Blogs in Plain English

A video for people who wonder why blogs are such a big deal.

Social Networking in Plain English

Slideroll

Create a Free Slideshow

Slideroll.com is a website where you can create slide shows and post them on a blog.

It's free and they even have music you can add (although it's pretty bad). 

For a fee you can upload your own music to the show. I chose to leave this one silent.

If you have a Flickr account you can also create slideshows from one of your image sets.

Here's an example of a Flickr slide show.

The images in this portfolio represent my digital mixed media worked from 2003 - 2008
All images Copyright © David Pohl | HOP | House of Pingting Archives

Social Media in Plain English

Copyright Laws

Here is a very detailed and informative piece explaining copyrights:
Copyright Explained: I May Copy It, Right? from Smashing Magazine.

From the legal point of view, Copyright in Web is often considered as the grey area; as such it’s often misunderstood and violated - mostly simply because bloggers don’t know, what laws they have to abide and what issues they have to consider. In fact, copyright myths are common, as well as numerous copyright debates in the Web.

Excerpt from Smashing Magazine

How To Remove Navbar In Blogger Blogs

How To Remove Navbar In Blogger Blogs

1. Open your Blogger dashboard.
2. Go to your blog’s Layout settings > Edit HTML
3. Look for:
/* Variable definitions
====================
4. And above that add:
#navbar-iframe { display: none !important; }
5. Save your settings and open your blog now. The navigation bar will be gone.

Source: SizzledCore

The Brand Called You

Starting today you are a brand.

You're every bit as much a brand as Nike, Coke, Pepsi, or the Body Shop. To start thinking like your own favorite brand manager, ask yourself the same question the brand managers at Nike, Coke, Pepsi, or the Body Shop ask themselves: What is it that my product or service does that makes it different? Give yourself the traditional 15-words-or-less contest challenge. Take the time to write down your answer. And then take the time to read it. Several times.

from FastCompany
The Brand Called You
By Tom Peters

Twitter + Microblogging

Educators Test the Limits of Twitter Microblogging Tool

How Twitter Can Help At Work

By Sarah Milstein
in The New York Times
September 7, 2008
9: 01 PM

Brave New World of Digital Intimacy
By Clive Thompson
Published in The New York Times

September 5, 2006

This is the paradox of ambient awareness. Each little update — each individual bit of social information — is insignificant on its own, even supremely mundane. But taken together, over time, the little snippets coalesce into a surprisingly sophisticated portrait of your friends’ and family members’ lives, like thousands of dots making a pointillist painting. This was never before possible, because in the real world, no friend would bother to call you up and detail the sandwiches she was eating. The ambient information becomes like “a type of E.S.P.,” as Haley described it to me, an invisible dimension floating over everyday life.

It is easy to become unsettled by privacy-eroding aspects of awareness tools. But there is another — quite different — result of all this incessant updating: a culture of people who know much more about themselves. Many of the avid Twitterers, Flickrers and Facebook users I interviewed described an unexpected side-effect of constant self-disclosure. The act of stopping several times a day to observe what you’re feeling or thinking can become, after weeks and weeks, a sort of philosophical act. It’s like the Greek dictum to “know thyself,” or the therapeutic concept of mindfulness. (Indeed, the question that floats eternally at the top of Twitter’s Web site — “What are you doing?” — can come to seem existentially freighted. What are you doing?) Having an audience can make the self-reflection even more acute, since, as my interviewees noted, they’re trying to describe their activities in a way that is not only accurate but also interesting to others: the status update as a literary form.

Renaissance Generation

Two things are going on simultaneously, and they live in creative tension. One is that we are ending one civilization and we are creating a new one. Witness what is happening on Wall Street. The second is the outpouring of creativity facilitated by the Internet. There is a generation that will lead us into what will literally be a second renaissance... more

Patricia Martin
Author of RenGen: The Rise of the Cultural Consumer and What It Means to Your Business