Over the last several months, LinkedIn has gotten very good – I’d say scary good – at recommending "People You May Know". It regularly pulls up names and faces of people whom I last spoke to 5 or 10 years ago, and even further into the past. Some pop out – it’s found an old friend or co-worker.

The scope of Frameweld’s past work with video and rich media is deep – implementations that combine countless layouts, applications that monetize content, learning handled a variety of ways, social features, certification workflows, custom reports, live events, unique workflows for specific clients, and the list goes on. Cramming everything into the Workshop was not an option. Aside from the staggering investment of time and effort it would take, the end product would be as expansive as it would be amorphous and directionless. We would likely end up with a video CMS and application framework that would be fantastic for our own use and a group of clients, but a small audience beyond that.

Work on our new online video platform, called the Workshop, started about a year and a half ago. We began with conversations and experiments on various user interface and workflow options. The origins of the Worskhop, however, stretch back many years beyond that. Here is the back story of why and how the Workshop was created.

Our splash page for SyncWords is up. If you’re wondering what SyncWords is and how to get more info – I encourage you to get to that page asap and drop your email address in the field.

This week we are unveiling a new tool called the Workshop. It is an online video platform, focused on creating great video presentations that your users will love to watch and use. The Workshop is unlike any other video platform out there, adding granular video search, easy synchronization tools, flexible publishing, and several tools and features that will put a smile on your face and make your videos a hit with your audience.

Annoyed, I unsubscribed from Groupon’s emails yesterday… not that I ever signed up for them in the first place. I took a deal on a breakfast sandwich one fateful day and Groupon thought that was an invitation to send me an daily email with New York City deals. Since that worked out so well for them, they doubled it to two emails on several days – god forbid I lose out on their Grouponicus deals. Groupon is hardly the only offending "app" out there.

Earlier this year, we added secure FTP as an option for clients to get their videos to us.  It’s not much of a change, unless your FTP client doesn’t support FTPS (FTP over SSL), which most do.

But the change reminded me of one important fact – many (most?) people are perplexed by FTP.  Quite often, they’re wondering what webpage they FTP from.

Use the apostrophe or not?  That’s one of the little debates circulating these days at Frameweld.  I’m leaning towards the apostrophe’d version because it "feels" right but some practical considerations argue for the un-contracted version.

The live captioning application lives at recapd.com since it’s not possible to work apostrophes into URLs.  No apostrophe in the logo either (pretty clear where Mykal stands on this one).  My guess is that users are more likely to search for Recapd over Recap’d, though both are tough unless someone is already familiar with the brand.  That’s a few checks in the Recapd column, so why use the ‘d?

We just put up our redesign of frameweld.com.  Aside from the redesign, many other things are new about the site.  There’s a shiny new engine under the hood, lots of new work is featured and more names and faces from Frameweld will be helping out with the blogging chores.

We took our time with this one and I’m loving the results.