Friday, July 17, 2009

Advising Web2 Immigrants— What do you think?


One of my Toastmasters friends asked me the other day if I would put together a 45 minute workshop to introduce other web2 immigrants in our local club to Facebook, and Twitter, and blogging. I think her idea is for me to launch the various sites, give them a tour, and let them see what it takes to set up the accounts and pages. She would like to blog, and she would like to check out Facebook, but has already expressed concerns about privacy.

What do you think? Is Facebook the best place to start? That's how I got started. I found it very encouraging to find people I knew who already had a presence in Facebook.

I have a couple of weeks before I'm scheduled to do the workshop. I'd really like some advice. What's do you think is the best approach?

Thursday, July 16, 2009

Been lookin’ at podcast directories

Decided to find a good web design podcast. Many of the web design podcasts were way too chatty for my taste— too much personality, and not enough content. I also found that you can find many of the same podcasts on different directory sites.

Discovered that some podcast directories had better browse categories than others. ODEO was pretty good, but to find the web design content in ODEO I had to choose Arts, and then Design to find the web design stuff.

Found the web design stuff at ITunes by gong to Arts, and then to Design. ITunes has a great sorting feature. You can sort the podcasts by Name, Time, Artist, Album and Genre.

Podcast.com has a web design channel. From there I sampled podcasts from CreativeExpert who does design interviews. I also sampled WebDesignTV. If you are interested in CSS3, I've included a link to a video interview with Hakon Wium Lie. He discusses many of the new features and font options available in CSS3.

Wednesday, July 15, 2009

Aggressive Advertising on You Tube

Until I started searching You Tube for an interesting video to blog about, I didn't realize how annoying and aggressive the advertising is on a large percentage of the videos. They remind me of those old car lot TV commercials where the salesman was barking at you like a sideshow carnie at the county fair.

After a while I became so annoyed by the “commercials” I was being bombarded with at the beginning of the videos that I refused to watch the videos that had up-front, aggressive ads. Some of the self-promotion was less aggressive, and many appeared at the end of the video. Those are much less objectionable.

Don't you think that a simple statement of who produced the video, and a short description of what you are about to see is more effective than yelling the company advertising slogan at you?

I really enjoy the county fair; Including the barking sideshow carnies. I think we should leave the barking to the pros in the traveling carnivals, and keep it out of social media.

Monday, July 6, 2009

I've been exploring online word processing

I've been exploring online word processing tools. I created an account at Zoho Writer first. I soon discovered that the application wouldn't launch on my Macintosh. That brought my interest in Zoho Writer to a screeching halt! I didn't even bother to check out their support documents to see if my assumption was correct. I moved on to Google Docs. So far, it seems very intuitive. I like it when I don't have to read tons of documentation to use an application. The application is robust (i.e. it has most of the editing and styling tools I'm used to, and the standard keyboard shortcuts work).

I finally broke down and explored the Help section. It looks like the Google Documents, Google Spreadsheets, and Google Presentations are all going to be easy to use. I think that the most interesting feature is the ability to collaborate with others on a document. According to the Help topics, if you and another collaborator are editing the same document at the same time, a box at the bottom left of the screen will appear, telling you the name of the collaborators you're working with.

I'm really interested now to see how well it exports my document for use in my blog. I'm about to find out.

It wasn't perfect. It threw in a few html tags I didn't expect, but It worked! I was able to publish this article directly from Google Docs.