Garr Reynolds (Presentation Zen), reviewing the book A Whole New Mind by Daniel Pink, applies the six attitudes of the book (Design, Story, Symphony, Empathy, Play, and Meaning) to making a presentation. It seems to me that they can be applied to designing a website or maintaining a blog, too.
The latest issue of Cybermetrics, an online journal publishing quantitative analyses of scholarly and scientific communications on the Web, is a special issue on “What does the Web represent? From virtual ethnography to to web indicators”. All of the articles are interesting, but one in particular looks at cultural identity: Studying the Scholarly web: How disciplinary culture shapes online representations.
Over at digital-ethos is a short post, “Intellagirl on the ‘Story of Digital Identity’ Podcast“:
Paul Madsen, Conor Cahill, Richard Piccarreto and I participated in Aldo Castaneda’s Digital Identity podcast last week. Have a listen! We discussed everything from OpenID to how digital identities are formed. It was a blast and I learned a bunch from these great guys. Have a listen and I’m sure you’ll learn a thing or two as well.
Kimberly Alvarado of the Center for Professional Development at Kean University and of K. Aimee web designs had several good comments about designing and adding content to a website. I’ll recap some of them here.
On design, color is important, harmonizing background color with text color. The appropriate choice of color can make a simple design more than aesthetically pleasing. Two online tools mentioned for this purpose were the color scheme generator and the color chart of safe colors. For those wanting to learn more about color, e-books can be purchased at Color Voodoo. The choice of font style, size, and color is also important with the main criterion being readability.
On navigation, Alvarado suggested creating one page that would act as a template for all pages, so that the navigation would be predictable and consistent across pages. Plus, it saves time by not needing to re-create/re-design new pages. All that needs to be done is to add the new content.
Generally speaking, she suggested staying away from sound, although if someone has the option of turning it off, it would be okay. Ditto for videos, although they seem more appreciated than audio.
A major consideration for using audio, video, or graphics is copyright. Is the item in the public domain or licensed under a Creative Commons agreement? If not, you need to get permission to use these on your website. One place for free music (mentioned by Tom Pawlowski) is SoundClick. Some sites for finding photos/images are yotophoto and Flickr’s Creative Commons photos. Photos on Wikipedia will state what license governs their use (and many are under Creative Commons), and those owned by the U.S. government are in the public domain. It would be a good idea to read about “fair use” at Wikipedia for articles published on Wikipedia and in general.
With respect to content, “the best content is something you really love or love to do or have an interest in.” Some possibilities she suggested were:
Regardless of the type of website, two questions to ask yourself are:
These questions will provide the framework and guidance for designing your site and for selecting your content.
Darren Rowse of Problogger writes about “How to add to blogging conversations … And eliminate the echo chamber,” saying:
One of the criticism that is often leveled at the Blogosphere is that it is an echo chamber - that the same stories get blogged about in the same ways by blog after blog - without anything constructive or unique emerging.
No doubt. But one might consider the purpose of the blog. For example, this blog is to simply acquaint students with knowledge new to them, that goes outside the textbook and classroom discussions, knowledge that they can pursue as they have time. So, should all blogs put in the time required to construct uniqueness? I’m not sure, but for those who do want to add content of value, visit his post for his guidelines for improving your blogging conversation.
jill/txt, reading Charlotte Hägström’s chapter for her class’s World of Warcraft anthology, reported on this quote from Giddens:
A person’s identity is not to be found in behavious [sic]. Nor - important though this is - in the reactions of othersm [sic] but in the capacity to keep a particular narrative going. (Giddens 1991:54; emphasis his)
This is most likely a quote from Anthony Giddens, who is well-known for his theory of structuration, which looks at how human agency and social life interact with each other.
I wonder how one separates one’s behaviors over time from the narrative they create, unless as David Gauntlett writes concerning Giddens’ thoughts:
Self-identity, then, is not a set of traits or observable characteristics. It is a person’s own reflexive understanding of their biography. Self-identity has continuity - that is, it cannot easily be completely changed at will - but that continuity is only a product of the person’s reflexive beliefs about their own biography (Giddens 1991: 53).
So, what narrative(s) is being maintained by our websites and blogs?
For those who prefer videos on how to create web pages, Tubetorial has a good series of 8 videos online ranging from creating simple web pages to using div and span tags.
Lawrence Lessig, a professor at the Stanford Law School, is giving a series of presentations over several months on Internet-related proposals for Congress. Here are his descriptions of them:
Copyright: Orphan Works: Orphan Works legislation is critical. Nonetheless, I strongly oppose the Copyright Office’s “Orphan Works Proposal.” I think it is extraordinarily unfair to current copyright owners, and insanely inefficient. My proposal applies an “Orphan Works Maintenance Requirement” to older works only; the requirement is a form of registration.
Copyright: Remix Culture: Congress should carve a robust exemption to the law for non-commercial remix. Commercial use of such remixes should be regulated by a baseline statutory license.
Network Neutrality: No surprise: I support Network Neutrality legislation. Unfortunately, too many of the reigning proposals are, imho, radically too difficult to enforce. I’ll propose a much simpler rule to enforce that would achieve the legitimate objectives of NN.
Spam: The email system is broken. A bazaar of private remedies to deal with spam now clog the system to defeat many of its original objectives. I’ll propose a modified version of an earlier idea to deal with this problem — a problem that costs the American public many times the total profits of the recording industry, but has gotten but a fraction of Congress’s attention.
Harmful to Minors Material: There’s a simple and minimally burdensome way Congress could protect kids online from material deemed “harmful to minors.” Not perfectly, but certainly better than the current regime. And without constitutional risk.
Deregulating Spectrum: Crude radio technology used to make regulating spectrum necessary. Smart radio technology makes it — in many cases at least — unnecessary. We should be pushing to deregulate where technology makes that possible.
In improving the content, design, and search engine optimalization of your blog, four blogs that offer good advice are Problogger, Copyblogger, Daily Blog Tips, and Pearsonified.
They also have good examples of “about” pages, separating “about the blog” and “about the author” information.
Senator Barack Obama, who announced his candidacy for president, has set up not only a Facebook presence (see One Million Strong for Obama? by Joshua Levy) but also his own online community at My.BarackObama.com (via Blogger’s Blog). What sort of presidential identity is he creating for himself?
