Special thanks to my new friend Alice for this photo.

I met some of Ning’s most outstanding employees, shook hands with (and possibly insulted with a back-handed compliment) CEO Gina Bianchini, and compared notes with some amazing network creators who are just crushing it (as Gary Vaynerchuk would say) on sites like MyModernMet.com, BabySpot.com, tudiabetes.org, BroadwaySpace.com, BJPenn.com, DesignDemocracy.ws and LiveHereOakPark.com.

I was a big fan of Ning before my visit, but I can honestly say that I am 1000 times more confident in their infrastructure and commitment to making Ning the best platform for niche social networks.

As far as I can tell, here’s their special sauce (it’s pretty simple actually): Ning cares a lot about their employees. And in return, the employees care a LOT about Ning’s members. My fellow community managers and I were treated like royalty, and our feedback was intensely scrutinized. You don’t see that every day from your typical software companies.

For those who don’t know, Ning offers an amazing product offering and level of service for a ridiculously low price. You can actually create a Ning network in less than 5 minutes at absolutely zero cost. That’s right, zero. Nada. ZIP! And you could scale that network to tens of thousands of users without ever having to open your wallet.

That said, Ning does offer some “premium services” for those who want them. For example, if you want to make your network’s url something like www.BobsFishingHole.com versus http://bobsfishinghole.ning.com, that’ll set you back a whopping $5/month. Want to turn off the banner ads on the right hand side, or hide the references to the Ning Platform? Those features are $25/mo each. They’ve also got premium support for a measley $10 bucks a month, although, frankly, I’ve never needed it. Their user forums are very active, and full of seasoned and helpful community managers as well as Ning employees.

Bottom line: Ning rocks! Nothing else out there even comes close. The good news is that all of my energy can now go into community development for NoTimeToCookDinner.com and new communities for my clients who are ready to take the plunge into social media.

Thanks again to Ning, and to all of my new friends as well.

They do.

So for anyone looking for an easy way to watermark YouTube videos without getting into video production or buying a one-off piece of software, this is probably a good solution.

Here’s a screenshot showing the annotation on the video embedded in my blog:

Using YouTube Annotations to Watermark Videos

Since Annotations are just an overlay on top of the videos (I think), web savvy individuals can probably get around this by downloading the YouTube video and uploading it to another video streaming service. And it happens all the time.

However, if you aren’t too concerned about it and you would just like to include a link to your blog or some other information (or add some “pop up humor” to your videos), YouTube Annotations can be a really fun and easy way to do it. You have some control over the size, shape, and color of the annotations, as well as the duration and some other aspects.

You can also create an annotation that links back to YouTube page (channel), where you can encourage people to subscribe to your videos. Just be careful about using arrow-shaped annotations to point to the Subscribe button, since the button won’t be present if your video is embedded on someone else’s blog or web site. Instead it might be pointing to an advertisement or other unrelated link.

Annotations are really easy to create. Once you are logged into YouTube, click on My Videos > Annotations and read the brief instructions. It might take a little bit of experimenting to find something you like, but the results could be very powerful, especially if you have a lot of “fans” showing off your videos. It even works on Facebook!

YouTube Annotations on Facebook

You can also create Captions for people with disabilities. But this post is already long enough…

Any questions?

A good friend and fellow IT consultant at Sureteq had been encouraging me to get a Microsoft TechNet subscription for quite some time… so I finally did.

For those who don’t know, a TechNet subscription allows you to download full versions of ANY Microsoft software for “evaluation” purposes. The theory is, the sooner the IT community goes out and tries this new software, the sooner they will feel comfortable rolling it out into their organizations. It’s a good model.

The subscription also comes with two Microsoft troubleshooting tickets (which more than covers the cost of the subscription) and access to forums and other valuable resources.

There are two types of subscriptions: download only and DVD. My recommendation (for newbies) is to skip the DVDs and just go with the download only option. You’ll save a couple hundred dollars by downloading and burning your own ISOs.

OK, so this post was supposed to be about Twitter, right? Well, it is. And here’s why…

In the past, I’ve always done a quick Google search for promo codes whenever I purchase something online. Sometimes you get lucky, assuming the forum you found isn’t too dated. Most of the time, you have to try quite a few codes before you finally find one that works.

Yesterday I discovered that Twitter is a great way to search for promo codes because the results are nearly REAL-TIME. That means the older stuff if filtered out. As soon as someone posts something that works, it’s almost immediately available in Twitter’s search engine.

Here you can see I searched for “technet promo code” and actually got a promo code from Microsoft TechNet France. I don’t care what language it is, those 7 magical little characters (TNWIN7L) saved me $100 bucks!

Find online discounts using Twitter's search

After Tweeting about my good fortune, a friend turned me onto this site: CouponCabin.com. It looks like a great resource, and there are many others like it.

Try searching for other discounts on Twitter and share whatever you find in the comments below. As for me, I’m off to install Windows 7…

12/1/09 update: Got $50 off an annual subscription to Lynda.com, the BEST online training resource for creative professionals.

I can’t believe all of the incredible tools available for bloggers these days. I just downloaded WordPress 2 for the iPhone, and wrote this post ON my phone.

OK, so it took waaaaaay longer to do it this way, and I know people have been doing this for a while, but it’s my first time so I’m feeling quite empowered.

I also just realized that this allows people to blog from virtually anywhere. Including places like the bathroom. Cool. I mean, gross!

But still, it’s pretty amazing considering that 10 years ago most people didn’t even have cell phones.

P.S. I later edited this post and added the screenshot using a web browser.

I found a nice Twitter Plugin on WordPress.org, which I installed and hooked up to my personal Twitter account (@tpinto3). Nothing really exciting happening over there either (not yet, anyway), but you have to start somewhere, right?

Now I’m looking for just the right skin. The default “themes” that came with the latest WordPress install were OK, but I’ve seen some really slick stuff out there, and not all of it is custom development. In fact, there are over 1,000 FREE WordPress skins that you can download and freely use.

Amazing! You just have to be slightly technical enough to get the files in the right place. Need help? Let me know. (Scratch that. I just discovered that you can search for and upload/install themes from within WordPress itself. Nice!)

You can also sometimes find out where someone got their theme by scrolling to the bottom of their blog and looking for the “powered by WordPress” link, along with the name of the theme that is currently applied. For example:

And if you click on either the name of the theme, or the designer’s name, you’ll typically be taken to some place where you can get the theme for next to nothing (often even free!).

Well, that’s about enough for today. I guess there were a few nuggets in there. Who knows, maybe I’ll actually keep this post.