Article You Only Know What Google Says You Know by Mark O’Brien on February 22, 2009 Lately, I've been spending a whole lot more time talking about blogging than actually blogging. The good thing about this, is that I've started to notice some trends and central themes that exist in the conversations I've been having, and this is one of the big ones. Read Now About
Article Theory on the Update by Christopher Butler on February 18, 2009 Virginia Heffernan, in her New York Times column Being There, writes: "My friend Lizzie, who is an actual poet, is a terrific, prolific updater. Her updates are often the kind of lyrical blast — T. S. Eliot’s “HURRY UP PLEASE IT’S TIME” was a recent post — that might get stuck in your head with no place to go. Sure enough, she has a great theory of the update, which she explained to me in a note on Facebook: 'Unlike ALL other walks of life, status updates are the appropriate places for spontaneous bursts of joy and being. You shouldn’t do it at work, you shouldn’t do it in the middle of a conversation, you shouldn’t do it on the street, you shouldn’t turn to a stranger on the bus, you shouldn’t leave it on someone’s cellphone. But on this grand constantly updating Christmas card that we are all free to access or withdraw from at any time, we FINALLY have a polite space for My sponge smells like a hot dog.' Spontaneous bursts of being: perfect. Read Now About
Article Should Information be Free? by Christopher Butler on February 17, 2009 I have to admit that I come at this question with a somewhat conflicted point of view. I believe that information is already free; especially those facts which we merely discover rather than invent. They would be, regardless of whether we knew of them or not. But I think that, to the extent we can facilitate it, information should be free, in that no one should be blocked by another from accessing knowledge. I suppose what I mean specifically is that nobody should own the fact that the planets orbit the sun, or something of that nature. Nor should somebody own the fact that an important event happened at some place or time. These facts exist outside the realm of ownership, obviously... Read Now About
Article Six Word Memoir by Justin Kerr on February 17, 2009 Could you sum up your life in six words? The folks at Scott Hull Associates asked some of their artists to give it a shot in their February newsletter. The original exercise is attributed to Ernest Hemingway who wrote, "For sale: baby shoes, never worn."I think mine would be, "was blind, but now I see." What's your six word memoir? Read Now About
Article Internet Memes Look Like Evolution? by Christopher Butler on February 16, 2009 In Slate Magazine, author Chris Wilson writes in Charles Darwin Tagged You in a Note on Facebook: "All in all, Facebook infections look remarkably similar to human ones. And like organisms, the odds do seem stacked against all but the fittest of memes. The 'Notes' application—including the ability to tags friends—has been a feature of Facebook since August 2006, a Facebook spokeswoman told me on Tuesday. (The PR rep also confirmed that Facebook itself had no part in sparking the trend.) The fact that it took two-and-a-half years for a Notes-based meme to hit it big suggests long odds. Still, viral marketers might take note of the patterns that '25 Random Things About Me' obeyed. The best hope for someone looking to start a grass-roots craze is to introduce a wide variety of schemes into the wild and pray like hell that one of them evolves into a virulent meme. If evolution is any guide, however, there's no predicting what succeeds and what doesn't. Just look at the platypus." Perhaps viral marketers already have? I was recently alerted by Facebook that a friend of mine had just joined a group titled something to the effect of "The 25 Random Things About Me meme is really just a marketing ploy to find out more about us." Read Now About
Article CRM Web Development Quality Assurance by Justin Kerr on February 16, 2009 Chris Butler wrote a great post last July about Quality Assurance (QA) in which he outlined the different types of QA Newfangled does and how it's integrated into our web development process.One of those QA types involves checking for site functionality, browser compliance and content integration after the client has finished entering their content but before the site is sent live. I've executed this type of QA on several sites and thought it might be helpful to share my checklist as well as a couple of tools I use when compiling a QA report.Typically, I start by clicking through every page and link on the site, taking notes as I find browser anomalies or bugs. I'll describe the problem in a text document and include a URL for the page. Sometimes I'll include an annotated screenshot of the problem (see below). A great tool for this is Skitch (Mac) and Greenshot (Windows). I also use the Web Developer toolbar add-on for Firefox to test javascript, auto-fill forms, view HTML source code, etc. My QA Checklist is divided into three categories: Critical Functionality, Important Functionality and General Usability. Critical Functionality bugs include things like code errors, non-functioning forms, broken links and cross-browser incompatibility. Important Functionality includes broken page templates, bad page security and blank or missing pages. General Usability issues include poor or missing SEO data, text legibility, inconsistent navigation and so on.Once the QA report is compiled, I create a PDF that one of our developers will review and address each item in the report. Sometimes a second round of QA is done just to make sure we've shaken out as many bugs as possible from the site before it goes live. Read Now About
Article Prospect Experience Design Creative Questionnaire: Andy Mangold by Justin Kerr on February 13, 2009 Andy is a twenty-year-old designer/craftsman/doer of things from West Chester Pennsylvania currently attending the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore. He is passionate about riding bikes, climbing trees, wood, good music, and all things design. If he was able to make a living building things out of Legos and making rubber band guns, he would. Read Now About
Article What is SSL? published on February 13, 2009 SSL (or secure sockets layer) is a way for a user to verify two things about a server they are trying to contact for requesting a web page. The first is that they are communicating with the exact server they are expecting to be communicating with, and secondly, that no one is listening in on this communication. SSL is essential for logins, transporting delicate information, as well guaranteeing the correct sender and receiver. Read Now About
Article The Intelligent Content Web by Christopher Butler on February 12, 2009 You've probably heard the term "semantic web," or "web 3.0" thrown around at some point recently. But it seems like many people mean many different things when they describe something as "web 3.0." In a new whitepaper entitled The Emergence of Intelligent Content, Joe Gollner, of Stilo International, describes the semantic web in this way: "the semantic web amounts to the introduction of a descriptive layer of particularly ornate content the traversal of which facilitates the discovery, interpretation and use of the content resources that people access and use." Read Now About
Article Futures as an Education Strategy by Christopher Butler on February 11, 2009 I was really interested in an op ed from this Sunday's New York Times, titled Education is all in Your Mind, by Richard E. Nisbett, a professor of psychology at the University of Michigan and the author of Intelligence and How to Get It: Why Schools and Cultures Count. Here's one example of several strategies taken by teachers to improve their students' performance: "Daphna Oyserman, a social psychologist at the University of Michigan, asked inner-city junior-high children in Detroit what kind of future they would like to have, what difficulties they anticipated along the way, how they might deal with them and which of their friends would be most helpful in coping. After only a few such exercises in life planning, the children improved their performance on standardized academic tests, and the number who were required to repeat a grade dropped by more than half." The article even mentions the KIPP (Knowledge is Power) program, which Bill Gates noted in his recent TED talk. Gates went on to talk about his optimism that any problem (including malaria and education) can be solved. I wondered recently in my blog what conditions would be assumed in order for any problem to be solved, and though I may have come off as pessimistic, I am intrigued and optimistic that considering future problem solving can improve academic performance. My assumption is that the shift to a more problem-solving mode of thinking is made easier by considering one's own future and possible barriers to success, rather than any problems in the abstract and that it naturally follows that a student could more successfully move to a more academic application afterward. Of course, I'm not a psychologist so I may be dumbing this down quite a bit. I wonder if the same approach could be effective in the workplace, too? Read Now About
