How to be a Good Plusser - Food Bloggers Community

Okay, turn that on.

Ah, there we go.

I got—

yeah. I like that lower third.

Is it showing up on mine too?

Not yet. Well, there's—

oh, here we go.

Ah, there you go.

Very good.

Yeah.

Oh, snow. Lovely.

Lovely. Brooks, are you there? Apparently not. I don't know if people can get to this or—

It was not necessarily— it wasn't all that obvious. I had to look to see the link below the on-air.

It looks like now there's a screen up there though, and right below the screen is the website, so.

Yeah, yeah, it's got the, it's got the on-air thing so people can just watch, and the link is below it.

Yeah, so they should be able to join us with the link, should they not?

They should.

If not, we can start inviting people in.

Yeah, well, if anybody is watching, they can certainly by now figure out that they can go below where they're watching.

Yeah, it takes me right to the Hangout.

Yeah.

Because I have another computer hooked up just in case.

Right. Well, that's how I— that's how I joined off that link, so.

Good.

Oh, there's somebody coming, right?

Hi, Dennis! Hey there, Barbara!

Hi, Barbara! Hello, Barbara!

Hi! I think you changed the time so it's earlier, so maybe people aren't aware of it. Is that right?

No, it's the same time I scheduled it at.

Oh, is it? I was thinking it was at 10.

No, it's at 11. I— it's been at 11. Depends where you are too.

Oh yeah, I'm Mountain Standard Time.

Yep, so it's 10 for you. Yep.

Well, it's 9, right?

9 for you, yeah.

Yeah, yeah. Hi Sandy! Hi!

Hi everybody! How you doing?

And we're gonna get started shortly. We're just trying to see if we can get a few more people in here first. I'm looking to see if anyone else is trying to come in. Yeah, it's not working.

Hi! So how do you get your name to show up on your screen like that?

That's lower thirds. It's an extension. It's called Lower Thirds.

Yeah, you can get it in the Hangout Toolbox as well.

Okay, I'll work on that.

It's free, and you should find a link where you can— if you go to the left side of your screen, you can see where it says Add Apps. It should be easily available there.

Okay, once we get started too, unless you have a question, I'm going to ask everybody to mute unless you're wearing headphones.

Okay.

Looks like there's a delay here with me. Yeah, wow, that's weird. Alright. Let me see. Okay, I think the delay was because I was watching the screen of the Hangout. That's what the problem was. Okay, looks like Stephanie's in the sidebar here. Can I join by text if you get a— got no camera, Stephanie?

Yeah, alright.

And it looks like Barbara, you're there, right, but you have no camera. Jackie's here. Okay, well let's get started then. Yeah, wow, that's weird. Today I called this community hangout because I wanted to talk about being a good pluser. I can't mute, I can't do anything. If anyone can mute their microphones. I'm getting some feedback from somebody. If you have a question, unmute please, okay? Alright, about being a good pluser.. And it's kind of an obstacle that I've seen a lot of people having problems with. They're treating Google+ like it's just any other social media. It's not like any other social media. It's a community and you have to treat it like a community. And that's where everybody's running into some problems. We got used to Twitter, we got used to Facebook, those of us that were on FoodBuzz got used to that. Where we used to try and self-promote ourselves in order to reach more of a market. And with Google+, that's not something you really want to do. You have to change your whole outlook on what you're doing and how you're doing it. You have to be more a part of the community to do that. So I set up a post last week and it was 10 steps to be a good pluser or to help you be more successful. And the way I laid it out was the first and most important thing you can do is to set up your profile. Okay, by setting up your profile, and I mean set it up complete, put your name in there. And I know there's been some discussion about using a brand name, using a fan page, or using your real name. And I'm really not for doing a fan page because it's hard to get followers. The only way they can follow you is if you— I mean, the only way you can follow them is if they follow you first. So it's very, very difficult to get a base. And then moving into our second part with Google Authorship, which we'll get into, that really kind of hurts you by not using your name. And I know there's some people out there too that have adapted their name or made up a name that looks like a name. I'm not saying it'll happen But once the dust settles, when Google has some time, you may get a notice that says you have so many days to correct your name because they don't consider it a real name, at which point they'll just click off your account. They actually did that to me after I started, and it's been about a year, and I just didn't have my last name, so that's all. So be aware that that could happen, and if they do ask you to do that you may have to put in your, your real name or take that to a brand page at that point and lose everything you've got, right? Because you're going to have to start the personal page to start a brand page. So keep that in mind. So when I talk about filling out your profile, I'm talking about filling out the whole profile. Put your links in, put in something about yourself so people can connect and get an idea of who you are. You can even tell people what your interests are if you want and who you will follow or what type of groups you'd like to be considered to be in, that doesn't hurt either. But you know, go to your profile, fill it out completely, leave an email address where they can contact you. I don't get a ton of emails. I have almost 300,000 followers and I really do not get very many emails, so don't worry about that. You can always start a Gmail account, you have one with this anyway. Make sure you put your blog link in. Put your link for any other LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, anywhere else you might be, your Flickr account. Try to be complete and include as much as you can in your profile. Does anybody have any questions on profiles before we move on? Okay. So then I also started talking about authorship, Google authorship. And if it's something you haven't done, it's something you need to do. And it's, it's not that difficult. You know, part of it will be verifying your email address. So you just have to have a good email address. And if you can't verify the one that you're on, you know, you just might have to change it to another one, a Gmail account or whatever. But you have to verify that. And then authorship. And then authorship is really cool because when people do searches your picture will come up next to your item. Okay, now that right away is connecting you as a real person to people that are looking for something. And then once they get used to seeing your picture, if they run a search and you pop up, they're more likely to click on your item than somebody else's. I mean, everybody loves the Food Network, the Cooking Channel, Allrecipes, all these places to go for recipes, but people like to have a connection with people. So that's why I'm saying this authorship is important because it makes you a real person, it makes you available to have this type of relationship with, you know, even if you never even speak or email or they comment, but they can say, "Hey, I was on Dennis' site." They can tell their friends, you know, it's almost like they know you or they can speak about you as if you're a friend because they've gone to your site repeatedly, they've seen your stuff come up in searches because your picture's there. Okay, and then I've also found that it seems like sometimes when I post a picture on G+ and I put the link next to it, sometimes in the searches not only will my picture come up, but the picture of the dish will come up too, which is kind of cool. And Stephanie is saying— there's comments in the sidebar too, you know, if you go to chat and you guys can talk amongst yourselves if you have questions or if you want to ask questions through that way. And Stephanie's right, your traffic will start to increase. Right now my traffic on my site, 30-40% depending on how hot Pinterest is running, is coming from organic Google searches. And that's how much that's grown over the course of time since I've been on Google+ because they do reward their users. So every time you're doing something on G+, it's like a little bell goes off and it's an extra credit for you. So it's a good tool to use, it's the only social media to use that will give you a benefit like that. And Google Authorship is pretty easy. Gareth, you had posted some things on that, hadn't you?

Ah, yes. I posted things in our community. It's really quite easy to set up. It helps if you have email with your domain name in it. It gives you a real benefit in searches. I've got one up here. Let me see if I can share my screen to show you. Whoops, that's not what I want. Well, anyway, if you do a Google search for pan roasted carrots, you'll see that My blog post from a few years back shows up on the first page of search above Gordon Ramsay, who's not got authorship. Until I got authorship, I never appeared on the first page of any search for anything. So it's very easy to do, and you really ought to get to it.

Very good. Thanks, Gareth. Yeah, it is important and it will really help you grow. You know, it's another tool that Google's using. Now the other thing is, is Google is going to be changing some of the ways it handles searches. They already have. And, you know, I haven't exactly heard anything, but I know there's been some talk among other people that, you know, part of the authorship program is going to help you when the search changes, when the searches change. And that's really gonna again benefit you even more. And there's also a tool, not everyone may have it yet, I know it's coming out slowly, it's called Authorship Analytics, and it'll appear below your circles when you do get it. And it's a really neat tool. When you click on it, it actually tells you how many times you're coming up in searches and then how many click-throughs you have. So, I mean, it freaked me out the first time I opened it and saw so. It's really, really helpful and gives you an idea, and it'll also show you what is really hitting heavy. I mean, I know you can go to the regular analytics and see, but it'll give you an idea maybe which ones of your recipes are the most popular, and a lot of that will tie into then about how you, how you title your recipe.. And that's also something for SEO, but we're not going to talk about that today too much. All right, so anybody have any questions on authorship? Okay, great.

Stephanie has pointed out that there are some authorship analytics in the Webmaster Tools as well.

Okay, great. Didn't know that. That's not something I use very often, and I know I should.. I just don't get over there. On my list to do. Next on the list, the third most important thing that I thought, to be a good pluser. This is not necessarily the gospel, but I found that this works the best. I've been on for a year and a half almost, and I've seen how trends run and I've seen what's popular, and it seems that the big The picture is what gets all the attention. Okay, so that doesn't mean just leave a link and post it and go. It means to put a nice picture up and write something about it, because you're not going to have your little blurb that goes along with the link, and then to attach a really good photo. Okay, now if it's a bad photo and it's big, I don't know if it's going to help you as much. So, you know, again, you want to try and find the best photo. If you're having trouble with your images, you know, there's free software out there. I do see that from time to time too. It's just the color is off because of the temperature of the lights you're using. Very simple to correct, you know, just to change that, and your pictures will come up better. You know, I'm not telling you to run out and buy an expensive camera, just maybe to check on some software that will help your picture be a little prettier. Okay, so you're posting the big picture, you're writing a little blurb, and then you put your link with it so they can follow to your blog. Okay, not everybody's gonna go to it, but if it's a big picture, you're liable to get shares, you're liable to get +1s. Okay, and while you may not get the traffic exactly from that into your blog, What you are going to pick up is you're liable to pick up new followers, and those new followers could equate to new readers at your blog. You don't know who's going to see this and exactly what that might lead to. So it's important to grab the attention, and those nice big pictures will help you grab the attention in your posting. Another thing about posting is I see bloggers come on and they post and they might drop 3 or 4 of their own posts and then they run. Alright, you're not going to get a lot of response on that if that's what you do. People are just going to— they might look at the first few times, and if that's all you're doing, you're not going to get the kind of response that you're hoping for. It's not something about just self-promoting. Again, you're going to get more traffic to you and you're going to get more followers to you if you share other people's work rather than post your own stuff that many times. So you put something of yours up, one thing, and then go through the site with your friends, your other food bloggers, and share things that you like. Okay, that's what's gonna start to draw attention to you because other people, when those things hit the stream, other people are gonna see them and they won't necessarily know that it's yours, but they know you shared it. So if you share good content, that good content is going to bring you more followers, which in turn could turn into more readers for your blog. So it's, it's good sense to do that. Okay, if you're only out for yourself, people are going to see that and they're going to associate it more with just self-promotion and get turned off by it. I know in the old days we used to rush to promote, promote, promote ourselves because that's what we knew from the sites we were on because That's how they ran on FoodBuzz. We would self-promote, self-promote because we wanted our friends, the food bloggers, to see us. Okay, now when it comes down to it, we really, while we love our friends who are food bloggers and we want to have them around and we like to talk to our peers and it's good to have that community, they're really not the readers we're going after. We're going after all the other people. That are on the site. Those are the people that are going to come to your blog and they're the people that are going to drive traffic to you. I don't know if that makes sense to everybody or not, but that's really the market you want. And again, so by self-promoting that much, you're not going to gain that market. Alright, and a lot of people, if you— I mean, I've seen bloggers drop like 10, 12 posts, and if they start coming in, you know what's going to happen? They're going to mute you. Or they'll block you or they'll just drop you altogether. So if you keep doing that and it starts to appear like it's spam in their notices, people are going to react to that. If they know you're sharing good content, you know, and again I'm not saying to drop like 10 or 12 things in it even if it is good content and not all yours, you know, to time it out, to space it out a little better. But if you're sharing good content, you're more likely to get some action on that. Now the thing to remember too, okay, people are going on and they want to post it at 10 o'clock, then they come back and they want to post it at 12 o'clock, they come back and they want to post it at 4 o'clock. Okay, that's not really necessary. If it's good content and people are commenting, when they comment on it, it's going to drive your post back to the top of the stream. Okay, so that's where comments are important. So part of the job of posting then is to provide content that people are going to want to comment on, because once it goes to the top of the stream again, it's just like you reposted it without doing it. Okay, so that's something to keep in the back of your mind. If it's good content and someone shares it, okay, again, some— it's going to be seen by other people, and even though if it's shared from your site credit all comes back to you. Other people may share it, but if it gets shared from there, you get the shares for it. It really works in your benefit to kind of help each other to provide good content and to not overdo your own stuff. Any questions on that? How do communities fit into the picture? We're going to get to communities in a little bit, Barbara. Talking about now posting, and I touched on a little bit about leaving comments. The other thing to do is when you leave a comment for someone, to put their name in the comment with the plus sign. So it would be plus Chef Dennis Littley. And as you start to type it, you should start to get some suggestions. Like if you have 6 barbers, it will come up when you start typing barber, and then you want to hit the right one. So the suggestion will come up and then you click on it and it'll be highlighted in your comment. There's also a place I see a lot coming up now and it says "respond to author." Okay, you can respond to author, the name comes up automatically. Also, it'll be, if you hover over a comment, like where the translate button and the +1 button is, a lot of times there's a reply button and that'll also put the person's name right in it so you don't have to do that work.. But by doing that, you're giving them a bonus point because it's another mention on Google. And every time you're mentioned on Google, it helps you. Okay? So if you mention them, they're going to mention you. They're going to say, "Thank you," and your name, "That was a nice comment," or you'll start to engage and interact with people. Alright, and that's again, this is about the community here, not just the smaller ones that we've been building., but the large community on Google+, you know, all of us together.

Alright?

So that's an important thing to remember. I left out number 5, whatever that was. Okay. Hashtags. Hashtags have started to become very popular, and Google is really, you know, really wants us to use those. So when you post something, alright, say you post a chocolate cake or a Christmas chocolate cake. You put your picture up, you put your link up, you said your little blurb, so under your link you put a hashtag and you might start typing holiday and see what comes up. So once you start a hashtag, if there's something there already, suggestions will come up. So it might say holiday cake, holiday baking, Christmas cake, you know, you'll type in whatever you want, or Christmas 2012 baking. There's different areas, so when someone does go to search you, or not search you, but someone says, look, I want to see what's on today for baking, and they'll just go in the box and they'll do #baking, and then all the ones that have that hashtag will come up. Alright, so here's another way for you to get new followers and new readers by using the hashtags. Plus, it's a way to kind of coordinate posts and kind of group them in the right topic section. But Google is real hot on using hashtags, so I would definitely advise starting to do that if you don't. Any questions on that? Barbara, yes, there is a— Barbara asked a question about comments. Yes, there is a benefit to commenting because you're going to use their name, and when they thank you, they're going to use your name back. Also, by commenting on someone's post, you're driving it back up to the top of the stream. It's kind of like the old comment game on our blogs where we used to play, and I leave one for you, you leave one for me. It kind of goes into that a little bit too. By doing that, you're helping each other out, you're helping drive your post back up to the top of the stream.

Don't the +1s also move things up?

You know, I'm not sure about that. That's a good question, Gareth. I thought they did, but I don't think it moves it to the top of the stream. I think only comments do that. I had thought at first that it did. That's something we'll have to ask. Yes, you can +1 a comment too. And if you don't have— rather than say, I really like that, oh, thank you very much, oh, you're welcome, oh, thank you for your welcome, you know, instead of doing that back and forth, if you +1 their comment on the second time, You know, that's just like saying a thank you without actually writing it again. Okay, Stephanie's typing something about— it's very possible that is true. Again, I don't use Webmaster Tools enough to know to be an expert on that. So something good to think about, we can look into. Alright, another way to help you This is all about finding more people to follow you. It's all about developing yourself in the community and being part of the community. They have group activities. There's Foodie Friday, which is a great thing. I mean, Google Plusers love food porn. It's universal. Food is universal. It doesn't matter what you're doing, what your walk of life is. Everybody eats, and for the most part, everybody loves to eat good food. Or at least look at the pictures and drool over them and wish they had that good food. So there's Foodie Friday that's run. That's a good way to get yourself seen by a wider audience by joining that. There's also Catterday, and you know, I'm allergic to cats. I love cats, but I'm highly allergic to them, so I don't have any, but I posted a picture of a cat licking a snow cone and it went viral, and it was just crazy. And I got a ton of new people following me just from that. Okay, I think there's a dog one now too. Canon has one for Canon users occasionally. So I mean, this is a good way to get yourself out into a wider spectrum of people. And again, it's all about community here, and this is what being a good pluser is. And by being a good pluser it's going to help you. That's what you have to remember. Alright, the other thing is events. This is an event today, alright, and you should start getting into the habit or try to start running your own events or at least your own Hangouts. Okay, a lot of you are very talented people— not a lot of you, most of you are all very talented people out there that have a lot that they could give back to the community.. And you know, it may take some time to get your level of viewership up, but it's not going to take as long as you think. Start with Hangouts. Now we do have our own Food Bloggers Community now, so it's a great place to practice with each other. And by practicing your Hangouts, you know, you'll get a little more at ease by doing them, more confidence, and then you can hold your own event. Now you can hold an event for anything. Say you just want to have a cocktail party with your friends, alright, and you want to— it's going to be Friday night, you don't you don't have any plans, and if anybody else is around, you just want some friends to hang out with and talk to, pop a bottle of wine open and just sit back and relax. Well, it could just be a wine party at your house, a Google wine party. Or if you wanted to— Jackie there, she's a singer. She might want to sing for people sometimes. Right, Jackie? So— yeah, I see you. So that's another good thing. I mean, Google loves music too. You know, and musicians are always doing little events on there where they have private audience and they try out some new material. So, you know, that's another good way to do things. So there's a lot of ways to use Hangouts. You know, you all are very talented people with a lot to share, and there's a lot of ways that you can connect with other people through those Hangouts. And then creating the events and make them more public, and then again it's gonna help you. More people are gonna come to you that wouldn't have known about you otherwise. Alright, the one thing about events too is you can do it a couple ways. There is, when you open it up in the box, there's a place to click on air in the box when you set the event. Alright, that's what I used to do, and then I was told that's wrong. Okay, when you want to go on air, when you open your Hangout, there's an on air option in the Hangout itself. You click on that. When you start the Hangout, you would start it before you actually started the broadcast, and then a little embed button comes up at the top and a broadcast button. What you do is you click embed, and then a black box appears, and it's got an HTML code and a URL code in it. By copying the URL code going back to your event, hitting on advanced, and it opens up other fields for you to put things in. There's a place for a URL YouTube code, and that's where you put it in. So now that allows it— if you go back to the event page now, we're live on that event page, and that's what allows that to be live for everyone else to view it. Okay, so that's a good tool to use for that. And also, when you're on air, when you're broadcasting, it's making a YouTube video for you every time, so you have another place that people might be running a search on something you did. Say you made a winter chocolate cake and you titled it that and someone's looking for a how-to video on it, they'll click on that and they'll come to your blog. And when people are happy with you when they find stuff like that, they tell their friends and then their friends reach you. So again, it's something that's going to help you and help build your following and your readership. Any questions? Stephanie is saying she's got about 150 YouTube videos. Wow! And you do attract a different audience and the traffic does generate a lot of page views. Okay, it's good to know. I've only got about, I think, 10, so I'm working on it. Okay, now there's some questions out there and I've been seeing them more lately as How do I react to people that are following me? Okay, do I have to follow everyone that's following me? No, you don't. You know, you can follow whoever you want to follow. I have a rule of thumb on following people. Number 1, they need to have a profile picture. Number 2, they need to have their profile filled out. And number 3, they have to post content that's worth reading. Okay, those are my 3 criteria.. And if you fit in all three of those criteria, I'll follow. You know, it's not gonna hurt me to follow you, so I'll follow you. And by doing that, by coming a little bit out of your comfort zone, okay, you're gonna gain a whole new area that you may not have had. Like, I have friends that are techies, I have friends that are photographers, real photographers, you know, and I have friends that are in every walk of life— doctors, lawyers, you know, and we meet them in food blogging too., but this is just a whole entirely separate community. I had a doctor, a researcher one time, she was supposed to be working on some paper she was doing, and I posted something and she wrote back, "Damn you, now I've got to make this." So she spent the afternoon making some baked good and then ate it and never got her work done, and was telling her friends all about it too. So you don't know who you're going to reach and what segment, and then that friend is going to tell another friend And that's how you start building a really diverse following. And that's how you start building a community. Okay, and you start engaging and interacting with these people that you normally wouldn't really talk to. Because again, we go back to food bloggers are not our target audience. Okay, they're our friends, they're our peers, they're people we go to for support and advice. But when we want people that are going to read our blogs and that are going to make the dishes that we come up with, We want to go with everyone else because that's where you're going to grow. By growing, it goes back to that old commercial, I don't know who's old enough to remember, but one person told one friend and they told two friends and they told four friends and it just multiplies. Again, that's what starts to build you. Questions? Follow people out of your comfort zone. You know, I'm not telling you to follow strange people, but follow people that maybe you might not have given a second look to if they look, you know, normal enough for you. But just because they're in a different walk of life or a different avenue of experience, you know, it doesn't— it's not going to hurt. Okay, and then the last thing on my list was to be consistent. Alright, if you post Every day, continue to post every day. Post at certain times, that's not quite as important, but you want to try and get on. If you can only spare 15 minutes a day, twice a day, that will help you. Okay, by setting up your circles properly, and that's something we didn't cover on this, but it's very important if you're— especially if you're starting out— to set your circles up in a way that you can access them and see the people that you want to see.. Now I have a couple of different food blogger circles and I will access those circles when I come on to see what my friends have done. It's a good way to stay in check with them. If you have a niche blog and you want to stay in contact with everyone but you have 20, 30, or 5 friends, whatever it is, that do exactly what you do and you want to see what they're doing so you can really stay in contact with them, start a separate circle for them. 2. Okay, whatever you like. But that way when you go to your screen up in the left-hand corner, there's a place where your circles will appear. You can have all and then it will break down. So you can click on whichever one and that's what will appear in your stream. So like I said, if you can spend 15 minutes, you go down, like I go down that circle of food bloggers and I see, I +1, I leave some comments, I share a few things, then I go into the general stream and I see what all the rest of my friends, if they're doing anything interesting, posting anything interesting. I'll drop my post if I have something, and then you're done. Now, if you want to stay on longer, it's not going to hurt you, that's for sure. It's going to help. But if you say, well, I don't really have the time to devote to it, you do. If you can spend 15 minutes a day, twice a day on it, just to start, and pretty soon you're going to see the benefits and you're going to want to stay on more. That's what it's going to be all about. Alright, so those were my 10, my 10 tips. And Stephanie is asking, can you repeat how to start a hangout? Okay, when you open your main screen, there will be a Start a Hangout button in the upper right-hand corner. I'm pretty sure that's where it is. And all you do is click on the Start a Hangout. If, you know, all of you are here, so you have everything you need to start one. And the boxes will come up, you have to name your hangout, you can invite people in right there, and even after it's open you can invite people in. And you start your hangout, it will give you a little picture of yourself to make sure, you know, you're presentable enough for you, and then you go live. And that's all there is to starting a hangout. So if you want to try it, you know, get a few blogger friends together and then take turns at starting one and inviting each other in and talking. I will advise that, you know, like I asked everybody to mute when they came in because you will get feedback, especially when there's large groups coming in, and you'll get an echo, and it'll be very disconcerting. You'll hear yourself talking in your ear, you know, like a second or half a second later, and it's really hard to do it. If you're doing that, sometimes it's good to ask everyone to mute unless they have a question, and then just unmute themselves, and then they can talk. Headphones are great. I got a Bluetooth on. It did fail on me once in the middle of a Hangout when I was doing that Crunch Cake demo, so I just went with a microphone on, on the camera. Laptop cameras, if you're gonna do them and you're gonna do promotional ones or videos or make something, I would advise getting a Logitech camera, getting a better camera rather than relying on the laptop one, because you're gonna get a better quality picture with it. Microphone is on there too, and it'll be better than the one in your laptop. You need to dial in twice for what, Stephanie? Stephanie just asked a question. Oh, no, you don't. If you have 2 computers, you can use 2 computers. And I do that sometimes. I hook up 2 laptops, because you can't hook 2 of the same kind of cameras into your laptop. And sometimes I use the laptop camera to talk like we are talking now, and then I will have my good camera positioned over the food. Now the only thing is that you have to— if you look at the top of this screen, you see a gear, and in that gear is settings. And when you click on settings, what happens is it opens up and you get to pick which camera's on, which microphone you're using, what your connection is, okay, your different default devices, and you can test your voice to make sure it's working. So that would be— and for now, because no one has developed a tool that lets us switch back and forth right away. You have to manually switch your cameras, which is a pain. If you have—

Actually, there's a software, it's called Manycam, M-A-N-Y-C-A-M. It's free, but it'll put—

Put their name across it, yeah.

It's only $50 for the full version. It'll allow 6 video sources, crossfades, etc., picture-in-picture, up to 4 pictures at a time if you want. You can control the size and shape.

Do you use that, Dennis Littley?

Yes, I'm still exploring it.

Good job.

And I plan to, but you can also use it, you can use it as the video source for a Hangout so you can do picture-in-picture live broadcast with crossfades and everything you want. So there is stuff out there.

I have seen that, but I didn't— I wasn't going to spend the $50 until I found somebody that had used it and knew it really worked.

I've been using the— I haven't done anything live with it, but I've used the freeware. And you can have two cameras on the freeware. It works beautifully. It's got a lot of stuff you'll never use because who cares that you can put on silly glasses? So it's a good thing.

Great, thanks, Gareth. And the other thing is we talked about before, someone asked about the names across it. It's called the Hangout Toolbox. And there's something called lower thirds on there. So that's how you use— that's how you have the name appear. Okay, there's a whole— there's all kinds of stuff in there, volume controls and different things. Again, I haven't used too much of it. I have to explore that a little bit more.

There are sound effects too.

Yeah, there are. I did go through those. So we could put cheering and clapping in, or booing and hissing, or all kinds of different things. But I think you need to have someone in there working that for you while you're doing your Hangout, which might be pretty fun too. Alright, okay, Mark Merrick just asked something and we're getting to that about the communities. You know, I had scheduled this hangout before the communities went live and it just so happened, you know, that we already had it on the do today, so we're going to talk about communities and There's so much going on right now. I think Google is overwhelmed at the response. Everyone's running out and starting communities. You're getting— I must get 10, 12 invites a day or more to different communities. This is where you gotta start thinking a little bit. I join some to support friends that are having them when I can. But, you know, I may not, may never be active in them, okay, because there's just so many hours in the day, there's so much time that you can spend, and time spent in the communities is good for the community, but again, it's not going to help you grow. You know, since I've been working on this, I've been kind of neglecting my blog and neglecting my pages here while I've been setting up our Food Bloggers Community. But, you know, once it's set up and running, I think it'll kind of run seamlessly by itself. But these first few weeks, I think, are going to be difficult and a learning experience for everyone as we do them. And I think, again, too, Google is looking at it and saying, you know, this is— we're not changing anything right now until we see what we can change more effectively, you know, once we've used this for a while. So I don't expect them to do too much to it for a month or at least a few weeks until we've really had a chance to play with it and see what's happening. But I would like to know the number of how many communities have been started, that's probably staggering. Because I know just within my circles, it's crazy, just how many people. Has anyone here started a community yet?

Yes.

OK. Marek, you have yours. I can't hear you, you can unmute if you want to talk.

Ja, ja, no, I hope I'm unmuted, yes? Started to get to know a little bit how it works, but I also was very intige— not sure about if it's worth to do, but I just started one to get experience. Therefore I asked the question, if you have one or if what your experience is, and yeah, it's not so easy to get a feeling on how to use the communities.

Okay. Well, they kind of sprang them on us, but there is a— Gareth actually put a post up with the link to how to use the communities effectively. And really, the key to using the communities, which they really didn't— I think I did get sent this, but again, when you're scrambling to set stuff up and to do things, it's difficult to get I'm getting some feedback here. It's difficult to really know what you're getting. Actually, my email crashed Friday night because I hadn't turned off all of the notifications from about 8 communities that I had joined. Let's talk about that real quick too. When you go in the community, underneath the community picture is a little bell, and if you toggle on it, it'll be on or off, and that means you're gonna get notifications. So if it's on and you're in a busy community, you know, you're gonna get 150-200 emails within the space of half an hour. It's just nuts. So communities, I think they're gonna be a very good thing. I think once the dust settles and people start using them for what they're really meant to be. I mean, you're gonna have some large communities, I think. You're always gonna have the bigger ones.

Oops. Looks like we lost Dennis.

Yeah, I think we did.

Well, should we just wrap it up?

Uh, give it a couple minutes and see if he gets back.

Okay. Looks like most people abandoned ship.

Some—