The Ultimate Guide to Using Images in Social Media. We usually digest visual information better than text-based content. We can make use of this when optimizing our social media marketing campaigns to give ourselves an edge over competitors who push out written content via social media. When it comes to social media, there is no denying the fact that the images we use in our content can have a huge impact on how the content is perceived by the community. See #3, #7, #3, all of which emphasize the same thing.
Whether you are a social media expert, or a newbie in charge of managing content, you will always have to double-check the height and width of every image you post on your favourite channels. Making sure these images look good in all possible formats is a time-consuming and frustrating process, especially since the content is accessible from a variety of devices. Interested in tips for a certain social network? Facebook Images Size Guide Cover photos on Facebook are prime real estate for showcasing your brand. Profile photos Pro Tip: 1. Gary Kovacs: Tracking the trackers. Keen On... Kevin Kelly: On the Social Revolution.
The Future Of Reading | Wired Science I think it’s pretty clear that the future of books is digital. I’m sure we’ll always have deckle-edge hardcovers and mass market paperbacks, but I imagine the physical version of books will soon assume a cultural place analogous to that of FM radio. Although the radio is always there (and isn’t that nice?) , I really only use it when I’m stuck in a rental car and forgot my auxilliary input cord.
The rest of the time I’m relying on shuffle and podcasts. I love books deeply. I won’t bore you with descriptions of my love other than to say that, when I moved back from England, I packed 9 pounds of clothes and 45 pounds of books in one of my checked bags. (I have a weakness for British covers.) So I’m nervous about the rise of the Kindle and the Nook and the iBookstore. And yet, I also recognize the astonishing potential of digital texts and e-readers. That said, I do have a nagging problem with the merger of screens and sentences. Let me explain. So here’s my wish for e-readers. Why You Should Write When Life Sucks. When Ali Hale sends me a post, I know it’s going to be good.
And this one – on what to do about writing when life sucks – hits the target. Feel free to let us know in the comment section what you’ve done with those “life sucks” moments and how you can use them to create emotional content that packs a punch. This isn’t news to you: sometimes life sucks. Maybe a bunch of things have gone wrong. Family issues. Financial hiccups. Perhaps you’ve lost some of your usual energy and zest. However it happened, you ended up here. That’s the best time to write. First get the head space to write. So carve out two hours from your day. Now you have a place where you have the mental space to focus on writing. Truthfully? Use Your Feelings to Create Powerful, Emotional Writing “Nothing can be made to be of interest to the reader that was not first of vital concern to the writer.” – John Gardner, The Art of Fiction Have you ever read words that really grabbed you?
Emotion shines through your writing. Stephen Colbert: The Whole Truthiness and Nothing But. Is your left hand more motivated than your right hand? Motivation doesn't have to be conscious; your brain can decide how much it wants something without input from your conscious mind. Now a new study shows that both halves of your brain don't even have to agree. Motivation can happen in one side of the brain at a time. Psychologists used to think that motivation was a conscious process. You know you want something, so you try to get it. But a few years ago, Mathias Pessiglione, of the Brain & Spine Institute in Paris, and his colleagues showed that motivation could be subconscious; when people saw subliminal pictures of a reward, even if they didn't know what they'd seen, they would try harder for a bigger reward.
In the earlier study, volunteers were shown pictures of either a one-euro coin or a one-cent coin for a tiny fraction of a second. The research shows that it's possible for only one side of the brain, and thus one side of the body, to be motivated at a time, says Pessiglione. ‘Genius Within’ and Glenn Gould’s Technique. Op-Ed at 40 - Interactive Feature. Illustrations by CHRISTOPH NIEMANN An Introduction By THE EDITORS On Sept. 21, 1970, readers who turned to the last inside page of The Times's main section found something new.
The obituaries that normally appeared in that space had been moved, replaced by something called Op-Ed. And so here we are. Here is some of what the outside world has had to say. Very useful HTML5 App with a size of less than 10 Kilobytes Couple of weeks back Aneventapart.com launch a challenge to web developers to develop an inspiring web applications with a size of less than 10 kilobytes. In this post I will handpick an application from that event that is very useful from day to day use for web developers and designers. Below is the list of incredibly useful applications with a very lightweight in size. Taskboard 10k Taskboard 10k is a light-weight on-line whiteboard for your task and notes about life, the universe and everything. TinyBounce Want to give some design feedback on a site? Pintura Pintura – A tool for creating color schemes (analogous, monochromatic, triadic, tetradic or complementary).
Unforgetit Unforgetit – A simple alarm and reminder app. Moodr Need some inspiration? Full Schedule Full Schedule is a simple app that records the tasks you do everyday. Colorist Colorist determines the color palette from the given image. Plan5 – HTML5 Task Organizer Plan 5 is a task organizer / planner / timer.
Mocker Chroma. Work at gdgt. Program or Be Programmed by Douglas Rushkoff, an exclusive Boing Boing preview. Program or be Programmed: Ten Commands for a Digital Age is the new book by Douglas Rushkoff, an author, documentarian, media theorist, and great friend of all of us at Boing Boing. This week, we are pleased to have Douglas as a guest blogger. To kick things off, here's a full chapter from his book. And for the remainder of the week, Boing Boing readers will get 20% off the price of the book or ebook in addition to whatever discount may already exist (currently 15%, for a total of 35% off).
Just type BOING in the discount box on the final ordering screen. -- Mark Chapter 3: CHOICE You May Always Choose "None of the Above" In the digital realm, everything is made into a choice. The medium is biased toward the discreet. The difference between an analog record and a digital CD is really quite simple. A CD, on the other hand, is not a physical artifact but a symbolic representation. The analog recording is a physical impression, while the digital recording is a series of choices. IDEO Reimagines the Future of Personal Banking | Design for Good. Design and innovation powerhouse IDEO is known for using design thinking and keen behavioral insight to reinvent object, products and systems that touch our daily lives.
Most recently, they envisioned three scenarios for the future of the book, but one of their more interesting new projects looks at something far less exciting but arguably more central to our day-to-day operation: personal banking. For Spanish bank BBVA, IDEO examined the interaction experience of ATM's, which has lagged dramatically behind the actual technology powering these machines. From simple yet impactful tweaks like 90-degree booth rotation for better privacy to cutting-edge customization software, the prototype -- which took two years of development -- offers a seamless, highly visual bridge between physical and virtual. The goal was not how to further automate the teller but, rather, how to humanize the machine. " Cloud-based IT failure halts Virgin flights. A catastrophic systems failure at cloud-based software provider, Navitaire, a business process outsourcing (BPO) unit of Accenture, disrupted travel for 50,000 customers of Virgin Blue airlines in Australia.
The situation offers important lessons for buyers of cloud-based outsourcing services. Related: Virgin's cloud failure: Rebuttal and a deeper perspective Virgin Blue provided details in a press release: Navitaire is the supplier of Virgin Blue’s reservation and distribution software platform and also hosts that platform on its own server infrastructure at a data centre in Sydney.
At 0800 (AEST) yesterday the solid state disk server infrastructure used to host Virgin Blue failed resulting in the outage of our guest facing service technology systems. According to travel technology website, tnooze, Virgin Blue recently transitioned from Navitaire's Open Skies platform to the same company's New Skies system. Implications for buyers. Book review: The Map that Changed the World. William Smith was born in 1769, as the industrial revolution was getting under way. Enclosures, coal mining, canal building and drainage work were building blocks to Smith’s maps; as a young man he became involved in surveying as a result of enclosures around his birthplace of Churchill, near Oxford. Following this experience in surveying he became involved in coal mining in Somerset. Here he saw directly the strata beneath the surface and learnt their individual character. Then he was involved in surveying for a canal to link the Somerset coal mines to the main canal system.
This combines surveying with geology, since the type of rock the canal goes over determines how easy it is to dig the canal and whether it leaks. A key insight was that the fossils found within a strata could be used to exactly correlate two distinct outcrops – in the absence of fossils two outcrops might look very similar but actually belong to different strata. National Institute on Money in State Politics. Australia welcomes first Aboriginal federal MP. How Much Does A Hurricane Weigh? : Krulwich Wonders… PND - News - Lumina Foundation Announces Grants to Advance Degree Completion. The Lumina Foundation for Education has announced nineteen grants totaling $14.8 million to help advance adult degree attainment through a series of interconnected projects that aim to engage, motivate, and help students to return to college to complete their degrees. According to the foundation, thirty-seven million adults between the ages of 25 and 64 (more than 20 percent of the working-age population) have not earned a degree or credential despite having attended a college.
The grants, which range from $250,000 to almost $1.3 million, provide support for large-scale projects that aim to educate and retrain workers who need to improve their skills in order to compete for jobs that will be created over the next decade, most of which will require some form of postsecondary education degree or credential. Through the projects, the foundation expects to reach some 6.6 million adults who have prior college credits. For a complete list of grants, visit the Lumina Foundation Web site. Sebastian Seung: I am my connectome. For the first time, monkeys recognize themselves in the mirror, indicating self-awareness. Typically, monkeys don't know what to make of a mirror. They may ignore it or interpret their reflection as another, invading monkey, but they don't recognize the reflection as their own image.
Chimpanzees and people pass this "mark" test -- they obviously recognize their own reflection and make funny faces, look at a temporary mark that the scientists have placed on their face or wonder how they got so old and grey. For 40 years, scientists have concluded from this type of behavior that a few species are self-aware -- they recognize the boundaries between themselves and the physical world. Because chimps, our closest relatives, pass the test, while almost all other primate species fail it, scientists began to discuss a "cognitive divide" between the highest primates and the rest. The finding casts doubt on both the relevance of the mark test and on the existence of a definitive cognitive divide between higher and lower primates. Trick of the Light Turns Small Phones Into Big Devices: Tech News « As a self-admitted hardware geek, I had to wipe the drool from my mouth when I saw the Mozilla Seabird concept phone designed by Billy May.
In a traditional open-source fashion, May created the idea based on user community feedback in terms of features, form and function. Seabird has all three, as you can see in the video overview: It’s a phone from the future. While the technology used for Seabird impresses, what stood out even more for me is how Seabird illustrates the growth of the smartphones as the central device in our lives and how such a device will become even more useful. May’s semi-crowdsourced concept is really trying to break the biggest confines of today’s handsets: input and output. Look at any phone today and these are the two most constraining aspects. New keyboard technology, such as that from Swype is helping to speed our typing on handsets, and voice input is becoming a solid secondary input method as well.
Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub req’d): How to use categories and tags in your nonprofit blog - Social media and inbound marketing for non-profits. Publishing posts in WordPress (.Com and .Org) entails the use of categories and tags. Essentially they’re a way for readers to easily find other articles on your blog. Sounds simple enough, right? No so. Why it’s easy to be confused about tags and categories If you’re new to blogging, understanding when to use categories and when to use tags can be challenging. Part of the challenge is that both share similar attributes (text links that describe post content). A simple way to understand tags and categories The last time you went to the grocery store, how many different aisles did you find tabasco sauce in? Now think about all the various items around the store that included red peppers as an ingredient. So… Tabasco sauce (post) is located in a single aisle (category).
Make sense? Share photos on Twitter. Digital Identity Tour Part-2: Digital Identity Tuner 7.0. This blog post is Part-2 of a series that started as the ongoing thinking after our Digital Identity Tour in June 2010. In Part-1, I developed the idea of the Unpolished Diamond. Today, I will entertain you on the concept of a Digital Identity Tuner, which in its own is also a further evolution of the Identity Rights System 3.0 post of March 2010. It all started coming together when – during the tour – we visited PayPal.
This visit was at the end of the tour. We were welcomed by Eve Maler, Distinguished Engineer, Identity Services at PayPal, and Andrew Nash, Senior Director Identity Services at PayPal These folks of PayPal basically told us to forget what we had seen earlier in the week. Indeed, I was amazed how much further ahead they were, not only in their conceptual thinking, but also in the pace at which they define and rapidly test new protocol standards. It is not that much about identity, but more about digital footprint. What if we could do this for a person’s digital footprint ? Tim Leberecht: 3 ways to (usefully) lose control of your brand. How crowdsourcing is changing business, advertising and cause marketing.
Video: Multi-Tasking is Bad For Your Brain. Here’s How To Fix It: Tech News « Privacy. Ray Kurzweil - Exponential Learning & Entrepreneurship. Jay Rosen @ Sciences Po: Who is the audience, and what does that make us, journalists? @ Fiction in Truth. If you glow down to the woods today... the moment fireflies turn woods into an enchanted forest. The good, the bad and the ugly truth about social media - AnnArbor.com. Carpenter Ants and Fossilized Mind Control. Caleb Charland. Green Column - U.S. Plays Catch-Up on High-Speed Rail. Human stem cells restore motor function in mice with spinal cord injuries. Untitled. The Value Of Ruins on Huffduffer. The Twitter I-Open Daily. The Twitter Kurt Vega Daily. Tools for the 21st Century Teacher. Why your brain flips over visual illusions - life - 03 September 2010. 11 Predictions That Back to the Future Part II Got Right.
Pierre Lévy on Collective Intelligence Literacy. Seven Ages of the Body. Untitled. Origin of The Bee's Knees Expression. Twitter Plans to Hijack EVERY URL on the Web! Rachel Sussman: The world's oldest living things. White space broadband to be finalized (at last) this month. Supermassive Black Holes Interacting With Dark Matter Observed from Earth. Philosophers-quotes.com. Twitter plans to record all links clicked | Privacy Inc. A World Without E-mail: One Man's Vision of a Social Workplace. William Gibson On the Future of Book Publishing. How To Start a Blog, From The New York Times — silencematters — Jeremy Zilar. CG121.