Blogging - Direct From Flickr

Why would you even want to do that?

Editing Workspace
Originally uploaded by imagebeam.com

Recently we've been having discussions with many of our clients and potential clients about the value of blogging. There are many ways maintaining a blog can be very beneficial, from supporting brand awareness to improving Search Engine Optimization rankings for your site.

The ImageBEAM blog is actually hosted by Blogger.com - which is a service provided by Google.

To impress you further (or maybe even confuse you... who knows :-) I actually created this post over on Flickr (yes - the photo sharing site). The photo above is showing one of our offices in Irvine - this is the one where we get to do our Video editing. When you upload photos to your Flickr account you have a "blog this" link. After a simple setup - you just click that button and within moments you have a new blog post featuring the photo you uploaded to FLickr.

There are some neat ways to support your SEO plan by setting up your own company Flickr account - to which you post relevant photos. The search engines crawl that site and "voila" - your site has some very useful links from a "high ranking" external site (it's a little more complicated than that... but not much).

This is a link to the Stemedica Flickr Channel - which is one of ImageBEAM's clients.

Sharepoint Video Portal for Stemedica

One of my favorite clients came to me with a rather special and urgent need.

ImageBEAM has been managing the on-line presence of Stemedica Cell Technologies Inc for nearly two years now. This has involved the creation of numerous web sites to allow the company to share what it is doing in the area of developing breakthrough Stem Cell treatment products to be used on clinical studies and research throughout the world.

An important aspect of this work is the collection and dissemination of critical patient progress information - many times in the form of patient progress videos. This information is confidential - but needs to be shared with authorized staff and partners on a world-wide basis.

In the past Stemedica has shared this information by creating DVD's of these videos which are then shipped around the world. As their progress on their clinical trials and research is accelerating a new approach to handle this process was needed - with the following features;

1. Allow for rapid distribution of videos.
   Stemedica wanted to find a way to have immediate access to the videos - rather than relying upon mailing physical DVD's
2. It has to be secure.
   The videos feature proprietary and confidential patient information - and as such they need to be protected by password and encryption
3. Videos can be updated / replaced as needed.
   The information shared in these videos is constantly being updated. The system had to be flexible enough to allow the content to be easily updated.

With those requirements Stemedica turned to ImageBEAM for a solution.

Over just a few days we had designed and implemented a custom Video Portal solution based upon a combination of Windows Sharepoint Services and Windows Media Server from Microsoft. The solution allows the videos to be posted rapidly with tight security in place allowing item-level security. Individual users of the portal may be given or denied access to any particular videos.

The client is of course delighted with the solution.