Notice Anything Different? My Site Has A New Color Scheme!
October 16, 2008 by Jonathan · Leave a Comment
For the last couple of weeks I’ve been working with a talented young person to revise and revamp the look and feel of my blog. The new design went live sometime last week but in case you only get my posts via Email or RSS - visit the site and take a look.
I’ve brightened things up, reorganized a few pages, and have a new header that’s more descriptive of what I do. This site is definitely a work in progress, but this is a step in the right direction.
I couldn’t have done this design refresh without the care and help of WebSketchz.com, Meji did some design work, tweaked the CSS code, and went through a bunch of revisions and nitpicking with me. She did great work and I’m glad to have worked with them.
Please have a look around and let me know what you think. By the way, very soon I’ll be Creative Commons’ing all of my content so let me know what YOU would like to see on this site.
Hurricane Ike Media Review: Judging Criteria
September 15, 2008 by Jonathan · Leave a Comment
As I mentioned yesterday, I’m going to be writing reviews of the local and national media’s response to Hurricane Ike this past weekend.
What I’ll focus on:
- Update frequency
- Web site usability
- User generated content solicitation and usage
- Multi-media coverage
- Distribution of content outside the “walled garden”
- Innovation, or lack thereof in coverage
Where I’m coming from:
- I have family who lives in a Houston suburb
- I am familiar with the Houston television market having visited several of the TV studios and spoken with employees there in the past
- I live in the Washington DC area, so do not have access to live television or radio coverage from Houston unless streaming media is available
- I work in social media for a major media company
- My background is in journalism, information distribution, and online community building
If you have any questions please feel free to leave them in the comments section of any post. Notice someone doing something that I’ve missed? Let me know and I’ll be sure to update posts or continue the series as necessary.
Each of the media outlets I’ll profile and review this week are major operations with large audiences. I don’t want to be too critical of efforts or insinuate that there is any one “right” way of doing things online because there isn’t. What I’m measuring them against are what I consider to be the current “best practices” in online media distribution.
Also understand that each of these companies have very different technical and infrastructure components which I’ll address where possible.
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This post is part of the Hurrricane Ike Media Review series by Jonathan Coffman. I welcome your comments below.
Introducing Google AppEngine
April 7, 2008 by Jonathan · Leave a Comment
It’s Google’s first foray into application stack support and infrastructure and I for one am very excited to give it a try. I was planning to go to bed early tonight and get an early start to tomorrow but now I feel the need to wait until 9 PST to signup and be one of the first 10,000 to signup for the developer’s beta program.
Do I know Python? Nope, but I’m certainly going to learn it now. Python is very popular among modern web applications and is one of the 4 or 5 primary (and exclusive) languages and Google uses and approves of in-house.
What’s amazing is that when you think of the end-result for Google by releasing an application stack of infrastructure like they are. If every developer in the world has a chance to develop web applications using the same base as Google does, well what can’t Google do?
Frankly one of the neatest aspects I see is this, if you develop on Google AppEngine, and Google likes your idea, they could buy your company or your app from you and launch it immediately. There wouldn’t be any more of this 1-year plus delay from purchase to beta re-launch under Google like JotSpot and GrandCentral who wait patiently to be integrated into the GoogleMachine. Your app already uses their system and works within their constraints, so what’s holding it back?
I’ll update this post with more as I encounter more news and information about the program in the coming hours and days. Stay tuned!
100+ Useful Web Resources for Small Business and Non Profits | BlogWell
March 5, 2008 by Jonathan · 2 Comments
100+ Useful Web Resources for Small Business and Non Profits | BlogWell: “to”
(Via Blog Well.)
I just can’t compete with that site, they’ve compiled an EXCELLENT list of resources and other sites that can help your personally or professionally understand and take advantage of the web.
It’s geared toward small businesses, but I can’t find anything on there that wouldn’t apply to enterprise web operations as well. We all have a need for growth and development online and blog-well has some very helpful advice.
I haven’t read each of the 100 sites linked to from that post yet, but I am making my way through it and haven’t found a dud yet!
Netdiver Magazine - Best of the Year / 2007
March 3, 2008 by Jonathan · Leave a Comment
Netdiver Magazine - Best of the Year / 2007: “”
(Via Netdiver Magazine.)
In case you needed reminding, there are people out there who are more creative than you or I. Sure we may fancy ourselves pretty creative and innovative but geez, there’s more out there!
Netdiver Magazine put out their Best of the Year 2007 in web design last month and there’s some really amazing items in the showcase. A lot of the sites use the power of Adobe Flash to bring animation, typography, and design to life.
This is both a good and bad thing of course, Flash does allow designers the freedom to manipulate and control how a site looks and feels, but it also restricts the viewer in terms of needing ample bandwidth to view the site and the whole search engine robots not being able to crawl Flash thing (which is improving by the way, thankfully!).
I’d use Flash a lot more in my day to day projects if it was friendlier to the viewers but it just isn’t. Flash is also just plain hard to work with sometimes. Of all the Adobe applications, I think it has the steepest learning curve. It’s definitely one of those things that if you don’t use it, you loose it.
Now go check out those beautiful web designs and be inspired to create something!
remarkable communication: The Ten Commandments of New Social Media
February 27, 2008 by Jonathan · Leave a Comment
remarkable communication: The Ten Commandments of New Social Media
I highly suggest you take a look at this recent post over at Remarkable Communication. He outlines ten very useful commandments for participating in social media.
His commandments:
- Participate in the coversation
- Do Not Lie
- Do Not Astroturf
- Talk like a human being
- Remember the community
- Don’t be a wimp
- Do not Snivel
- Write what is worth reading
- Don’t talk about what you don’t know
- Have a sense of humor
Wow, that’s quite a list and I tend to agree with each and every one of them. In fact, it reads almost like the text from Principals of American Journalism back in my early years at the Journalism School.
Those commandments of social media sound just like what it takes to be an honest, fair, and tought Journalist (just like in Jschool, that’s Journalist with a big J to support Big J journalism. Does that make sense to anyone who hasn’t gone to Journalism School?).
The only thing I might question would be astroturfing, not that I support it, it’s a ridiculous practice, but do people still participate a lot?
My Switch to MarsEdit
February 10, 2008 by Jonathan · Leave a Comment
I finally took the plunge after two 30 day trials (I tired it once a couple years ago, and then for the last couple of weeks) I finally decided to take the plunge and purchase it.I have no complaints so far, the program makes it very easy to keep all my ideas and draft blog posts ready to go at a moment’s notice. Sure it has a lack of WYSIWYG when typing, but the preview window does a great job of giving a pretty darn accurate version of what the post will look like on the blog (especially if I took the time to tell it what the real blog CSS code is).
The application is lightweight which is absolutely necessary on my aging Powerbook G4, and for the fact that I keep a million and a half programs open at any given time. It’s very quick loading and ready to go whenever I need it.
I suppose the purchase stemmed from me needing a more efficient way to blog, and to make sure that I blog almost every day. One value that i want my loyal readers (YOU!) to have is a reliable posting schedule. I typically write my posts a day or two ahead of time, just to give me time to think about and edit them before they go live and this makes that work flow very easy to follow.
If you run a Mac and have a blog (or contribute to a ton of blogs like me) give MarsEdit a try and let me know what you think in the comments.
My iGoogle Homepage Favorite Things
February 9, 2008 by Jonathan · 2 Comments
The iGoogle homepage is my personal portal of choice, for a number of reasons, once I just like having the Google search bar right there waiting for whenever I want. I don’t keep a lot of widgets and tabs saved onto it, but enough to get me the latest headlines from my news organizations of choice, and weather (although usually my weather reports come from hitting the Weather icon on my iPhone.
A couple other widgets that I keep on my iGoogle main page is a ‘Daily Einstein’ quotes box (I’m a big Einstein fan) as well as a Joke of Day widget (I only glance at it every couple of days, but sometimes there’s something funny there!).
One other favorite thing on my iGoogle homepage is the Google Gadget Editor, for those moments when I get fed up with going to a website and just want a widget, I use an RSS widget template and roll my own! I’m sure this is what frightens some PR folk, people rolling their own content widgets, but gosh if they did them themselves audience numbers are sure to grow!
Very soon I’m going to roll out some widgets and other gadgets on my blog, mainly different ways to read and access the information contained in it. Some things I’m currently thinking of doing in the short term include a Mac OSX Dashboard widget, iGoogle homepage widget, iPhone application, SpringWidgets widget, and maybe some extra RSS feeds so you can roll your own (just be sure to send me a link, I love seeing what kinds of cool things people can do given some unique content).
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