Some really interesting metrics from JESS3 for AIGA on the state of the internet.

JESS3 – the State of The Internet by JESS3 for AIGA Baltimore

Online search giant Google recently made its foray into the formal social media sphere with its Google Buzz service. Tied into the popular Gmail web-based email client, Buzz was rolled out to Google’s approximately 146 million most active users, the company saying that a social network has always been beneath the surface of its email technology (WSJ.com). But even with the current social-media craze, many users were unhappy with what seemed to be an intrusion on their everyday social routines. We’ll look at some of these users’ comments and I’ll espouse what I see to be some of the possibilities that we might not be hearing over the Buzz. Read the rest of this entry »

This week has been absolutely great. I received a lot of good news, had friends over for dinner, got a lot done at work, played LEGO Rock Band… And now I’m ready for a weekend of working for myself.

My first task this weekend is to get the tea@elevensies site up and running. It’s taken too long and I feel bad. But I did have a rough stretch the past six months or so that deterred me from getting it all wrapped up — still, not a good excuse. This weekend is the weekend, however, to bust out this site for Ashley and Char. And then probably see what Ash wants to change (she apparently is over her design now). But at least it will be another project down.

The second issue I’m going to try to wrap up is this site. I’ve got most of a new design mocked up and sitting in Photoshop, just waiting for me to bring it to life in HTML5 and CSS3. So this site will change in the near future. And for the better, I think.

Third, I need get started on redesigning Jessica’s blog. Her new branding is amazing and I want to get it up and running for her, as well as a complete graphics package for her Etsy shop.

It is nice to have some time to work on personal design and coding. Stress is gone, and that goes a long way toward the proper motivation in these sorts of situations. Things are exciting!

In a couple of weeks I will making my initial foray into college-level teaching. Last week I signed my first adjunct contract to teach Web Page Design to a group of Sophomores through Seniors. I am really excited about this job, to tell the truth. I think it’ll be a lot of fun and a good experience for me as a designer.

The class is once a week on Monday evenings for three hours. It’s an introductory web design class, so I’ll be teaching the most basic of XHTML and CSS. But I am hoping that this group of Digital Media students will catch on quickly enough that we can really get into the cool stuff.

Beyond markup and stylesheets I will be teaching them some design. Some actual design. Because I think that’s part of what the class has been lacking (from the students I’ve known in previous classes). The students in my class will be following good design blogs and hopefully learning some trends.

As a new teacher I think I’m lucky to have such great online resources available, in the form of so many design blogs.

Is there anything specific you would want to learn in a class like this if, of course, you were taking it? I’d be interested to know what you think is important.

CurtisBlackwell.com

It’s the time of the year when the Digital Media near-graduates give their portfolio presentations so I’ve been spending a lot of time giving advice, troubleshooting and, now, grading their portfolios. It’s a lot of fun. I am really excited to be teaching Web Design next semester. Hopefully I’ll be able to get the newer kids loving web design as much I do.

One of my good friends, Curtis, just launched his portfolio/site tonight. And I want to give him a plug because:

1. He’s and awesome guy and put together a really cool site design
2. I helped him a bit in getting it together

I didn’t realise the sheer body of work that he’s put together just in the last 6 months or so. It’s pretty amazing. In any case, please check his stuff out.

CurtisBlackwell.com

So at work we are in the process of moving our CMS platform from Joomla! to dotCMS.

We just finished two days of basic training in dotCMS and I am super excited. The CMS is built on Java, but don’t hold that against it. The user side of it is nimble and ridiculously flexible. Everything cool is done in Apache Velocity code which makes it simple to do pulls.

Basically, if all goes according to plan, we’ll be going from 20k pages of content to about 30 pages with all of the content being dynamically pulled. Simply, how a CMS should work.

I’m excited. We got to do some cool things with velocity in our training yesterday and have a second training round coming up.

Had our kickoff meeting with Dotmarketing today about implementing dotCMS. We’re getting it all rolling. I’m hoping to set up a tech/development/process blog on EDU to keep track of all of that as we go through it.

The target launch looks like early to mid March, which is awesome. And Kevin starts work on Monday so we should be getting this cranked out pretty quick. First design meeting is Monday.  yay!

I started a thread over in the NaNoWriMo forums trying to find people who scrobble at last.fm (btw, you should scrobble if you don’t. And you should add me as a friend). And it’s been awesome to have a few discussions about music as well as finding new bands and such.

That’s what I like about social networking — the loose communities that can develop. We’re able to have friends in other parts of the world that we can converse with daily or hourly, which helps us maintain community. Facebook has gotten us to connect to old friends and classmates we may never have seen or heard from again otherwise, MySpace lets us show off how crappy our layout skills are (just kidding… for me anyway, my design skills rock!) and connect with random folks, LinkeIn keeps us connected to the professionals we networked with at a conference or worked for briefly freelancing, and Twitter gives us constant voices of friends around the world.

Sure, it can be construed as information overload by some, but I’m adept to not being overloaded, which is how I can handle of this. And I really do like the “meeting” new people aspects. I’ve met a couple of cool people through NaNo and last.fm in just the past couple of days. yay!

I convinced my boss to let me do something awesome. Something that’s right and good and will make everyone’s life easier.

I am moving our school’s news to a WordPress install in the coming month or so. Our current site is built in Joomla! which I absolutely hate. It’s not that it’s a bad CMS, it’s just not designed to do what we need it to, and we don’t have a full-time developer on staff.

So, I will be moving and then importing all of our archived news stories into WordPress and then using syndication feeds to target news content on the main Joomla! site. It’s going to be a lot easier for me.

See, WordPress by default builds an RSS feed for each category, tag, or everything. Which is great. That means I can place a story from the Management department in the “management” category as well as in the “School of Professional Studies” category and it will be included in both feeds. On top of that it will be included in our main news feed. When I want to place news from that department on their information page on EDU, I just have to grab the feed, shove it into a module and the latest stories will automagically show up on their pages.

And I can do that across the site. The other benefits I see are being able to add a more social element to our news content, adding more media – photos, video, podcasts, etc., and breaking away from our current habit of posting only news releases. Rather, we’ll be able to run a sort of year-round online magazine highlighting what our students and faculty are doing. This will go beyond our current alumni publication – I mean, there’s only so much you can put in a 26 page print publication. Instead, we can expand on that and drive people back to our website.

Can you tell I’m excited? One guy I met at the HighEdWeb conference handles his school’s news in WordPress already. And it’s working out great.

I’m excited to start developing it and see where I get. At the very least we’ll have greater control over our content and that will make me a happier camper.