DigiChat

Discussion leader: Reflection

Cheryl — Fri, 23 Mar 2012 01:58:56 +0000

My presentation was called ‘Digital Politics’ and I focused on several trends that I’d researched that pertained to that topic. I think it would have been easier to present one time to the whole class versus presenting the same presentation four times, but it was interesting to see the difference in the dynamic depending on the audience. The first group was very talkative and we didn’t finish the slides, so I thought “uh oh, too much content”. The second time around I spent less time on details, but the group had less interaction, so we finished early. It was a challenge to get the timing right!

One thing I did like about the small group interaction was the opportunity to learn more about each other’s viewpoints. Probably the most lively discussions centered around the Votizen web site. Votizen is like Linked In for voters and really noone had heard of it … and almost everyone was intrigued by the notion of online voter interaction. The other thing that students found interesting was the amount of money spent for online political campaigning and the trends over time.

It was gratifying to hear the other students talking about some of the points from my presentation later on in the class, but I probably got even more out of engaging in the dialogue. Sometimes we learn the most ourselves by teaching others.

Blog Project: The Liveaboard Community

Cheryl — Sun, 11 Mar 2012 01:16:57 +0000

My final project is complete! It’s the beginning of an online community for liveaboards: people who are, or want to, live on boats, sailing yachts.It’s called the Liveaboard Community.

I hope you enjoy it!

Open Information meets “The Generalist”

Cheryl — Sun, 04 Mar 2012 22:02:47 +0000

I’m a closet generalist. For years, I thought there was something wrong with me because I find almost everything interesting in one way or another. Now, sure, that means I’m an enthusiastic learner, but it also means — as I’ve joked many times — that I can tell you something about almost anything; it just may not be very much. You see, generalists don’t generally like to go deep.

But, a few months ago, I was at a dinner with a number of other marketing professionals, and it turned into a hilarious debate about which of us were the most general of the generalists. I had clearly found my home.

Now, this blog post isn’t really about being a generalist. It’s about the concept of providing open, and sometimes free, access to a wide range of information (content) to allow for knowledge sharing on a massive scale. I was just reminded of my generalist tendencies because I get so excited, and so sidetracked, by all the information that can be found online. I’m so Alice-down-the-rabbit-hole sometimes, that I can’t even follow my trail back to the surface.

Thus, I found myself on the MIT OpenCourseWare (OCW) site, watching videos on computer science, photography and product development. The good news is that I’m not alone. This is what Bill Gates had to say about MIT OCW in 2010:

Another great site for courseware is http://sofia.fhda.edu/, hosted by DeAnza college. They don’t have the breadth of courses available, but what they have are comprehensive. In fact, many universities offer free materials online: Yale, UC Berkeley, Utah State, and UW, to name a few. In addition, there are open universities like OpenLearn, which only exist online and have no physical presence.

Open universities are just one distribution mechanism for ‘content’, however. There are many, many others. For example, YouTube, Wikipedia, WebMD and, I’d also put eBooks in this category; where access to knowledge is open and is offered at little or no cost.

Charlotte Hess & Elinor Ostrom in Introduction: An Overview of the Knowledge Commons (2006) describe this phenomena as “knowledge as a shared resource.” They provide some insight into design principles that help to ensure a robust information-sharing community; things like: conflict resolution methods, self-monitoring of behavior, defined boundaries and rules (which can be modified by members). The criticisms of knowledge sharing would point to the absence of incentives for sharing, the prevalence of free riders (ala game theory) and the potential absence of quality control and editing.

Of the concerns listed, I’m most concerned about quality and editing. It’s one thing to provide open access to knowledge — a beautiful thing, in my opinion — but, yet another to distribute shoddy and inaccurate work. One option would be to establish an independent, collective governance board to review and ‘certify’ content that means a minimum threshold of quality. Essentially, the equivalent of a seal of approval.

Because, at the end of the day, even we generalists like to know that what little we do want to know about a topic, is reasonably accurate.

E-T-H-I-C-A-L Blogging

Cheryl — Thu, 01 Mar 2012 04:33:50 +0000

It may be my marketing background at work here, but I just think that guidelines, in general — and especially those that describe ethics — are begging for a mnemonic device.

So, here we go!…

E is for Editorial integrity. Please disclose outside influences and, especially, those that may be paying…er…supporting your opinions.

T is for Truth. Tell the truth. Period. To the best of your ability. Truth-telling, in my book, also includes disclosure of your identity.

H is about being Harmless. No animals, children or people who happen to be of a different race, creed, color, or political party (unless they are Republicans) should be harmed in your blog.

I is for Impartialiaty and Independence. Be fair and open-minded (I was kidding about the Republicans!)…but, if you can’t, then at least disclose biases to your readers.

C is for Civility. See ‘T’ above. If you wouldn’t say it in person…to someone’s face… then don’t say it in a forum, blog or comment. Otherwise, well, ‘C’ is for Cowardice.

A is for Accountability. You are, at the end of the day, accountable for what you do…and SAY… in life. It’s a big responsibility. I get that. You should, too.

L is for Legality. Don’t plagiarize. Don’t steal. Don’t run red lights.

Discussion leader presentation: Digital Politics

Cheryl — Sun, 26 Feb 2012 02:30:37 +0000

I am scheduled to be a discussion leader for Week 9 and my topic is Digital Politics with a view to highlighting several trends in political fundraising, campaigning, activism and humor. This is the presentation I will walk through next week.

Digital politicshttp://static.slidesharecdn.com/swf/ssplayer2.swf?doc=digitalpolitics-120225202425-phpapp02&stripped_title=digital-politics&userName=ckelly12

View more presentations from ckelly12.

Testing Inline CSS Styling

Cheryl — Thu, 23 Feb 2012 05:01:53 +0000

This is a test of inline CSS formatting. It may or may not work with your theme.

CC Photo by 'J'

Sample Serif H3 Title

Sample Sans-Serif H3 Title

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A sans-serif paragraph set as bold type. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Vivamus tempor semper erat, ut bibendum nisl viverra id. Donec eu lobortis lacus. Quisque vitae condimentum nulla. Nullam suscipit facilisis euismod. Fusce risus lacus, semper eget vestibulum ac, vestibulum nec lorem. Curabitur eleifend sollicitudin arcu dictum cursus. In ut erat consequat purus viverra consequat vitae ut ante. Quisque euismod diam a lorem cursus non aliquam nisi consectetur. Maecenas facilisis felis ut velit elementum quis cursus lacus commodo. Maecenas non suscipit sapien. Duis sed turpis libero, in fringilla libero. Aliquam pellentesque faucibus libero, sit amet aliquam nibh eleifend a. Etiam interdum convallis accumsan. Vestibulum ante lacus, facilisis et rhoncus vel, pulvinar in eros. Integer in blandit purus. Aenean quis massa nunc.

A serif paragraph set as normal type. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Vivamus tempor semper erat, ut bibendum nisl viverra id. Donec eu lobortis lacus. Quisque vitae condimentum nulla. Nullam suscipit facilisis euismod. Fusce risus lacus, semper eget vestibulum ac, vestibulum nec lorem. Curabitur eleifend sollicitudin arcu dictum cursus. In ut erat consequat purus viverra consequat vitae ut ante. Quisque euismod diam a lorem cursus non aliquam nisi consectetur. Maecenas facilisis felis ut velit elementum quis cursus lacus commodo. Maecenas non suscipit sapien. Duis sed turpis libero, in fringilla libero. Aliquam pellentesque faucibus libero, sit amet aliquam nibh eleifend a. Etiam interdum convallis accumsan. Vestibulum ante lacus, facilisis et rhoncus vel, pulvinar in eros. Integer in blandit purus. Aenean quis massa nunc.

Digital Photography Revolution

Cheryl — Mon, 20 Feb 2012 16:14:17 +0000

This week’s reading choices center on the digital photography revolution and the social networking site: Flickr.

Image via CrunchBase

It was a very timely selection of materials to read considering I was just cleaning out my home office closet and found several rolls of film that needed to be developed. I’m not sure how old some of them are, but I do know that it may be difficult to find someone who still develops Kodachrome. According to CNET, Kodachrome is dead. Paul Simon must’ve seen that coming when he wrote the song, Kodachrome, back in the 70′s.

“Kodachrome, You give us those nice bright colors, You give us the greens of summers, Makes you think all the world’s a sunny day, oh yeah!, I got a Nikon camera, I love to take a photograph, So Mama, don’t take my Kodachrome away!”

Kodachrome lyrics © Universal Music Publishing Group

Image via Wikipedia

Well, Paul, it wasn’t Mama who took Kodachrome away, but it was the forces of the market. And, unfortunately for Kodak — the Mama of all film companies –they just didn’t see it coming (or, at least, they didn’t see it coming so fast). Digital photography was a ’disruptive technology’ (Christensen 1997) and Kodak lacked the nimbleness, what Christensen calls ”dynamic capabilities”, and the ability to manage the change necessary to manage to the new paradigm. Granted, Kodak did several things that should have made a difference; they invested in R&D, set up a separate division focused on digital technology and even swapped out CEOs. In the end, I think you need to either motivate employees with the vision/purpose and some new incentives, or set up a completely separate subsidiary to drive innovation in such deeply established companies.

The boom in digital photography has done more than just render some companies obsolete, however. It has provided less expensive photo production to millions of amateur photographers, allowed for greater and more expedient photo-sharing and created the phenomena of photography as social narrative. (Murray 2008) You could argue that social networking sites like Fotoblog and Flickr were, therefore, quite inevitable. After all, people have always tended to want to publish (photo albums) and share (slide shows) their photos. With the web, they can take that tendency to much greater scale.

In the case of Flickr, people sometimes share more than just the meaningful, crossing over into the more mundane. I found many pictures of things like laundry, contents of women’s hand bags (oddly fascinating), food, signs and other urban objects. There is some criticism, also, that Flickr isn’t really all that collaborative as most photos are not looked at very much by other users and the amount of comments (interactivity) is somewhat low. In addition, the community tends to provide non-critical and non-technical feedback which, therefore, doesn’t contribute much in terms of raising the bar on good photography. (Cox 2008)

All in all, I see the ubiquitous nature of digital photography and photo-sharing sites like Flickr as an enormous boon to human interaction and to social networking. By sharing what we choose to see and capture in our world, with frequency and ease, we are able to speak a language than extends beyond mere words.

Week 7: Open-Ended Questions

Cheryl — Sun, 19 Feb 2012 23:45:48 +0000

How much should you charge to wash all the windows in Seattle? A man pushed his car into a hotel and lost his fortune. What happened? Why are manhole covers round?

And…

Who on Earth asks these kind of questions?

Typography Assignment

Cheryl — Sun, 19 Feb 2012 21:58:17 +0000

My WordPress blog theme uses a clean looking font. I have absolutely no idea what it is, though. So, after looking all over WordPress, I tried using Identifont to identify it. First you choose whether it is ‘serif’ or ‘sans serif’ (the serif is the little tail on the letters), then, I had to identify the line in the ’Q’ which, in this case, crosses the circle. Next you type a ’4′ to see if it is ‘open’ or ‘closed’, a ‘$’ (single line crossing the ‘S’) and a ‘G’ to check the spur/tail, an ‘M’ to choose where the ‘V’ lands on the baseline and whether or not the lines are parallel, etc, etc. (This went on for quite awhile, but I really learned a lot about font design ’options’ in the process.) Okay, drum roll, the font is….

Aktiv Grotesk!

Hmmm…that doesn’t sound right. I’m guessing it’s Arial or Sans Serif and that there’s an easier way to figure this out in WordPress.

Meanwhile, I’m going to move on to commenting about the lecture at Kane Hall. Truthfully, I really didn’t think about fonts or typefaces a whole lot before attending the lecture. Sure, I have some font preferences and I try to be consistent within a specific document, but I’m afraid I hadn’t been terribly observant about the differences in styles. My major takeaways from the lecture were threefold, 1) fonts are actually an art form and, 2) changing font formats can dramatically alter the layout of the document and, 3) there are people out there who actually make money designing fonts! In particular, Jean-Francois Porchez (the lecturer) designed fonts for a Spanish magazine, for Louis Vuitton and for Yves Saint Laurent.

Now, I think it would be fun to design a font for myself or, at least, to personalize my font choices a bit more.

Interestingly, the difference between typeface and font has blurred a bit with the advent of desktop publishing. Prior to that, a typeface was a set of designed characters (cast in metal and used in printing process – like the keys in a typewriter) and each typeface was a particular size. Now, people refer to those as fonts or font sets and use the terms interchangeably.

These are a web sites I visited to look for my new Cheryl-font: Google fonts (free web fonts and there is a WordPress plug-in), Typofonderie (has nice fonts, but a bit expensive at 800+ euros) and Fonts.com (web fonts that are more reasonably priced).

Sail and Linotype Abstract are fun fonts for a blog title, but Open Sans looks more readable and professional:

Feb 24th Assignment: Project Timeline/Progress

Cheryl — Tue, 14 Feb 2012 02:48:02 +0000

Domain www.liveaboard.community.com is live! And, this is my 5-week plan for the project:

Week 1 (this week, 2/20):

Set up and linked domain name (http:www.liveaboardcommunity.com) to WordPress blog
Almost settled on the design – so far, using only my own photography
Completed blogroll links to other ‘liveaboard sites’ and a couple of interesting sailing web sites
Drafted ‘About’ section and first blog post, but both need more work
Posted first YouTube video
Not yet officially ‘open’ as I’d like to get more content posted first – and, work on the design some more

Week 2 (week of 2/20)

Finish design, ’about’ page and 2 blog posts
Find someone to interview for the ‘liveaboard’ section

Week 4 (week of 2/27)

Interview write up and blog post
If it’s ‘ready’, begin to promote via web ring, twitter and FB accounts – social media integration

Week 5 (week of 3/5)

Add another post or two
Respond to comments
Check stats

Now, for the hard part: measurement. I actually want to think about that some more. I’m not sure if I’d measure the # of hits, the comments or the # followers (the quantitative), or if I’d really rather measure the qualitative. The purpose of having the site is to start a conversation and to learn more about myself and others who are looking at living on boats (either in marinas or cruising). To that end, it’s more about the level of discussion and interation than the number of people who view the blog.

How esoteric is that??!