BlogPaws - The Pet Social Media Resource

Friday Freebies for Bloggers: DogTipper's Free Dog and Cat Photos

By Tom Collins

This one belongs under: How did I not know this before???

But in case you didn't either ... I was over visiting Paris and John's DogTipper blog and noticed the "For Bloggers" link in the nav bar, scrolled over it, and bingo! Down dropped a link to their Free Dog & Cat Stock Photography galleries.

Friday Freebies for Bloggers: Fun Infographic Tool from Intel

By Tom Collins

I came across this one in a WebProNews post by Chris Crum: Intel's free tool called What About Me? that enables you to automatically create an infographic about yourself! The data about you comes from your Facebook account, along with your Twitter and YouTube accounts (the latter two optional).

In giving it a try, I decided to include Twitter, but not YouTube, for no particular reason. If you click on the thumbnail, you can see what mine spit out.

My first reaction was that using What About Me? would likely be a one-time diversion — a little bit of fun, but without much practical use.

I was surprised, though, by learning things that might actually help me get more out of the ways I use Facebook and Twitter.

Friday Freebies for Bloggers: Information is Free, but What's it Worth? - Part 1

By Tom Collins

I know myself well enough to know I won't always find the time to try out a new tool, or put together a tutorial each week for the Friday Freebiesseries. So I've been planning to include occasional "curation" posts, linking you to stuff I've come across and find interesting, with a short blurb about why. 

To kick off my (at least) two-part introduction of the curation concept, here's the recorded video from my live-streamed "Safe Surfing for Pet Owners to Get Reliable Pet Care Information" presentation at the American Animal Hospital Association annual conference AAHA 2012 Denver:

 

Friday Freebies for Bloggers: Free Slideshow Tools by Kizoa

By Tom Collins

Kizoa slideshow: Dragon at Longmont - Slideshow

Today's freebie is from Kizoa, a really nifty set of tools for creating slideshows from your images.

I found this one while visiting Miah Rae's Start the Change You Want to Be blog, where she'd posted this slideshow about Dragon, in her ongoing series on saving pit bulls.

After setting up a free account, it took me about an hour to upload a batch of photos from BlogPaws 2011, drag some of them onto the simple filmstrip timeline interface, and apply a few transitions, special effects, and music. 

Friday Freebies for Bloggers: Sharing Moments in Video with Tout (15 seconds at a time)

Watch to see and hear why I think Tout will soon become another "must-have" social media tool:

When Michelle Maskaly (My Tail Hurts from Wagging So Much) introduced us to Tout the first morning at Global Pet Expo last week, I got excited about it right away. We had a ball with it creating clips of our BlogPaws Best awards, as you can see.

We discovered that Michelle is an amazing "director" of the 15-second short form video! With a few words and gestures, she got our award recipients, Chloe, Felissa, and even me, comfortable and most of the clips were done in one "take." I think I'm tied for the worst record, requiring 4 or 5 do-overs on one clip. The clip above took two.