Feb. 9, 2009
After many conversations with wonderful educators dedicated to digital learning I think I stumbled on a missing piece of the pie. Since an amazing amount of content is being created and re-created for digital learning I thought it might be appropriate to facilitate a free exchange of Moodle courses to foster greater communication and sharing in the digital world.
I’ve started MoodleShare just for this purpose. It is currently in beta but open to anyone who would like to help contribute to this project. Register now at http://www.moodleshare.com/.
Posted by matt in Power of Ten, Your Delivery, Your Strategies, Your Tactics, Your Vision | No Comments
Jan. 14, 2009
If you’ve ever wondered what is going on with the dreck that ends up on your site in comment fields, forums and other interactions here is the answer from Google:
Posted by matt in Uncategorized, Your Delivery, Your Tactics | No Comments
Dec. 3, 2008
http://www.adaptiveavenue.com/
Banner ads are finally growing up. With the web becoming more semantic and service oriented its now possible to put the Sistine Chapel on the head of a pin, and dynamically serve up just about anything in your banner ads, quantitative testing, qualitative testing, ecommerce and database driven content and more. At Target we called this the super widget and it took five years from idea to implimentation, now it is becoming common place.
I see getting the creatives on board will be the biggest challenge, they hate designing or writing to templates, but the future isn’t going to wait for them.
“Bant Breen, the president of worldwide digital communications at Initiative, the Interpublic Group media buying and planning firm, had a similar view. “The traditional creative process right now is not structured to essentially deliver hundreds of permutations, or hundreds of ideas for messaging,” said Mr. Breen, whose firm is using Tumri to determine which ads are working.
“There’s no doubt that there will be a lot of data that can be collected that could be applied to the creative process.”
But, he said, “that’s not necessarily an easy discussion to have with great art directors.””
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/03/business/media/03adco.html?_r=1&ref=media
Since we are doing this on the net now, can we get the web to print version working as well? This will be fun!
Posted by matt in Your Delivery, Your Tactics | 2 Comments
Dec. 3, 2008
Date: Friday December 5, 2008
Time: 10:00 a.m. - 12:00 p.m.
Location: B-26 Walter Library on the Minneapolis campus
http://dmc.umn.edu/usability/directions.shtml :: for lab location and directions
Event: Opportunity for faculty, staff, students, and the general public to tour the Usability Services Lab at the University of Minnesota. My team will be happy to show you the lab and discuss our services. Our usability consultants will be doing demonstrations of sample usability evaluation tasks, using our eye-tracking equipment.
Objective of the lab: We help project teams and researchers obtain the user perspective on the way that information is presented on a computer screen. The usability lab provides an environment in which teams are able to observe users trying out a Web site or other design. We offer usability testing and other services, utilizing screen capture, video, audio, and eye-tracking tools and equipment in the lab. We provide services both to web design teams and to academic researchers.
No sign-up is necessary. Visitors may stop by anytime during the Open House hours.
Contact Info:
Alice de la Cova
Usability Services Manager
Office of Information Technology’s Digital Media Center
University of Minnesota
(612) 624-9365
a-dela@umn.edu
Posted by matt in Your Delivery, Your Tactics | No Comments
Nov. 17, 2008
http://www.schmap.com/florence/tours_tour1/#p=49496&i=49496_22.jpg
In an amazingly clever and simple way, Schmap is using Flickr and Yahoo maps in a wonderful mash-up travel guide. They are using one of my photos, with permission, which I freely gave, of the Baptistry at the Duomo in Florence.
Outstanding use of crowdsourcing and web 2.o tech.
Posted by matt in Your Projects, Your Tactics, Your Teams, Your Vision | No Comments
Nov. 5, 2008
I’ve had this notion for a while, I don’t know if anyone has perfected it yet, some companies have gotten close. I want to be able to create an Indesign template, upload it into a web based system that will allow me to edit predefined areas through a web browser, put it into an approval queue, once it is approve it automatically resizes itself a bit into one of 14 predefined sizes and then is transferred automagically to the publications as defined in the media buying system.
This should be done already. Websites have been doing it for years in the form of database driven websites. Now that the Indesign file format is basically just XML it really isn’t a very large leap to do a few integrations between exisitng technologies and have a whole new product that any company that does regional or nation newspaper advertising, or magazine advertising would love to utilize.
Posted by matt in Your Delivery, Your Projects, Your Tactics | No Comments
Oct. 28, 2008
The Print Production Club of the Twin Cities met tonight at Bolger. After some great wine and food we were treated to Dick Bolger talking about green initiatives in the printing community, a fantastic and honest presentation that I enjoyed immensely. Even though the Marketing and Advertising industry consumes a great deal of natural resources, there are ways for us all to be mindful of how much we are consuming, the impacts of that consumption, the upstream effects, and downstream effects. The choices we make in purchasing and producing materials to sell, should have as light of a touch as possible on our mother earth, to make sure our sons and daughters have a world that supports them as it has supported us, and is enjoyable to live in.
