NET225 Writing for Electronic Media: November 2010

Thursday, November 25, 2010

Happy Thanksgiving!

Hope everyone has a warm and safe holiday!

--Brad

Wednesday, November 24, 2010

Why Are the Rich So Good at the Internet?

Why Are the Rich So Good at the Internet?
FAST COMPANY | NOVEMBER 24, 2010
http://pulsene.ws/n9em

Pew Internet has released a report finding that income is the strongest predictor of whether, how often, and in what ways ...

New HTML5 image editor from Aviary

We've been looking at the growing field of online image editor, but they have all been Flash based. Aviary is developing an image editor written in HTML5, which makes it ultra lightweight and ultimately usable on mobile devices not all that Flash-based (iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch anyone?). Interestingly, the editing tool has been developed as a widget that can be included in other websites through an embed code. I'll let you know how that works.

Monday, November 22, 2010

Pixlr out-Photoshops photoshop.com

In a comparison of online image editors (those that work solely through web browsers, Photoshop.com is a fairly disappointing entry compared to some others.

Among the fastest and most fully featured I've found is Pixlr. One of the Flash-based editors that seem to be one of the few reasons why Flash needs to hang around, Pixlr's interface looks very much like an older incarnation of Photoshop for Windows.

It supports advanced features such as layers, layer masks, blending options, cloning, filters, distort, vector type, and a surprisingly rich right-clickiness (contextual menus). (Side note: Pixlr's interface is so like Photoshop that we wonder how long until Adobe takes note.)

Pixlr is free to use, imports and saves to Flickr and other online sharing sites and social media apps, as well as to and from the desktop. You can load, edit and save images to and from your desktop without creating a Pixlr account. For most users, this may be more than enough image editing power, comparable to the desktop version of Photoshop Elements.

Article: Community College Times

Program portfolio review? Heck of an idea!

Community College Times
http://www.communitycollegetimes.com/article.cfm?ArticleId=3050

(Sent from Flipboard)

20 Things I Learned About Browsers and the Web

via 20thingsilearned.com

Google has created an excellent primer on the current state and recent history of web apps and such. Don't let the "comic book" look and feel throw you - this is good info in a concise and understandable format.

Also, it is a terrific example of HTML5 web development.

Wednesday, November 17, 2010

You want an iPad with that Hyundai?

Owner's manual done digital...

http://www.usatoday.com/money/autos/2010-11-17-hyundaiipad17_ST_N.htm

Monday, November 15, 2010

Check out this video!

NET student Amy Barr created this video for the contest.

View the video then vote for Amy!

I really dig this video from the AT&T Simplify Your Life video contest - check it out. It could win the $20,000 Grand Prize!

You can see the video here: http://tinyurl.com/2e323rq

eMarketing/Social Media/Web position

Interesting skill set....

Tuesday, November 2, 2010

Awesome name for a rock band...

Longchain Polymer and the Free Radicals

NET225S Writing for Electronic Media - Translation

NET225S Writing for Electronic Media

Translation

Several events occurred to inspire this lesson in writing for electronic media. First, one day last week I had two messages in my In Box that made me pause:

One email alerted me to a comment on one of my blogs from a person in Russia (.ru) and the comment was posted in Cyrillic. The other email is from a student whose first language is Japanese, and in the “From” field, the name is rendered in Kanji.

A few days later, I encountered an article in my newsreader that claims that 70 percent of the world’s internet users do not speak English.

Now, what was really interesting is that the above-mentioned Russian comment wasn’t lost to me. With barely a thought, I copied the text from the email, opened Google Translate, pasted in the text, and read the result. And this seemed like a perfectly reasonable thing to do. Really, though, a tremendous amount of clever programming and computing power is behind this seemingly mundane act. (Google Translate, Babelfish.com and other translation services can translate entire websites - just paste the URL into the translate box.)

First, the program must recognize the alphabet, then the language, then the words, then the meaning, and render that into an entirely different language. It made sense. Here is the translation:

Excellent article! Many thanks to the author for interesting material. Good luck in development! :)

Machine translation (as opposed to human translation) has made great strides in the last few years, as processing power has increased, translation tables have been populated, and artificial intelligence models try to tease out contextual clues. Fluent and instantaneous machine translation has been a staple of science fiction for over a century, and we are now very close to its realization, both from language to language and mode to mode (text to speech or speech to text). There has even been experimentation of voice in language A to text in language B!

Machine translation breaks down when we use idioms - words that seem to have one definition but are used in a different way in conversation. Humans are pretty good at understanding idioms, but machines are terrible at it.

When we use idioms and metaphors to communicate, and a non-native speaker (or machine) tries to translate, it can sometimes sound like a Star Trek episode. For example, we commonly use the phrase “That’s big of you” when we mean someone is being generous (or sometimes we mean it sarcastically when they are not, but that’s a different problem!). Translating that phrase to Latvian, for instance, results in:

Tas ir liels jums

It is a word-for-word translation. But if we translate it right back to English, we get something else:

It's great for you

Uh, oh. “Big” became “great” and “of” became “for.” So let’s say we are in a business deal with a Latvian partner, and she makes an offer that is to our advantage. We reply “That’s big of you,” to indicate that we think she is being generous. However, on the other end, it sounds like we are saying, “That’s great for you!” meaning we think it is in HER favor. That could be taken as an insult, and the entire deal could collapse.

So, what can be done to avoid such miscommunication? Let’s try the translation again, this time being more precise with our language:

Original phrase: You are very generous

English to Latvian: Jūs esat ļoti atsaucīgs

Latvian to English: You're very generous

The more precise and non-idiomatic English phrase avoids the mis-translation seen in the earlier example.

The activity for you, then, is to identify five or so idiomatic or metaphorical phrases that you are prone to using. (Review your email archives for one source.) Enter them into a translation site and translate them into several languages, then back to English. See how they change, then try to re-write the original text to remove the idiom or metaphor and use direct language, and run them through the same translators to see whether you have succeeded. Post your phrases, translations, back-translations, revisions and re-translations to your blog site.

Google Docs makes it easy to create, store and share online documents, spreadsheets and presentations.

NET225S Writing for Electronic Media - Brevity

NET225 S Writing for Electronic Media - Brevity

NET225S Writing for Electronic Media

Brevity

One of the interesting consequences of the rise of social media - Facebook and Twitter, in particular - is the prevalence of the “micro-blog,” or a web posting that is extremely abbreviated.

Twitter’s post limit is 140 characters. Not words - characters! Including spaces and punctuation. Here’s what you can say in 140 characters:

How do you explain Twitter to someone who doesn't follow Twitter? Tweets are trail markers, saying "go this way to find interesting stuff."

Actually, that’s 139. The input field on Twitter’s web page counts them down for you.

What happens if you want to say more? One option is to use a blog+autopost option, such as Posterous. Here’s a longer post, as it appears on Twitter:

Springsteen lost and found: The Promise http://post.ly/198QF

That is actually just the title and a shortened URL link to the full blog post at http://edisonnet.posterous.com/springsteen-lost-and-found-the-promise. The URL itself is 69 characters - fully half of the allowed character count for a tweet (what an entry on Twitter is called). Posterous, in addition to posting the entry to blogs, Facebook, etc., will create a shortened URL to save character counts.

There are a number of URL shortening services, Bit.ly being perhaps the most popular. These work by building a simple table, using a uniquely generated string of letters and numbers and associating that string with a full URL. When someone clicks on (or enters) the shortened Bit.ly address, the site forwards the page request to the actual URL.

Another place characters count is in Facebook ads. Facebook ads are fairly inobtrusive, as web-based ads go. They appear on pages as relevant content, based on either the content of the posts or on information in the user’s profile settings. Here are two ads that appeared on one of my pages recently:

The disc golf ad appears because I am a member of the Edison Disc Golf fan page. The other is because I graduated from high school in 1977. Your ads will differ based on your preferences and settings. If you notice, just above the Disc Golf Superstore heading, there’s a link to “Create an Ad.” If you want to see something cool and magical happen, paste in a URL of your website (your blog URL is OK) and click the “Suggest an Ad” button. Facebook reads the content of the site and puts in a title, some body text and even a graphic!

Note that you have 25 characters for a headline, and 135 for the body text. Edit your title and body text to get a message to a prospective audience. Facebook will show you a preview of what it looks like:

The next step is to target your ads (you can still do all this without committing to a purchase). Try different keywords and demographics to see how that affects your potential audience.

If you are interested in how Facebook ad pricing works, click Continue. Otherwise, post a screen capture of your ads (try a few) and some information about your demographic selections to your blog. Specifically address how your ad copy targets the people you identified in your demographic selections.

Then try to recreate the ad in a Twitter entry, including a shortened URL to point people to your web address.