Media Lab creates Center for Future Storytelling

MIT News reports:

With the establishment of the center, whose research program begins immediately, the Media Lab and Plymouth Rock Studios will collaborate to revolutionize how we tell our stories, from major motion pictures to peer-to-peer multimedia sharing. By applying leading-edge technologies to make stories more interactive, improvisational and social, researchers will seek to transform audiences into active participants in the storytelling process, bridging the real and virtual worlds, and allowing everyone to make their own unique stories with user-generated content on the Web. Center research will also focus on ways to revolutionize imaging and display technologies, including developing next-generation cameras and programmable studios, making movie production more versatile and economic.

I’m going to be following this as I plan to start yet another website, HamRadioStoryProject.Org, that will allow ham radio operators to tell their stories about their experiences with ham radio.

Frameworks Make Programmers More Productive

Currently, on the Southeastern Michigan PHP User Group mailing list, there is a discussion of PHP frameworks. I’ve always known that I should be using them, but while they do offer a number of benefits, they can have a steep learning curve. I kept putting it off, saying, “I’ll use on on the next project.”

As a result of this discussion, however, I’ve decided to bite the bullet and start using frameworks. The one I chose was CodeIgniter. According to one message, “It’s lightweight, robust, and has very good documentation.”

Some of the others mentioned include:

• CakePHP
• PHPMVC
• Symfony

There are even more on PHP Frameworks.

To test CodeIgniter, I developed a small application to collect and display the fortunes from fortune cookies. This was a rewrite of an app that I wrote several years ago without a framework.

Even with having to learn the framework, this took me only about four or five hours from start to finish. While I don’t recall how long it took me to do the first time, my guess is that it probably took about the same amount of time. So, if you subtract the amount of time it took to learn about CodeIgniter, then the development time was shorter using the framework.

Using the framework also enabled me to think differently about the application. Using the framework, you have to think in terms of model, view, and controller (MVC). This kind of thinking allows you to segregate these functions instead of lumping them all into one big page. For example, when developing a view, you only have to worry about how to display the data, not how to generate it. That’s the job of the controller.

I’m sure that there are some “gotchas” that I haven’t encountered in this simple application, but overall I think using frameworks is the way to go. You can be I’ll be using CodeIgniter for my next development project if it’s appropriate.

WPG Now Offers Web Meetings, Webinars

Business travel is expensive, but sometimes posting information to a website is simply too impersonal. Now, there’s a middle way— the Web meeting or webinar. With a Web meeting or webinar, you can:

• meet and collaborate with colleagues and customers around the world,
• give sales presentations from your Mac or PC, and
• deliver online training.

Both Web meetings and webinars use Voice Over Internet Protocol (VOIP) technology to connect people. All that’s required is that presenters and attendees have a relatively up-to-date computers and a broadband Internet connection. To hear the audio, attendees will need speakers.

Web meetings can connect up to 20 people with computers (with speakers and microphones) who can all interact directly with one another. Webinars can have up to 1,000 attendees, who can interact with the webinar’s presenters via a “chat” interface.

We’re very excited about this technology. It enables you to personally reach out to colleagues, customers, and potential customers without expensive business travel.

Web Publishing Group can help you prepare the material for your Web meeting or webinar, set up and run the event, and then provide information on the event’s attendees after the event. Please contact us by calling 734-930-6564, or emailing danr@webpublishinggroup.com, for more information.

Five-Second Usablity Test

I mostly deal with small companies or companies that don’t want to spend a lot of money on a website. That’s why I was excited to read about the 5-Second Test and the fivesecondtest.com website that will let you run these tests for free.

From fivesecondtest.com:

“Conducting a five second test allows you to find out which elements of your user interface are the most prominent. You do this by asking users to recall elements they saw after looking at your interface for five seconds.

To create a test all you need to do is upload an image of the interface you’re testing, enter your email address, and your name. A link to run your test is generated for you that you can share with friends and colleagues.

All submissions made by your test users are then emailed to the address you provided.”

Improve YouTube Video Quality

Many YouTube videos can be played at higher quality by making a simple change to the URL used to access the YouTube page. Just modify the URL in the address bar by adding “&fmt=18″ to it. The visual difference is quite noticeable.

If you are posting a link to a YouTube video, you could choose to include the “&fmt18″ right in the link. Note that YouTube users can also set a video preference in their YouTube account that determines the video quality they see normally.

For more information on this and other YouTube and video tips, visit Jimmy Ruska’s Blog.

Use Forums to Increase Website Traffic

Josh Klein makes a good case for using forums (and mailing lists, I might add) to drive traffic to your website. I think this is one of the most overlooked methods of increasing website traffic, but also one of the most effective.

It’s great for your Google ranking, too. I have the #1 rated ham radio blog on Google. That is, when you search Google for “ham radio blog” or “amateur radio blog,” I am the #1 link. I think the biggest reason for this is that I participate in many amateur radio Yahoo Groups. On each of my posts, my signature carries the URL of my website, www.kb6nu.com.

YogaSpiritWellness.Com Serves Both the Body and Mind

Laurie Blume and I have just released this lovely site for Yoga Spirit Wellness, a company that offers classes in yoga and specializes in yoga therapy for patients with Multiple Sclerosis, Parkinsons, Fibromyalgia, or other neurological conditions.

5 Steps to Marketing Your Website

Startup Nation recently ran an article on marketing your website. The five steps include:

• focus on content and code,
• participate and network,
• build your word of mouth and viral marketing,
• create press and write articles, and
• sync up with search engines and online tools.

In my humble opinion, marketing your website is probably even more important than a site’s design or functionality. What good is having a fancy website if no one visits?

SEO for Images

On Work.Com, Richard Burckhardt writes about how to optimize images to maximize search engine placement. The article, Guide to SEO 101 - Image Optimization notes:

Google’s implementation of Universal Search has changed the whole search landscape and settled the often debated SEO issue of whether the use of ALT text and keywords in image file names have any effect on rankings. In two words - they do.

There are a bunch of other good tips, too.

7 Steps to Blogging Success

Startup Nation recently published an article “Eight Steps to Win at Blogging.” I could find only seven steps, but they’re all very good:

1. Choose a host. Bodnar says outside hosts like TypePad, WordPress and Blogger are easy and cheap, “but you’re limited to storage size and features.” You get what you pay for, he says, when it comes to adding audio, video, links and content other than text.
2. Hire a dedicated blogger. “Find someone who’s interested in it and will oversee it,” Briguglio says.
3. Collect links up the wazoo. Both inbound and outbound links are vital - collect some “link karma” by directing your traffic to relevant sites, and you’ll see it coming around in the form of inbound links to your blog. The more inbound links, the more traffic and visibility you get. Briguglio recently blogged about Hershey’s Kisses and linked to the Hershey site.
4. Set up an RSS feed. Really Simple Syndication is a code-based system that allows Web users to “subscribe” to their favorite sites – including your blog – for up-to-the-minute action and updates. On that note…
5. Update constantly. A blog’s success depends on the regularity of its posts. “We have so much information on our blog that we rank very high on search engines,” Bodnar says. Searches find frequently refreshed, keyword-rich sites first.
6. Read other blogs and comment on the posts. Get involved in the blogsphere to learn what makes a good one. A great way to start: enter “entrepreneur” at Technorati, a search engine now tracking 56 million blogs. You’ll find more than 200,000 examples of how it’s been done.
7. Collect images, links, statistics and other sources to include on your blog. Think of it as your personal online magazine and make it as visually appealing as possible. Spend some time at a heavily stocked magazine rack and mine it for what works – and what doesn’t.

I really like the idea of making your blog your own personal magazine. Put stuff in that you find interesting, and chances are that other will find it interesting, too.

I would add a few items of my own:

1. In addition to reading other blogs, get on mailing lists that discusss areas of interest. The incoming messages will not only serve as fodder for your blog, but if you stick your blog’s URL in your e-mail signature, it will help to garner readers for your blog.
2. Use zookoda.com to set up a mailaing list for your RSS feed. Some people are not geeky enough to get RSS feeds, while others just prefer e-mail.