following this Debs
Smith.
So you’ve got that kind of ongoing interaction.
Now what has just happened is one of the people has dropped out of this conversation here
and if I wanted to join in and give my two cents’ worth to the room, I could click
on Join and then the moderator who’s up here on the upper left-hand corner would be
able to determine whether or not they wanted to bring me into the room or not.
So I could actually join in on the conversation if I chose to.
So I’m just going to back out of this room because I want to show you the rest of the
interface.
So there it is.
So I backed out of the room.
So this is my account.
Let me just click on my account just to show you for a moment how it’s set up.
It’s quite simple.
It follows my Twitter profile as far as the name and all of that sort of stuff.
It’s got how many people I’m following and how many people are following me.
That will build over time, especially if you’re broadcasting, if you’re the sort of person
that’s going to start creating and using this for community building.
So you’ll get followers.
As much as you do on Twitter or on Facebook, we get people that are following you.
So here are some of the people that were engaged in the single Blab that I did last night.
We had Brian Fanzo on and Sue Zimmerman.
We’re all on it but as you scroll through, you can see all of the different people that
I’m following right now.
This is the list of people that I’m following.
This woman here, Ileane Smith, I’m going to put a link to here in the description below.
Ileane has really followed this technology closely and she’s got a really good PDF
that you can download that walks you through the process both as a participant and as a
broadcaster in this space.
She has really jumped into it early on and one of the really good early adopters.
So she’s providing some great services there.
Personally, having used it for just a single broadcast now, I like the environment.
With four people on it, it’s not too noisy, it’s not too busy.
It’s far easier to manage a Blab broadcast than it is a Google Hangout or other form
of broadcast.
The technology seems to be a little bit more stable as well, which is a good thing.
During the recording at any point or during the broadcast, the host can choose to record
the Blab cast—Blab cast?—and at the end of it, they are sent a download link for the
video and the audio.
So they can create a podcast instantly from it so it’s very, very friendly as far as
being able to leverage the content that you create in one of these broadcasts downstream.
Now a lot of the cut broadcast that you jump into now are people that have no idea of what
they want to say in a broadcast so they’re basically babbling on about doing their nails
and stuff like that.
So there’s going to be a bit of a sussing out period until people that are really engaged
in content and really get their head around what sort of content they want to deliver
in this format, get into this space and start to take over and start to dominate the space.
But if you come in thoughtfully and knowing exactly what it is you want to share with
a good structure and good control over the environment, it can be a very rich broadcast
environment.
It reminds me a lot of doing call in radio in the kind of control that we want and the
kind of interaction that we want.
There’s a chat window going down the side, there are tweets that are happening, all integrated
right within the broadcast itself which really adds to the audience being able to come in
if there are interesting people.
The fact that you can move people in and out of those chairs, in and out of those four
squares and interview different people and have guests jump in and out, that creates
a really nice, interesting dynamic approach to the entire thing.
I like it a lot.
Just today—we’re August 17th I think—they released the Blab iOS app.
There isn’t one out yet for Android but let’s take a quick look.
If I open the iOS app, I had to log in using my Twitter credentials once again but it’s
identical, it looks pretty much identical to what we’re seeing on the desktop.
From what I understand—let me just jump into that same talk that we were in; I’m
just opening it up here so you can have a look—the chat is a little bit compressed
down at the bottom so it’s not quite as comfortable as far as chatting would be on
your desktop client.
But here in the mobile environment, this is awesome, you’ve got the ability to be able
to view these through mobile.
You can also broadcast through mobile so it kind of takes on a little bit of that Periscope
side except with Periscope, what people are doing since there’s only a single feed is
they’re pointing the camera at Skype while they’re interviewing people and while they’re
talking.
So Periscope seems to work much better for a one-on-one, whereas this works far better
or it works very well, I think, for an interview format, a group conversation, that sort of
thing, which I find to be, as I say, very, very compelling.
I’m going to tap here on the Home button.
That takes me out of that Blab and back into the home.
That’s it.
I encourage you to jump on and take a look.
It’s free.
They haven’t really outlined yet what their business model is going to be.
There doesn’t seem to be any advertising attached and they are in the early stages
so this is an opportunity to jump on one of the really fast moving, new, compelling technologies
just as it’s kind of coming into its own.
So check out Blab.im.
I hope you found today’s video to be useful.
Now remember, there are three ways to stay in touch with us here on DottoTech.
The first is you can subscribe to this channel.
Second is subscribe to our newsletter and guess what?
I’ll let you know when I’m doing upcoming Blabs in the newsletter as I will be doing
them on a fairly regular basis, I think at least for the time and for the foreseeable
future.
And finally, DottoTech is a community-funded channel.
We’re supported by you, our viewers through the crowdfunding site, Patreon.
I encourage you to drop by our Patreon page, have a look and discover the perks that are
included in supporting DottoTech.
Those perks, well, they are awesome.
That’s all the time we have for today.
I thank you so much for your time.
Until we see you again, have fun storming the castle!