Call to action: put us to work! October 16, 2007
Posted by charlotteanne in competition, presentation, tools.add a comment
One of my faculty friends who teaches advertising and marketing campaigns reminds me that great endings often involve good “calls to action.” One ending he remembers from a great student campaign was, “Now put us to work!”
With all due deference to music from later decades, I propose we end the presentation with this musical call to action:
Garr Reynolds + Guy Kawasaki + Pecha-Kucha? September 29, 2007
Posted by Brian in presentation, tools.1 comment so far
I forgot about this post at 43Folders a while back. ‘Tis all about presentations. Please look at the pictures first without reading to get a good grasp of how well it works.
Pecha-Kucha: PowerPoint Poetry September 29, 2007
Posted by Brian in presentation, tools.1 comment so far
(Say it with me, now: pih-CHOTCH-kuh)
I finally found it. It’s called Pecha-kucha, which means “chatter” in Japanese.
20 slides in PowerPoint, 20 seconds apiece. Add a dash of EI, and you’re good to go.
It is brilliant in so many ways. Look at the video in the link, s’il vous plait.
September 24, 2007
Posted by Brian in crowdsourcing, tools.2 comments
Last night I mentioned something about people getting notified if there were a story in their area (or maybe someone else said this, I don’t recall), but it made me think of this great tool used for getting at nacho niche markets.
Questions? Comments? Concerns?
(Edit: So … WP deleted the embedded video. I’ll put it in again, and if it doesn’t work, just go here)
BuiltWith: Technology Researchers’ Dream Site September 7, 2007
Posted by Brian in announcements, statistics, tools.3 comments
For those doing the technology research, the fantastic site BuiltWith breaks down a site to show you what exactly it is … built with.
For those who are curious …
Rockchucks – Innovation Incubator
Analytics and Tracking
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Google Analytics offers a host of compelling features and benefits for everyone from senior executives and advertising and marketing professionals to site owners and content developers. Other popular sites using Google Analytics include globalsurfari.com, gennit.com, wordpress.com, readwriteweb.com, billycorgan.info and g2007.com. 36.93% of the top 5000 profiled sites use Google Analytics. |
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Provides Quantcast with tracking information about rockchucks.wordpress.com which the user can access. Other popular sites using Quantcast Tracking include wordpress.com, ebin.wordpress.com, 43folders.com, getbasil.com, seeqpod.com and emetrics.org. 1.31% of the top 5000 profiled sites use Quantcast Tracking. |
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Tells owners of rockchucks.wordpress.com how many people are visiting the site, where they are coming from and what’s most interesting to them. Other popular sites using WordPress Stats include wordpress.com, g2007.com, ebin.wordpress.com, nilshammar.wordpress.com and etceterapodcast.com. 0.71% of the top 5000 profiled sites use WordPress Stats. |
Widgets
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Adds a small preview window to external hyperlinks using SNAP Preview Anywhere technology. 0.58% of the top 5000 profiled sites use SNAP Preview Anywhere. |
Blog Publishing
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WordPress is a state-of-the-art semantic personal publishing platform with a focus on aesthetics, web standards, and usability. Other popular sites using WordPress include billycorgan.info, g2007.com, ebin.wordpress.com, 43folders.com, blog.builtwith.com and anhdres.com. 4.87% of the top 5000 profiled sites use WordPress. |
Frameworks
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PHP is a widely-used general-purpose scripting language that is especially suited for Web development and can be embedded into HTML. Other popular sites using PHP include cakephp.org, getbasil.com, simplespark.com, engadget.com, realsurf.com and phpbb.com. 40.42% of the top 5000 profiled sites use PHP. |
Aggregation Functionality
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rockchucks.wordpress.com supports RSS; a family of web feed formats used to publish frequently updated content such as blog entries, news headlines or podcasts. Other popular sites using RSS include gennit.com, wordpress.com, readwriteweb.com, billycorgan.info, g2007.com and ebin.wordpress.com. 24.41% of the top 5000 profiled sites use RSS. |
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Provides a location where rockchucks.wordpress.com provides a list of other documents that it contains such as web logs, photos etc.. 0.2% of the top 5000 profiled sites use Atom Introspection. |
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A Pingback is one of three types of Linkbacks, methods for Web authors to request notification when somebody links to one of their documents. Other popular sites using Pingback Support include billycorgan.info, g2007.com, ebin.wordpress.com, 43folders.com, blog.builtwith.com and yongfook.com. 5.07% of the top 5000 profiled sites use Pingback Support. |
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Really Simple Discovery is a way to help client software find the services needed to read, edit, or “work with” weblogging software. Other popular sites using Really Simple Discovery include wordpress.com, billycorgan.info, g2007.com, ebin.wordpress.com, 43folders.com and blog.builtwith.com. 7.41% of the top 5000 profiled sites use Really Simple Discovery. |
Document Information
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rockchucks.wordpress.com claims XHTML strict status (check). XHTML Strict is the same as HTML 4.01 Strict but follows XML guidelines. See the link for more information. |
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The defer attribute gives a hint to the browser that the script does not create any content so the browser can optionally defer interpreting the script. This can improve performance by delaying execution of scripts until after the body content is parsed and rendered. |
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Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a stylesheet language used to describe the presentation of a document written in a markup language. Its most common application is to style web pages written in HTML |
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JavaScript is a scripting language most often used for client-side web development. Its proper name is ECMAScript, though “JavaScript” is much more commonly used. rockchucks.wordpress.com uses JavaScript. |
Encoding
UTF-8 (8-bit UCS/Unicode Transformation Format) is a variable-length character encoding for Unicode. It is the preferred encoding for web pages.
Just a Reminder of Sorts … September 7, 2007
Posted by Brian in announcements, tools.add a comment
Read/Write Web has a list of the upcoming (and some already existent) advents of our lovely Internet.
I suppose time for this kind of research is over, but it’s still worth a quick look.
Maybe we could get some cues from… August 22, 2007
Posted by Jeff in data display, software, tools.add a comment
* the GUI (graphical user interface) for the OLPC (one laptop per child) seems to be very promising in the “community” aspect. It is introducing what could be deemed a “new paradigm” in personal computing – switching from the window-based interface to something completely different. Their demo shows what it is like.
* Microsoft is introducing a competitor to Flash called Silverlight. As a demonstration of this product, they have made a new search website called tafiti. Looks promising, but their search still sucks.
Social Networking Interoperability August 22, 2007
Posted by Jeff in tools.add a comment
Brad Fitzpatrick (of LiveJournal fame) is working on ideas for the interoperability of social networking websites, synchronizing who-is-friends-with-whom across most (if not all) social sites. Thus, one would easily be able to find the MySpace profiles for all of his or her Facebook friends, and vice versa. Brad is a really smart guy, and has obviously had prior success in social websites – LiveJournal is quite popular and some of the code involved (memcached) is also used for Facebook.
Facebook’s answer seems to be that the world should just all be Facebook apps. While Facebook is an amazing platform and has some amazing technology, there’s a lot of hesitation in the developer / “Web 2.0″ community about being slaves to Facebook, dependent on their continued goodwill, availability, future owners, not changing the rules, etc. That hesitation I think is well-founded. A centralized “owner” of the social graph is bad for the Internet. I’m not saying anybody should ban Facebook, though! Far from it. It’s a great product, and I love it, but the graph needs to exist outside of Facebook. MySpace also has a lot of good data, but not all of it. Likewise LiveJournal, Digg, Twitter, Zooomr, Pownce, Friendster, Plaxo, the list goes on. More important is that any one of these sites shouldn’t own it; nobody/everybody should. It should just exist.
We shouldn’t rule out a social application just because of the “who the heck would want to create a new profile?” vibe. It’s evident that there’s something coming… just don’t know what.
Jott August 21, 2007
Posted by Brian in tools.2 comments
A service called Jott lets you call a number, say something you’d “jot” down, and they send it to you in an email. The speech-to-text worked very well when I said “Hello, World”. It didn’t understand “floccinaucinihilipilification” or “antidisestablishmentarianism”, but it sort of, kind of translated “hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia”. I’ll try with more coherent words and sentences, but I just think this is a cool app. Any takers?
Google Going for the Gooold August 21, 2007
Posted by Brian in data display, mashups, software, statistics, tools.add a comment
People want to know how they’re connected. But we don’t have a clear-cut means of doing so yet.
Google is developing a social network aggregator. (This, of course, means that social sites existing as walled-gardens would be out of the loop. I wonder how many will open up after this?) Google wants to be the main provider of a social graph (a big visualization of how everyone is connected). Google also realizes that “[p]eople are getting sick of registering and re-declaring their friends on every site, but also: Developing ‘Social Applications’ is too much work.”
The man who founded LiveJournal left for Google, and he has some ideas for the social graph himself:
- Open-source software for such graphing
- Decentralization of information for such graphing
- Right-after-sign-up addition of “old information” to new network
- Syncing multiple sites for a user
- Not to replace _____
And has anyone heard of FOAF, the Friend of a Friend Project? It’s going to try to show how you’re related to everyone else, which sounds like XFN, the XML Friends Network, which links people by metadata.
