Social Media: One Year from Now

To conclude the semester long blogging assignment, I will write about this article that predicts the changes that will occur with social media in the next year. During 2009, social media took off at speeds that no one had predicted, and next year the social media bandwagon looks to gain even more attention, and next year looks to bring even more people to “connect” with others. The author of the article posts ten predictions that he thinks we will see throughout the year 2010 and I will briefly cover a few of them. First, he predicts that social media will be completely integrated in to everything that we do. No longer will we have Facebook status updates, Twitter followers, or flickr accounts. Instead, everything that we do (that we wish to share with people), will be in one place to share and connect with people. He also predicts that the use of mobile technologies will be the top used form of social media. It is predicted that the number of people using mobile web will rise to nearly 1 billion by the end of 2010. Another prediction on social media for next year is that companies will be more concerned with their ROI with their social media sites. Companies like Facebook have been able to see some profits during 2009, but more companies will become more concerned with doing the same as 2010 comes around. These are only a few of the interesting predictions that the author of this article brings up, take a look at the article and check out some of the other ones. I find these very interesting and would really like to see how some of these play out during the next year. I think it would be really cool to see if some of these predictions actually happen or not.

Pay Attention to the Small Details!

This article i found from webdesignledger.com gives some insight on some small details of your web design that can make a huge difference to the total look and feel of your page. While looking over these I can see why many people would look over these small details, but at the same time can see how something so small can really change the appearance of the page. Using pixel lines, shadows, gradients, and textures are all small details that you can add to your website to make things stand out and make it look more professional and clean cut. The use of a pixel line can help make a navigation bar stand out and give it depth. Shadows also help give objects depth and adds a nice effect. Gradients and textures also help to improve the overall appearance of your site and help to make it look more professional. These are all things that we all can consider as we get in to web page design, both now and in the future. I also liked seeing all of these aspects up close and it helped me realize just how much using all of these small things can help to boost the image of a website.

Great HTML and CSS Guide

This week I happened to stumble upon this website that offers tons of tutorials on not only HTML but on CSS as well. They offer several tiers of tutorials on both topics, ranging from beginner to advanced. I went ahead and looked around the different topics on the site to get a feel for the site and what all it had to offer. Clicking on the beginner HTML link brings you to a site that pretty much explains what we had done on the first day of HTML in class. From creating tables and using headers to creating the body, all of these topics could be found there. This site also does something I found very helpful, and that is they offer a recap at the end of each tutorial section to wrap up everything and offer the user help on putting all of the topics in the section together. It’s one thing to be able to understand how to work each different part in HTML, but its another to be able to put them all together to make something. I also went ahead and took a look around the HTML intermediate and advanced topics and saw things such as meta tags and we had mentioned in class, as well as more table information, and tags that you should stay away from. I also looked at some CSS information and was pleased to see it is somewhat similar to applying HTML, but maybe a little more difficult to apply. I found this particularly interesting because it is something that we can all definitely use while we are learning and using HTML in class and it will give us something to reference as we begin to work on our web sites. Obviously it relates to class because it is exactly what we have been working on this week.

Is Twitter Dying?

While searching around Delicious I came across this article talking about Twitter and it’s recent activity. According to QuantCast, Twitter’s unique visitor count has flat-lined for the past 4 months. Twitter CEO has even taken note of this occurrence, meaning this may be something serious that Twitter is looking at. However, nobody has really been able to pinpoint exactly why this drop in unique visitors has happened. Twitter has been mainstream for quite some time now, with celebrities and companies joining twitter all the time. People should be joining all over the place, but for some reason it has just stopped for nearly 4 months. Some may blame it on being too “geeky” for many, while others just simply enjoy Facebook, feeling that Twitter is just a stripped down version of it, making it pointless to use. Many predict that it is just a rough patch for Twitter and that sooner or later they will fall out of it. Again, an article like this goes along with when we talked about socialmedia and its influences. There are only so many articles I can find on FCP before they start overlapping, so I’m forced to go back and write about socialmedia which is always changing. This is interesting to me because to me it seemed like Twitter was getting huge and I was not expecting to see that their numbers had stalled for the past 4 months.

Fun CSS Tricks!

Although I know we haven’t started talking about CSS in class yet, this article gives us some easy and fun tricks that you can do while using CSS. The article starts out with saying how versatile and fun CSS can be and all of the fun things you can do with it, but reminds us that we need to be careful when using certain things because only a select few of browsers supports some of the things you can do with CSS. In order to protect your design for those websites that may not support some CSS things, it is important that you have what is called a fallback, which is just what it sounds like. It is something for your website to basically fallback on in the event the web browser being used does not support the CSS used on the page. This article shows some pretty cool things you can do, like growing links, blurred edges, elliptical rounding, and multiple backgrounds. They go in to detail and show you how to write the code for the various effects and such. This is interesting to me because it relates to something we will be doing soon in class. Whether or not this will be applicable to what we will be doing in class i’m not sure, but at least i’ll be able to come back to this article and maybe understand it more fully.

Google Adds Music Search

Yet again, Google has made searching for anything easier. This article gives you the insight on Google’s new music searching service. Ok, maybe it’s incorrect to call it a new service because it is built in to the normal Google search, but it is more or less a new feature. If you have long been using YouTube to listen to crappy quality music by your favorite artist, you will love this. So, say you want to listen to the new Jay-Z song that just came out and you just HAVE to listen to it right now. Forget about waiting to illegally download find it on YouTube, all you have to do now is search for the song title in Google and it will give you back results with links to directly listen to it. Partners for the service include iLike, LaLa, Pandora, and Rhapsody. And if that wasn’t good enough, you don’t even need to know the name or artist of the song to find what you are looking for. If you’ve got that song stuck in your head that you just can’t remember who sang, just type in a fragment of the words of the song and it will still give you the correct song.

This relates to class from when we talked about searching the internet and also goes along with SEO. Google music searching is just another thing that makes Google the leading search engine. This is interesting because I have always wanted a way to find a way to find music to listen to online without having to use YouTube.

Some helpful Final Cut Pro tips

While stumbling the other day, I came across this website featuring 202 Final Cut Pro tutorials. Yes, you read that correctly, 202. Now I spent the last week watching every single one of them and now I will debrief you on each one. Just kidding. I did however check out some of them and these tutorials are very easy to watch and understand. The website breaks down the tutorials by website rather than topic, which I feel is an easier way to organize the videos. First, of course, they start with some tutorials and videos straight from Apple. You can choose to watch some videos or even choose to read some guides (who reads anymore though, really??). There is also a slew of YouTube tutorials that people have created to help us who have no idea what we are doing to better use FCP. They also give links to various blogs, forums, and web tutorials on FCP to further help you with getting better at using the program. I feel that any and all of these websites can help all of us to better understand FCP and learn some new techniques and skills not only to use now but in the future. I find it interesting to see just how many people offer their help and expertise, especially with all of the blogs and YouTube videos. It is also to see all the different forums dedicated to FCP. I know I am a part of several forums, and it is cool to see that there is a forum out there for just about anything.

YouTube on the Way to Profitability

According to this article, YouTube announced during their 3rd quarter conference call that they were on there way to profitability in the near future. Sure, anyone can say that they will eventually make some money, but Google execs had some pretty impressive numbers to back it up. Not too long ago, YouTube announced that it serves over 1 billion videos every day. Every day. YouTube also says it is monetizing on over a billion video views every week. That means they are making money on 1 in every 7 video views. YouTube gets a considerable amount of income from advertisements on its page, and it was stated that 90% of it’s homepage ad space had sold out for the quarter in the U.S., with the ad space for the rest of the world not too far behind it. YouTube has also made deals with 4 major record labels, which will also allow them to have yet another source of income. It is hard to believe that with all of this money coming in that they are not profitable, but they assure us it will happen soon.

Again, we have been talking about social media websites throughout the semester so far. As with the previous article, I find it very interesting to see that companies such as YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter are on the verge of becoming profitable by offering a free service. It’s hard for me to believe they can make money like that. Seeing all of the things these companies are doing to turn a profit is very interesting and intriguing.

Twitter Expands into…. The Wine Business?

Yeah, that’s right, Twitter no longer is just a place to tell all your friends about everything you do. Check out this article, grab yourself a bottle of Twitter wine and THEN go post! At first thought, maybe this is Twitter’s way of creating some profit, but why wine? Of all things. Well, have it be known that Twitter is seriously creating its own brand of wine which will be known as Fledgling Wine (yeah, I get the correlation too….), but it will not be a source of profits for them. Instead, Twitter has decided to use all the proceeds from wine sales and donate them to Room to Read, an organization that promotes literacy in children throughout the world. Twitter will offer two types of this wine and it is important to know that for the time being it is a pre-order. The wine will not become available until 2010. At $20 bucks a bottle, not only can you give to a great cause, but also enjoy a great night of Twitter wine and Twitter updates!

It is kind of a stretch, but we have spent a lot of time in class about social networking, and Twitter in general for that matter. We have talked about how it is hard for companies such as Facebook and Twitter to become profitable and how they may go about doing that. While this is a philanthropic move for Twitter, this may help them in the future to become profitable. It is very interesting to see what social networking sites are doing to expand and differentiate themselves from one another. I feel that Twitter doing this, which is COMPLETELY random, is really going to help differentiate themselves from their competitors and maybe one day become profitable.

Mendeley Academic Research Software

While searching around on Delicious, I came across this website, Mendeley Academic Reseach Software. This is a free program, for both Windows and Mac, that you can use to organize, share, and discover research papers. They describe it as an iTunes for research papers, an easy way to find and organize relevant information that you are searching for. Mendeley allows you to research topics that you are interested in and you are able to contact reputable authors, as well as view the most popular papers in certain topics, as well as the best authors. This makes it easy to find quality and reputable papers that you can use for research. Mendeley also allows you to share your work with others so that they can use your information. You can create groups to easier collaborate with teams and other researchers in your field. It also allows you to organize your research papers so that you can easily go back to them and find them. Just like organizing your iTunes library, you can customize it to file your research papers how you like.

Mendeley seems like it would be a nice program to use when trying to organize information for research. I am always interested in finding new programs and ways to make doing school work and researching more productive and efficient, and I think using this program can achieve both of those. In class we have been talking about the research process and finding reputable, quality information. This tool will allow you to do both of those things.