The concept of Jing is the always-ready program that instantly captures and shares images and video…from your computer to anywhere.

I'm seeing some neat uses of Jing lately!

I heard from Len Charnoff from the Digital College blog. He used a Jing video in a Flickr group he belongs too!

Len is a member of the Feathery Friday group on Flickr. Each Friday a new topic is announced. So, Len posted his picture of his bird and supplemented it with a Jing video! The Jing video gives you so much more information about his bird than the single picture did. You can see his post in Flickr here. Or click the screenshot below to watch his Jing video.

I also found a blog entry from Microsoft OneNote and PowerPoint MVP, Kathy Jacobs. She has a contest going on and if you Jing her to answer her questions, you could win a copy of SnagIt and Camtaisa Studio! You can read about the contest here.

How are you using Jing? Jing me!

I saw a great use of Jing this week. I participate in a Technology Chat room on Skype and at one point in the conversation, someone sent a link to a Jing screen capture!

This is a perfect use for Jing! It's much faster and easier for me to follow the URL than download a file sent via chat. One of the ways I use Jing the most is in instant message chats. Take a quick screenshot or video and post the link in your chat message. Done! Your point is made quickly and clearly.

How are you using Jing?

"How do I put my pictures on a CD?" "I think I have a virus, can you help me?" "Have you ever seen a computer do (fill in the blank)?!"

These are the questions I often hear from friends, family and new acquaintances as soon as I tell them I work at a software company. You may also be that person to your friends and family.

Now, I love to help people, but sometimes it's hard to do this over the phone or email. How many times have you tried to walk someone through fixing a problem over the phone? Or, spent hours drafting that email with pages and pages of instructions. It can often be difficult and frustrating for both sides. This is where Jing could come in handy for you...

I found someone using Jing to help others! I had the honor of meeting Tris Hussey last week at Gnomedex. He shared with me how he uses Jing. He was recently having a problem with some software, ClearContext, that he uses and went to their forums. He noticed that the solution posted in the ClearContext forums were correct only if you were running XP. If you were running on Vista, the information was a little off. So, instead of taking a long time to write-up corrections to the forum information, Tris simply made a quick Jing video and posted the URL in the forums! You can see the forum thread and his Jing video posted here.

You can read Tris's original post about Jing here on his A View from the Isle Blog. Tris also writes another great blog, the Pimp Your Work Blog that is all about making your work day better with lots of great tips and tricks.

Problem solved! And, you get to be the hero!

**Photo courtesy of the fabulous Josh Hallett

It's 2am and I'm still awake...What am I doing? Surfing the web, doing research and checking out websites and technology. My days are often filled with meetings and other activities that prevent me from doing this during 'normal business' hours. And, what are normal business hours anymore?

I'll often see companies post webinars to learn more about products or talk with their reps, but I cannot always block an hour out of my day to attend. And, it's never at 2am or when I want to attend outside of normal business hours.

On that note, I was happy to see several video tours made with Jing at Jumpchart. I can watch their videos and see their product in action any time of the day...whenever it works out best for me! Check out all of their videos here. Think about it...Add a video tour and your sales and marketing demo runs 24/7!

Have you seen other cool uses of Jing? How are you using it?

You may be familiar with Minesweeper, Solitaire, Bejeweled, and Sudoku. Have you ever heard of Summing? This is one of my favorite games on my Palm handheld. They have it for Windows too. Like a lot of little games out there, you never know what you’re getting until you install it. Many times freeware of this nature is unsupported and poorly documented. Summing was really hard for me to explain to my friends. It was virtually impossible to help people understand textually or verbally. (P.S. Of course, I never play this on company time if you’re reading this dear managers.)

Jing helped me on two fronts. First, I made a how-to video for my friends. More importantly, it was a Quimple way for me to capture my high score! Even if you don’t like Summing, the point is that Jing can be a great way to share your addictive, time-consuming discoveries with others.

Watch my Jing (3:26) to see my attempt at explaining Summing to friends.

Click here to see my high score!! (Like golf, a low score is better.)

Maxwell Scott-Slade sent us an email about a Wicked Cool way he's using Jing. He wrote: "You can see my Jing website here: llllost.com where I use Jing with my own code to make it an image blog." We had to know more, so we asked...and Maxwell dished the details. (Disclaimer: If you wind up vaporizing a few hours playing Attak or HighSpeedChase ...don't come crying to us!)   —Daniel Foster, newsletter editor

What's Johnny Two Shoes and who visits your image blog at llllost.com?

JohnnyTwoShoes is an independent games company I run (now full time!) with my brother Josh and girlfriend Sarah. We use llllost and Jing to relay ideas and keep a global history of what's happening—we only show the latest 30 posts to the public at the moment.

Currently llllost is visited by die hard JohnnyTwoShoes fans and ourselves. We've tried to keep it a little quiet.

Why did you start using Jing? What problem were you trying to solve?

I was using Apple OSX a lot at work; I loved the fact that I could copy a portion of the screen to clipboard and used to paste to iChat a lot to demonstrate ideas to co-workers. I work primarily with web design and development so to be able to show stuff visually is an amazing asset.

Then, I thought why can't I do this on my PC? I was actually exploring ways to write my own version for PC and I thought it would be great to upload images to an FTP server afterwards if people can't accept file transfers. I was so relieved to find someone beat me to it and added a lot of things I hadn't thought of!

Now I use Jing on PC and on Mac.

How are you using Jing for llllost.com?

When you're just too busy, a blog is a real chore. With images you can just "jing" what you need of your screenspace to capture that portion of an idea.

I guess llllost has evolved from there now. We like to keep snippets of our progress which also acts as a preview (or teaser) for users of our games site JohnnyTwoShoes. Jing lets us all have a little say about what's happening without actually ever typing a word more than the title.

How have you configured Jing? You mentioned that you're using it with some custom code you've written...

Jing is configured to upload to a folder on my FTP server. After that, a PHP script (that I originally wrote in a lunch break at work, using the CodeIgniter PHP framework) takes the uploads, makes a little thumbnail version and sticks it into a database. It's all cached so it's super quick as well.

The website does all the work, all we have to do is grab a portion of the screen and press "share"—it's online. Also made it output an RSS feed so I can see what's going on without being there.

What do you like most about using Jing?

Jing lets me communicate ideas much faster. It's hard to be confused when you've got something to look at straight away. I also like that I could add something to the process by making my own functionality on the remote server.

Have your own cool use for Jing? Leave a comment or drop us a line.

Wanna learn a cool trick? Next time you have to give a presentation, wow your audience with an embedded video. This will help you explain certain things without the usual static screen captures and bullet points.

There's a couple of ways to do it. There's the easy way, which requires you have a copy of TechSmith's SnagIt software. SnagIt's Add-in makes it easy to drop a video into a slide. I've made a Jing video showing this process. You can learn more about all the SnagIt add-in's here.

You don't have to have SnagIt in order to put Jing videos in PowerPoint presentations, but PowerPoint doesn't make it obvious like inserting an image. I've found and tried a couple of resources on the Web.

The process is fairly similar on PowerPoint 2003 and 2007.

A video from Moyea PowerPoint to DVD Burner Software showing PPT 2003.

Here's a post written by Amit Agarwal on Digital Inspiration that shows PPT 2007.