Fight The System: Battling Bureaucracy — Part 2 - Smashing Magazine. Advertisement This article is the second part of Paul Boag’s series about common problems and difficulties that occur in in-house Web teams working in large companies. The series explains ways to to improve how your team is perceived within your organization, overcome politics and problem people, ensure that a project gets approval and deliver work within scope and on time. Feel free to check part 1 of the article as well. Ensuring Approval When working for a large organization, you constantly require the approval of others to move anything forward.
This approval process is often a nightmare. The first step is to identify key influencers. Identify the Influencers Every decision-making process has key influencers. But don’t assume that the key influencers are always the loudest or most senior. A Web designer tries to identify who the real client is. Once you have identified them, the next step is to get them on board. Avoid Committees, Talk to Individuals First, it puts you in control. (al) 5 Step Process for Social Media Success | Content Marketing | Social Media Consulting - Convince & Convert. 10 Usability Tips Based on Research Studies. We hear plenty usability tips and techniques from an incalculable number of sources. Many of the ones we take seriously have sound logic, but it’s even more validating when we find actual data and reports to back up their theories and conjectures.
This article discusses usability findings of research results such as eye-tracking studies, reports, analytics, and usability surveys pertaining to website usability and improvements. You’ll discover that many of these usability tips will be common sense but are further supported with numbers; however, some might surprise you and change your outlook on your current design processes. 1. Forget the "Three-Click Rule" The idea that users will get frustrated if they have to click more than three times to find a piece of content on your website has been around for ages. Logically, it makes sense. But why the arbitrary three-click limit? In fact, most users won’t give up just because they’ve hit some magical number. Source: User Interface Engineering. ACRL Value of Academic Libraries | An initiative from the Association of College and Research Libraries. Drexel Freshmen Get Help From 'Personal Librarians' - Wired Campus.
With students spending more research time in front of the screen and less in the stacks, librarians at Drexel University are trying a fresh approach to helping new freshmen navigate their resources: “personal librarians.” The Personal Librarian Program assigns each of the university’s 2,750 entering freshmen to a librarian. The librarians get in touch with their students before they arrive via snail mail—sending a signed letter and business card—and later meet with students in person for a crash course on the library’s offerings. Each of the approximately 20 librarians trained for the program will also work with their students throughout the semester to encourage them to use the resources and help them figure out how to do so. “Our role is to help coach our students and help them learn the tools and skills needed to become very savvy,” said Danuta A.
Nitecki, Drexel’s dean of libraries. “We believe it’s about human interaction.” Return to Top. 12 Rules for New Administrators - Run Your Campus. By Michael J. Bugeja During the summer, two of my best friends and former colleagues asked me for guidance about making the transition from professor to administrator. Both had just been named directors of major academic programs at large public universities. I made that transition myself in 2003 when I was appointed director of the journalism school at Iowa State University. No one prepares you for the position of department chair or director—arguably one of the most difficult jobs in academe because it requires you to navigate between the dean's dictums and the faculty's demands.
Start serving others. Those service obligations that are often overlooked when it comes time to grant promotion or tenure to faculty members are requisite in administrative reviews. Stop loving students. Get organized. So stay on track by updating a calendar that reminds you of deadlines and tasks on a daily, weekly, monthly, and semester basis. Appoint a leadership team. Be transparent. Michael J. A Detailed Look into Popular Styles in Web Design. Just as there are a variety of designers out there, there are respectfully just as many web design styles. Some are good, some are bad - many are just experimental. However, there are those few styles in web design that we see all the time. They are the design styles that work, and that we've grown to know best. Sometimes popular web design styles can deter us since we love to create something original. Illustrations Illustrations have been very popular in the world of web design for a few years now.
Why Does it Work? Illustrated designs give us a world of possibilities. Because of all this, web designs with custom illustrations are great for branding. Common Features Illustrated designs tend to come in three main categories (while there are some exceptions): personal branding, mascots, and the abstract. Mascots are also often used, and are usually animals or other memorable characters. There are also many abstract illustrations that tend to have no final shape or form. Examples All Star Ben. Kalachandji's Restaurant & Palace :: Dallas, TX. 10 Tips for Designing Presentations That Don’t Suck: Pt.2. Last week we looked at part one of our two part series on designing better presentations. We learned practical tips on using photography, typography, color and more to create stunning results.
Today we’ll wrap things up with tips six through ten and teach you how simplifying your designs can lead to drastically improved results. Let’s get started! #6 Simpler is Better This is a major stumbling block for non-designers. After all, if the presentation slides contain all the information begin conveyed, then why would the audience even need a speaker? I’ve seen far too many people give presentations with slides that look like the one below: You might think I’m being facetious with my design but trust me I’ve seen slides that were far worse. Again, remember that your speech is the reason you’re up in front of people. Use your slides to grab and hold the audience’s attention through attractive visuals. Notice how the slide below pulls you in with an incomplete statement. . #10 Make ‘em Laugh 1. We strengthen our rights by exercising them. – Stephen's Lighthouse. OK, here we are at the start of another academic year and September – and sadly at the intersection of the anniversary of 9/11, a small number of people advocating burning the Qur’an/Koran and ALA’s banned books week focused on the freedom to read.
I usually avoid politics on this blog and I am still doing that. This isn’t politics. This is basic human rights. We enjoy many rights and privileges in North America. We enjoy the freedom to read. We enjoy freedom of expression. We enjoy the freedom of the press. In particular, at this moment in world history, we continue to have dedicated men and women, from the U.S., Canada and more, fighting for these rights all over the world but, in particular in the Middle East. Our freedoms are the foundations of our society here. We have free libraries and every citizen has a right to use them. I am a librarian. Burning books as symbolic attack and commentary is not in my vocabulary.
I have a simple suggestion for those who want to take personal action. The Next 5 Years in Social Media. In honor of Mashable's five-year anniversary, this series is supported by IDG. Matt Yorke, President of IDG's Strategic Marketing Services explains why now is the time for marketers to conduct social experiments. Read more here. Over the last five years, social media has evolved from a handful of communities that existed solely in a web browser to a multi-billion dollar industry that’s quickly expanding to mobile devices, driving major changes in content consumption habits and providing users with an identity and social graph that follows them across the web.
With that framework in place, the next five years are going to see even more dramatic change. Fueled by advancements in underlying technology – the wires, wireless networks and hardware that make social media possible – a world where everything is connected awaits us. The Technology The Strong Get Stronger The Next Frontiers for Social Media The Internet has already enabled anyone to be a publisher. Beyond Social Media. TIME TO REVIVE THE LIBRARY? Use the 80-20 Rule to Increase Your Website’s Effectiveness. By Oleg Mokhov Want to increase your website’s conversion rate?
Want more subscribers, opt-ins, members, customers? How about doing less work while you’re at it? Too good to be true? Nope. It’s possible if you apply the 80-20 rule: focus on the 20% that will bring you 80% of the results. By doing an 80-20 optimization of your website — whittling your pages down to the 20% of things that produces 80% of the results — you’ll not only have a simpler site that’ll convert better, but you’ll have less work in developing and managing it since there’ll be fewer elements to think about.
Okay, so the above claim about less work was only partly true — you’ll have to do a bit more work upfront, but the benefit is less work and more rewards afterwards. 80-20 Whut? The 80-20 rule is another term for the Pareto principle. So what the heck is this 80-20 rule? Business management thinker Joseph M. The 80-20 rule is also a common rule of thumb in business, i.e. 80% of your sales come from 20% of your clients. BJ's Restaurant & Brewhouse :: Dallas, TX. Texas Attorney General Investigating Google & Antitrust Issues. Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott is conducting an investigation into Google’s business practices as they relate to search listings, in particular whether Google is manipulating its paid and editorial results in a way that violates antitrust laws.
We received a tip about the investigation this week, and Google confirmed today that an investigation started in July. The company plans to post to its blog later today about the matter. According to Google, the Texas Attorney General’s office is seeking more information about allegations that have been levied against Google by: UK-based FoundemNew York-based SourceTool & TradeCometOhio-based myTriggers Why an attorney general based out of Texas is investigating allegations made by non-Texas companies is unclear. According to Google, as long as the companies have customers in Texas, then it can be deemed relevant jurisdiction. But have any Texas consumers complained to the attorney general about these issues? Texas Launches Antitrust Investigation of Google.
It has been revealed that the office of Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott is conducting an investigation of Google over complaints of antitrust and anti-competitive behavior, and the search giant is responding. According to Search Engine Land, the state of Texas' investigation is focused on whether Google manipulates its search results to the detriment of its competition. The investigation was sparked by complaints from vertical search engines Foundem, SourceTool/TradeComet and myTriggers. While none of these companies operate out of the state of Texas, they only need customers in the state to help spark an investigation.
Google has since responded to the report via a blog post from Deputy General Counsel Don Harrison. In it, Harrison addresses the questions about the "fairness" of the Google search engine while providing background on Foundem, SourceTool/TradeComet and MyTriggers. This background refutes each company's argument that Google is engaging in anticompetitive behavior. Make the iTunes 10 control buttons horizontal. The future of the internet: A virtual counter-revolution. Granada Theater :: Dallas, TX. The Case for the Commons: Reclaiming our Shared Resources. Divided We Fall When politicians talk about getting the country "back on track," what does that mean? When did we ... This article is part of a series of articles on the commons. For more, read The Science of Cooperation and A New Political Dawn. For more writing on the commons from the alternative press, visit utne.com/Commons. The first three times I heard the word commons, I had no idea what it meant.
Although it is often associated with Britain and its colonies, the commons as place and process can be found in societies from Central America to South Asia and, most recently, cyberspace. The term “tragedy of the commons” was coined by microbiologist Garrett Hardin in a 1968 Science article, in which he asked what happens when individuals compete for a scarce resource. In many ways, Hardin’s world looks a lot like our own, as we destroy it at a pace made more frantic by the recession. Scratch the surface, though, and Hardin’s arguments blame the victim. The barons rebelled. Cupboard Natural Foods :: Denton, TX. 10 Reading Revolutions Before E-Books - Science and Tech. 1. The phrase "reading revolution" was probably coined by German historian Rolf Engelsing. He certainly made it popular. Engelsing was trying to describe something he saw in the 18th century: a shift from "intensive" reading and re-reading of very few texts to "extensive" reading of many, often only once.
Think of reading the Bible vs reading the newspaper. History, of course, is rarely so neat, and other historians quickly found counterexamples of extensive premodern reading (Cicero and his letters) and intensive reading today (the way the Romantics brooded over The Sorrows of Young Werther, or our contemporaries over that very different contemporary Werther, Harry Potter). 2. But first, let's apply a clean explanatory schema or three to the print revolution to see how each one fits. 3.
This fusion of orality and literacy helps explain the potency of classical Hellenic culture. 4. 5. 6. 7 & 8. 9. And that's the common thread to all of these revolutions. 10. Images: 1. Why Does ‘Twitter API’ Keep Asking for My Password? | Epicenter. Sites around the web are getting splashed with a mysterious dialog Tuesday, thanks to a change in the way Twitter handles user authentication. Some Wired.com website visitors see the dialog box shown here when visiting any of this site’s blogs.
It states that a username and password are being requested by Twitter, with the unhelpful message, “Twitter API.” The same dialog has been spotted on ReadWriteWeb and even on Twitter’s own website. In addition, users of some Twitter apps, including Twitter’s own Tweetie and BlackBerry apps, Tweetdeck and Twitterrific, have complained of Twitter login problems. In the case of the website dialog, entering your username and password doesn’t do anything useful, and won’t make the dialog box go away. The cause of the trouble appears is a change in the way Twitter handles user authentication for remote sites and programs.
However, now that Twitter has switched, programs and sites using the old authentication method are not working properly. See Also: How CEOs Will Use Social Media in the Future. This series is supported by Gist. Gist provides a full view of the contacts in your professional network by creating a rich business profile for each one that includes the most news, status updates, and work details. See how it works here. Today's CEO is not social. So says Forrester Research's CEO George Colony. Very few of the CEOs at top companies in the U.S. and the rest of the world have any material presence on the popular social media sites. Colony believes they should be social though, and all signs are pointing to a future filed with CEOs who can speak the language of the people — social media. While one can only speculate about the future of CEOs and social media, there's no question that social media plays a huge part in life and the world as we know it right now.
The Next Generation of CEOs When it comes to CEOs, there's a vast disparity between the young ones heading up startups and the more seasoned CEOs running the world's most powerful companies. Plus, industry is social. Blogging For Web Designers: Editorial Calendars and Style Guides - Smashing Magazine. Craftsmanship in Designing Websites. Ben Folds, Nick Hornby, & Pomplamoose VideoSong!!!! 10 ways data is changing how we live. White Rock Lake :: Dallas, TX. 27 Essential Social Media Resources You May Have Missed. A brief guide to life | zen habits. Ghardin | Listen to The Style Council – The Whole Point Of No Return. 5 Web Design and Development Tools I Simply Can't Live Without (and Why) Social Bookmarking Even When You're Not Social: Why I Use Delicious.
Mi Casita Express :: Denton, TX. 8 things I wish I knew before starting a business. Information R/evolution. 10 iPhone Apps to Get You Back to School. Björk - The Comet Song - The Moomins And The Comet Chase OST. Google's Book Search: A Disaster for Scholars - The Chronicle Review. Minimalism in Web Design: A Guide. Whiterock Lake. Tukta Thai :: Dallas, TX. Things Organized Neatly. 5 Huge Trends in Social Media Right Now. 10 Essential Free E-Books for Web Designers. The Web Is Dead. Long Live the Internet | Magazine.