Archive for the 'Internet' Category
Yesterday morning in my Flickr stream of photos from contacts this new service appeared that allows you to create online mixtapes.
It is called Muxtape and it’s simply designed and works great!
A new way to share, discover, and listen to hand-picked music online. Starting right now you can create a muxtape and upload up to twelve songs curated by you (instead of a cold computer algorithm), then share it in a simple, elegant player.
The internet has changed my life and without it I would not be where I am today. I have had several proffesional artists and designers tell me that they wished they had the internet when they were young and where happy to see how I was using it. The internet does more than just allow me to communicate with friends.
1. Connect and communicate with professional artists and designers around the world.
2. Write a blog and share my stories, ideas, and thoughts with the world.
3. Follow what other creative people are producing and get inspiration from them.
4. Have conversations on various topics through other people’s blogs and writing.
5. Educate myself on current events and allow me to do research on my interests.
When you are able to do these things online, they are very valuable. I consider them a neccesity to my lifestyle and work and am glad for what it offers.
It seems like there is a certain type of website that portrays “quality”. The way it is design and the content is what leads to this portrayal of quality. It is what makes it rational for me to spend time visiting the site and absorbing what it says. These sites are placed alongside NPR and The New York Times in the quality scale. These two sites are high up on the quality scale.
Subtraction by Khoi Vinh
This site is great and features design related writing along with some great stories, thoughts, and observations about life.
The Morning News
With a diverse group of writers this site features some great essays mixed in with headlines and digests.
In my opinion we are seeing to much sharing and republishing of links and images on the web. Sites like these offer a nice substitute and provide some personal writing. The only problem I can see is that people don’t have time to read the sometime lengthy articles, but if its well written and you have an interest in what is being said, you can make time. Thanks to these two sites for what they have provided to myself and countless other readers.
I subscribe to plenty design and creative blogs, some of the best I would say. And everyday, I truly enjoy going through all of them and finding some great work and articles. I have even been featured on some of them. The problem however is that all I do is look at the post and the work and then if it’s good enough I will save it for later. The internet allows us to do so much more than look at design and creative work, we might as well take advantage of it.
I would like to see a new type of design and creative blog. One that engages it’s audience more. For the most part, the audience of these blogs work in the creative field themselves, thus making them easily engage-able. So for starters, most of these blogs will have the title of the post, an image or two, and then a link back to the portfolio of the creative individual who made it.
Continue to do that, but now add some more value to it. In the post, put in some of your own commentary. Why do you like what you are posting and even why you do not like it. Feel free to critique it a little. Then ask your audience what they think. If you ask them specific questions then it can make it even easier for them because they will be responding to something. This is not a new concept, rather it just takes advantage of the comments by having the readers comment more and answer specific questions.
Some bloggers might not have the time to do this. Or might feel that their role in the community is to share. And I won’t stop reading those blogs. But I think that if some of the design and creative blogs out their implement this concept and method, they will be able to provide so much more to their readers.
(There have to be even more ways to engage your readers, what do you think some other methods might be?)
Yesterday, I got an email from SXSW saying that the time for voting on panels is coming to a close. I did not realize that this was coming up so fast, and thought I would make an attempt to get some last minute votes. At the bottom of the post you can read more about my three panel submissions. But for now, these are the titles of my proposed panels.
These three panel ideas I am very excited about and would love to be able to get together a group of people and share our thoughts and have a conversation with the SXSW community. I have never attended SXSW before, instead for the past two years I have followed the conference through blog posts of those who went. If my panel submissions were to be accepted, I would get a complimentary pass to the conference, thus decreasing the high cost for someone without a steady income to attend. (by the way, I am 17 year old designer, blogger, and entrepreneur)
So if you think I have some good ideas, pleas go and vote. Thanks.
There has been much talk lately of the issues and problems with this conference, and I thought now might be a good time to share my thoughts and ideas on this with you.
From what I have heard, the major problem is the quality of the panels. I think that people need to talk about there panels ahead of time, its not the hard with a few emails. I also think that when voting for a panel online, your vote should count more if you are planning on attending or have attended in the past. If my panel was chosen I would make sure that we had a simple presentation that was designed well, a handout for people to leave with, a way for everyone to continue the conversation after the conference online, and I would make sure that the audience got a good amount of questions and comments in. Now I have never been to SXSW before, so I don’t know if people have already done these things.
Moving on, here are the descriptions of the panels that I would like to share with you. Simply click on the link to go vote and leave comments.
A New Kind of Social Media Consulting
A group/network of thinkers, designers, business people, and developers coming together and offering consulting services, thus drawing on everybody’s expertise and offering consulting to brands and companies to get them taking advantage of the new internet, online communities, etc. Could be compared to an artists residency program.
The Internet Creating Real World Interactions
No longer is it just about interacting with people online. Rather, it is about taking that experience offline and into the real world. Such examples include Meetup, Un-conferences, Co-working, Streetmining, Photowalking, 1000 Journals, and more. Learn how this could work for you and your business and why it is important.
The Future of Learning
Not about why we have to bring blogs, wikis and the internet into the classroom. Rather about how teachers and students can use them to collaborate, connect, and be educated. Take a look at re-structuring the classroom, sustainable education, the design of educational space and more.
I have received several responses on these ideas, one from Twitter, one on this blog, and one on the panel picker website.
“The second one particularly interests me. I’m impressed by your ideas.”
-Carolyn Foote
“Appreciate your 2nd SXSW 08 panel submission. Lots of potential there!”
-Christian Long
“Wow, sounds interesting! If you’re interested in a panel member, let me know!”
-Jake McKee
Thanks for reading and for your support. Feel free to leave comments and get in touch with me. Thanks again.
I submitted three panel ideas for the 2008 SXSW Interactive Conference. For the past two years I have followed the conference through the blogs of those who attended. I would like to attend this year and if one of my panels are chosen I would get a free pass, thus lessening the financial burden for me to attend. Please go vote on them and leave your comments below. Let’s take a look at them.
A New Kind of Social Media Consulting
A group/network of thinkers, designers, business people, and developers coming together and offering consulting services, thus drawing on everybody’s expertise and offering consulting to brands and companies to get them taking advantage of the new internet, online communities, etc. Could be compared to an artists residency program.
The Internet Creating Real World Interactions
No longer is it just about interacting with people online but take that experience offline and into the real world. Such examples include Meetup, Un-conferences, Co-working, Streetmining, Photowalking, 1000 Journals, and more. Learn how this could work for you and your business and why it is important.
The Future of Learning
Not about why we have to bring blogs, wikis and the internet into the classroom. Rather about how teachers and students can use them to collaborate, connect, and be educated. Take a look at re-structuring the classroom, sustainable education, the design of educational space and more.
Earlier this week Christian Long tagged me, which reminded me that Arthus had tagged me some time ago, and then yesterday Diane tagged me. Let’s see what I come up with for this meme…
THE RULES
1. Post these rules before you give your facts.
2. List 8 random facts about yourself.
3. At the end of your post, choose (tag) 8 people and list their names, linking to them.
4. Leave a comment on their blog, letting them know they’ve been tagged.
Grew Up On Apple Juice
Basically, I love apple juice. Drink it all the time. We buy tons of it when we go shopping.
I Run An Online Video Site
Never told you this cause I can’t really share it with you. You know, school doesn’t want the entire world seeing video of its students for safety reasons. Anyways, it is an independent study project that I started and we had some
trouble getting it off the ground last year, but it should rock this year.
I Love Blueberry Pancakes
Yep, they are the best. We pick the blueberries and then freeze them so we can use them throughout the whole year. It is what I always request for breakfast on my birthday. Pretty much my favorite food along with Doritos.
Don’t Play the Guitar
One Christmas I asked for a guitar and got an awesome acoustic electric and a box that I could hook up to the computer to record with Garageband. Never really learned how to play it. Going to be no time this year. Someday I will though.
Pastry Sugar and Chocolate Sculptures
I used to want to be a pastry chef just to make this things. They are pretty sweet. (no pun intended) Like this and this.
Ductape Wallet
I made a black ductape wallet like two years ago and still use it to this day. Not really sure why, could buy a nice one if I wanted to or go and find old leather one, but why bother.
Technical Theater
For the past three years I have been doing lighting design and sound for the school two major theatrical productions and all other events that require lights and sound. Basically I drive this hydraulic life around and go very high into the grid of bar that is mounted on the ceiling and move, position, and focus the lights specifically for a certain show. Then go and program the lights on the light board based on where the actors and actresses are doing their thing. This past year I worked with a friend who is going to college for it, which should be pretty awesome.
No Coffee
I don’t drink coffee or tea. I don’t know why. I just wake up in the morning. No spending 5 bucks a day on that stuff for me.
The People I Will Tag Are…
DK of Mediasnackers
Nancy Bosch
Colette Cassinelli
Carolyn Foote
This is my submission to a contest started by Dan Meyer to see how people sell themselves in picture and text only slides. It could be for a college application, a job interview, or whatever. More information on Dan’s blog here.
At my school we have a simple Lit Mag (Literature Magazine) that is published at the end of the year. It is around 60 pages and the size is about 5″x8″. This past year there was some trouble getting people to submit work. This is a little bit weird because every student writes tons of pieces for their english classes. I thought I would take a go at rethinking the Lit Mag and share with you what I came up.
This has been inspired by Christian Long’s call for ideas as he returns to the classroom as an English teacher that has been put in charge of the Lit Mag. Along with a friend of mine who will be taking over the Lit Mag next year.
I believe that it is still important to publish the traditional Lit Mag as a paper booklet at the end of the year. Why? Because reading something on paper is awesome and has a certain feeling about it. Plus, when a student sees there work printed instead of on the screen it is completely different.
A monthly Lit Mag that could be published online would make sense. Here people from anywhere in the world could leave comments and suggestions, never mind fellow classmates and the school’s english teachers. I think that students would love to receive comments on their work from people they don’t know, this would mix it up for them. This monthly Lit Mag could also be made available as a 8.5 x 11 PDF file that people could download and print off.
To add even more value to the whole concept of putting a Lit Mag online, why not create and develop a network of Lit Mags that are published online. This would be much like a blogging network that has blogs that focus on specific topics. This would result in bringing people who care about literature together and would give people that aren’t so much into literature a great starting point.
It is vital to get students involved and participating. They need to care about it. The students who like to write will most likely participate, but what about the people that don’t like to write. Just because they don’t like to write doesn’t mean that their writing is bad and unworthy of being in the Lit Mag. It would be a good idea to build participation of the Lit Mag into the curriculum by requiring that students submit work to it. They are writing pieces for English class anyways, right?
In order to get students, teachers, parents, and the world interested in the Lit Mag it is important to provide more than just prose or poetry pieces. I propose adding a “culture” aspect to the Lit Mag and here’s how. Collect writing pieces from History, Art, and other classes. Have teachers that don’t teach English submit writing pieces about anything they want. This way if a student really loves science and their science teacher puts something in the Lit Mag, they could get interested in English and Literature as well. It is also important to have students explore topics outside of school such as the art, business, political, and entertainment worlds. (the list could go on an on)
Also, invite and encourage people to comment and offer their own thoughts on pieces that are in the Lit Mag. Have an Opinion section where students can express themselves on certain issues. Then ask a question at the end and have people respond online by leaving comments.
That’s all I have for now. If I think of anything else I will update it here. Anything else that you can think of?
While we are on the topic of writing I thought I would bring up a create site that has created a participatory community of writers called Urbis. Solution Watch gave a great review " onclick="javascript:urchinTracker('/outbound/www.solutionwatch.com/535/urbis-judging-the-books-without-covers/_br_/');">here.
Since, I do do so much writing for school, I have been thinking of putting up a bunch of stuff online either here or on my personal site. What do you think?
Around a week ago I did a podcast interview with DK of Mediasnackers. This is what they do.
“MediaSnackers delivers training in new media/technology for young people, youth professionals and corporates. We also do consultancy and speaking…”
Now let me start off by saying that this was a great experience. DK is a really nice guy to talk to. We talked for about ten minutes before and after we actually did the recording of the podcast. So, here I was sitting in the United States and there is DK sitting in UK. He was able to see my desk where I was sitting on Flickr and I was able to ask him about his business planning meeting that I knew about through his Twitter. Amazing how we knew about each other through the online world.
What we talked about was sustainable education and the re-structuring of the class. You can listen to the podcast here. And below is a screenshot from his site that outline our conversation. Enjoy and much thanks to DK and Mediasnackers.
The CNN Youtube Democratic debates recently occurred and I thought I would provide some personal insight into it all…
It was an interesting format and I am glad that people were able to send in questions. But I do not think it really worked. Sure there were some funny videos that raised good questions but….the videos were too small, we got the same answers that we always get from the candidates, the candidates videos were just commercials, and it should’ve been held online.
Perhaps something along the lines of TED or Stock Exchange of Visions would be a good idea.
I would love to see these candidates say something remarkable or share with us an original idea that excites us. I would love to see a website where all of the views, background information, issues, news, videos, photos and what not are collected about each of the candidates. Then once everybody can easily access all of the information in the same standardized way, allow the people to vote on the issues. Allow people to respond and have conversations. Allow people to make suggestions and voice there support.
And did I mention that I would like to hear something new from the candidates?
Jeff Jarvis talks about the debate here.
I just finished working on my new website.
There is a screenshot below. It’s made using Indexhibit.
You can visit it at www.ethanbodnar.com
Ryans Sims and Brad Smith of Virb came up with this sweet idea.
Perhaps this is the original iTrapped, not in the iPhone but instead in a shipping box. (still by the same people though)
Back in the day when I first got word that the great folks behind Purevolume were coming out with a social network I got excited. Well, Virb finally came out and I never really got involved that much in it. I use it to discover some great musicians and band, but other than that, I don’t use it that much. Facebook is where all of my friends are at, even the bloggers who appear in my feed reader every day are on Facebook now. But, I recently went back and logged into my account at Virb and started fooling around. This is what I found and what I would like to see in the future.
The way I see it Virb is a different kind of social network. It is one for people who like to make things look good and use things that look good. For the artists who like a good looking social network. I saw somewhere someone call it the “designers version of Myspace. Just because all of my friends aren’t on Virb doesn’t mean that there is no value for me. I can use it to connect with artists, musicians, bloggers, and more.
So far, Virb has gotten some things right. They allow you to integrate Flickr, added widescreen video, made easy to track what music you are listening to with VirbTunes, and more. Furthermore, the way the allow you to customize your profile is very well done along with the ability to turn customization off. Some people have done a really nice job customizing their profiles.
But I do have some suggestion for it and from what I have heard the Virb team is busy working on improving Virb as we talk. Here is what I would like to see at Virb in the coming months.
-More integration from other web applications and communities like they did with Flickr.
-It takes too many clicks to view your friends profile.
-Some beautiful custom CSS themes for those non programmers among us.
-That Google advertisement at the bottom is huge. I am guessing they just put that there temporarily until they figured out their advertising strategy, at least I hope so. I think that they have a huge opportunity to develop there own non-intrusive advertising platform. They could allow ads to be targeted based on profile information.
-The Virb Blog is a little lacking. I think they could blog a lot more. But maybe that’s just me.
-They still have yet to add the “Virb is…” section. When they do this it could be huge. Allowing the users to find content and other people through this could be great.
-Since a lot of people on Virb are of the creative type, I think they could add a feature for Projects where people could highlight what they are working on in the profile and in the “Virb is…”section. This way others could offer feedback and people could share their projects.
That is all I have to say. I see an awesome future for Virb!
Check out my Virb profile here. (still being worked on)
Check out the blog by the company who makes Virb called The Big Noob.
Check out what other people are saying at Joshua Blankenship’s blog where he asks for feedback on Virb.
I sent in the answers to the survey that Shel sent me. It was great to be able to think about social media and the future of it. Hopefully I will post the full survey here in a little bit, but for now go check it out on Shel’s blog Global Neighborhoods.
There has been a lot of talk about Twitter versus Pownce. So I thought I would present my take on the whole thing. I am not going to give you a review of each and tell you which one is better. Instead, I thought I would use this opportunity to have a conversation about where this is all going and what it means for the future of social media, blogging, and online communications.
I think we are going to see a lot more people starting to streaming their lives. This is made up of two concepts.
Online Activity:
Allow people to create a stream of all of their online activities by using the RSS feeds from web applications.
Offline Activity:
Have people post updates on what is going on in their lifes. This can mostly be compared to Pownce and Twitter.
We need a solution that would accommodate this concept, allow us to have a network of friends, and create/view content in multiple ways. I think that Twitter should re-design their site, keep their simplicity, and add the concept of an online activity stream.
I think that we are going to see people move away from blogging toward a model like this. No, I don’t think blogs will start disappearing, the people that have a good audience and those who write longer posts will be sure to continue. But the average blogger will start streaming their life and writing short posts. They will focus more on the conversation. They will share ideas in small form factors. They will create concrete networks of people around them based on what everybody is doing online and off.
(I am aware that there is already services out there that do some of this stuff. But it hasn’t been perfected and there are problems with them)
For now here is my story of how I came to be on Twitter and Pownce…
About a month ago I decided it was about time to sign up for Twitter, the ever so popular service that allow people to share updates of their life with people. In the past week I really started getting into it and found many people whose blogs I read, who I have collaborated with, or met at conferences already on Twitter.
Then along came Pownce. I got an invite and tried the service out. The main difference between Twitter is that Pownce adds file/event sharing and is a better design. Though design is not the main thing people care about in this case, for a service like this it is all about functionality.
So, I have set up accounts at both places but for the most part I will only update Twitter. I have already found a good amount of people who I want to follow on Twitter and don’t feel like finding them again. If I want to share files with my friends I will just use a file sharing web application. Twitter is simple and doesn’t make it complicated. Twitter has an API and from that has come some wonderful apps that were made by the community. And lastly, Twitter has mobile updates which seals the deal. Twitter is for me.
Check out coverage from some other people…
Brian Benzinger at Solution Watch gives his impressions of Pownce.
Nik Cubrilovic writes about the importance of Twitter’s API.
Glenn Wolsey gives a good overview of what Pownce is all about.
Check me out and add me on Twitter and Pownce.
I have several invites left for Pownce. Leave me an email if you would like them.
The Future of Online Advertising was a great experience. It was great to be able to meet so many people doing such great things. The connections I have made are priceless and I thank everyone for the conversations that we had.
As for the speakers, some were good and some were not so good. I found that two different groups of people attended the conference. You had the media buyers and advertisers who learned many new and exciting things about the internet and advertising on it. And then you had the bloggers and creatives who knew some of the stuff that was being said already.
Overall, the conference was great and I was glad to be able to go. Thanks to Carson Systems for everything, the speakers, and all the people I met.
This is the first conference that Carsons systems have advertised for. Some of it was done through bartering and deals with blogs and publishers. The main thing that Ryan said was to measure your goals and campaigns because it is worth it. People started making comments on what they had done to advertise the conference and Ryan said that he didn’t want to make this feel like the audience had to help him. They had placed an ad in a magazine which had three things wrong with it. The colors were not well matched at all, there was no call to action, and the word “conference” was not in the ad at all.
(This presentation was done because a speaker was unable to make it)
Elctric Sheep was at the conference and gave a presentation that dealt the most with the “future” of online advertisng. They are placing advertisments in virtual worlds such as the popular Second Life. The interesting aspect of this, is that you do not have to pay to pay Second Life to advertise in their virtual world. Various types of advertisments include outdoor video displays, product placement, sponsored locations, hosting events, and your average billboard (all of which are in the virtual world). I feel that there are endless opportunities here and look forward to see how it all turns out and develops.
