Jing is a lot like Twitter at first: when you try it you might think, “Interesting, but when would I ever use it?” Then you start playing around with it, see how others are using it and you’re hooked.

This is a guest blog post by Michael Britt, host of The Psych Files podcast.

Essentially, Jing allows you to take a quick (5 minute max) screen capture (still or video) of whatever you’re doing on your computer. If you take a video screencast you can:

• save the video to your computer as a .swf or .mp4 file (.mp4 is only available if you have a Jing Pro account),
• save the video to Jing’s servers (Jing is owned by TechSmith, the makers of SnagIt and Camtasia). Jing will send you a URL to the video which you can share however you like, or
• send the video to your YouTube account.

If you’re having a problem doing something with a program on your computer for example, you could take a quick Jing video and then when Jing sends you the URL (takes about 2-3 minutes), you email/IM the link to someone who can see exactly what you’re doing.

Here’s how you might use Jing with your Sprout: in my previous post I showed how a teacher could use a Sprout to handle all those annoying writing errors (like confusing “then” and “than”) which crop up every year in students’ papers. A teacher could create a Sprout with buttons for each typical writing error, and then link the buttons to a page that contains written examples of how to write properly or links to YouTube videos in which someone else explains how to avoid the writing error.

You could also use Jing to explain things to your students yourself and then embed that video into your Sprout.

To embed a Jing video into a Sprout, get yourself a free Jing account and play around with Jing. Make a video and either:

• save the video to your YouTube account, or
• save your Jing videos to your computer in .swf format.

In your Sprout, open Assets, click “Add Assets” and then upload the .swf from your computer. At that point you can just drag the Jing .swf file to your Sprout or just click the green plus sign below the Jing file and it will be added to your open Sprout.

Couple of things to note:

• When you make your Jing video you’ll probably want to make it small. Hold down the shift key when you’re determining the size of your Jing video and you’ll get some options you’ll probably want to use.
• The Jing video will play find, but it will use its own controls in your Sprout – it won’t work within the Sprout video component unless you upload it to YouTube and embed it from the YouTube URL.

Give it a try. Here’s a quick  video that shows how I combined Sprouts with Jings:

Works great.

- Michael Britt

If you are interested in learning more about what Joe Stump created, check out http://tweetimag.es  Now that you have an understanding of the syntax behind Tweetimag.es, let’s adapt it so that it works in Sprout Builder.

The URL looks like this:
http://img.tweetimag.es/i/{username}_{size}  (see size chart below)
for example: http://img.tweetimag.es/i/sprout_n

In order for this to work in Sprout you need to add “?.png” to the end of the URL so that this is the URL you enter into the image URL field: http://img.tweetimag.es/i/sprout_n?.png Add an image component to your sprout and double-click it.  You will see a dialog, such as the one below, where you can insert the Tweetimag.es URL.

Here is what you can create using Sprout Builder and the Tweetimag.es service:

As you can see in the sprout (above), you can have the Twitter profile image completely separate from the Twitter component that displays the tweets.  This give you the flexibility to completely customize the appearance and layout of your Twitter component.  Let me know what you think about using Sprout to display your tweets.

Let’s take a deeper look at some of these applications.

General Electric has done some very innovative advertising campaigns around their ecomagination initiative.  Ecomagination has a very lofty goal, which is to help solve the environment’s biggest challenges.  It’s not surprise that they are pushing the limits in the advertising space as well.  Enter augmented reality.  This campaign allows the web site visitor to take a physical piece of paper with an image on it and then place it in front of the web cam to “sprout” a wind farm of turbines or a solar panel array.  Watch the demo below to see the end-user experience.

Another campaign using AR was created by a London-based interactive agency, Poke.  The client was Coca Cola for their non-carbonated bottled soft drink, Oasis.  Oasis is perceived as an alternative to water and Poke was tasked with creating an experience that drove this idea home.  The final product was an “Oasis Gaming System” coupled with augmented reality to a create an experience where the gamer avoids the water drops as a rubber duck.  I took a screen capture of the gameplay.

It doesn’t end there, in this Ars Technica article, it is rumored that the iPhone API will soon support the ability to add a form of augmented reality into 3rd party applications.  This is the tip of the iceburg when it comes to innovative engaging advertising technologies.  What is your favoritve augmented reality technology (advertising campaign or otherwise)?

Johnathan and I discussed how he is using sprouts to both promote his documentary film across the social graph AND use it for specific applications within social networks such as Facebook.

Here is an example of using a sprout that can be shared across the social graph, with the starting point being the documentary’s MySpace profile. There is also a sprout that displays an RSS feed.

Johnathan also used Sprout to create custom interactive content for the documentary’s Facebook Fan Page.  This content is designed to stay on the Facebook Fan Page and not be shared across the social networks.

So you have a Facebook page and you have a sprout.  This blog post will show you how to get a sprout with a custom tab on your Facebook Fan Page.

I had previously written out each step-by-step but decided to re-do it as a video and only include the crucial code to make this easier.

Here is the code I used for this specific example:

WordPress was treating the single quotes very weirdly so you will need to manually type in the code above.

What you will learn:

• Create a Sprout and use it as your Myspace header
• Create a custom size slate for your Sprout
• Add assets to your Sprout’s pages
• Create a transparent timer
• Insert into your Myspace code and place at the top of your layout

Lets Begin

1. Once logged into Sprout, click the red text in the top right hand corner of the screen that says “Launch Sprout Builder.”

2. Choose Blank Slate for your page template

3. Add a title, project description and choose your canvas size. Choose any predefined size from the drop down list or set the width and height to whatever size you need. In my case it will be 800px wide and 600px high.

4. Open your asset manager to either upload or add a url to any piece of content you plan on using like pictures, video, graphics etc then hit save. In this case I used 2 pieces of content. The first is a countdown timer .swf movie I downloaded from http://www.istockphoto.com and the second is a video from http://www.youtube.com. I uploaded the timer as a file and copied and pasted the URL of the YouTube video and uploaded to the asset manager.

5. Once your content is added to the asset manager, drag and drop it onto your page. I created 2 pages; one for the timer and the second page for the video. Close your asset manager tray, re size the timer movie and video to 800×600 and position both to X=0 and Y=0 on each page.

6. On page 1 which contains the flash timer countdown movie, you need to create a real timer to tell page 1 that when the timer reaches zero to go to page 2 and begin playing the YouTube video. You can do that by selecting the timer component from the general tab inside the components module.

Now that the real timer is added to page 1 you should click the timer object to select it and set it as transparent. Then use the drop down settings to select how many seconds the timer should run before navigating to the next page of your sprout.

7. Now you have a sprout that is 800×600 with a timer and a video that can be used as your Myspace header. Click the green button in the upper right hand corner named publish. Copy the HTML code that is given to you.

8. Paste the code into a text editor like notepad, word or an email body. Find the URL that contains the piece of flash you need to paste into your Myspace code. The URL ends with an .swf extension, contains a hexadecimal code after load/ and looks like http://farm.sproutbuilder.com/load/nABWy2gIFEhiMSI9. This is the URL snippet you need to paste into your Myspace code.

9. Log into your Myspace profile and click edit profile. You can generate code like this using a site like www.mygen.co.uk. The images below will show you where to place the Sprout .swf URL, how to re size your header table and how to push the body of your Myspace layout down the page to make room for your header at the top.

Appendix. Click the images to enlarge:

Paste your Sprout .swf URL and edit the size of your header

Push the body of your myspace page down. *This is important. It creates room at the top of your layout for your Sprout to live!

This was a guest post by Sprout user, Adam Gershenbaum. Follow him on Twitter.