Jib-Jab’s Latest Election Video…
The guys at Jib-Jab are notorious for putting out some hilarious political videos, here’s their latest piece of work. I think you will agree it’s pretty funny!
JibJab – Funny eCards, Birthday Cards, and More at JibJab
Breaking News: Hardin May Resign?
I just heard on Twitter a few minutes ago that Lu Hardin, UCA President, may resign tomorrow. This is pretty big news considering all that he has done for the University of Central Arkansas during his tenure as President.
As a resident of Conway I know that he is an extremely popular person in town and it’s hard to find a person who doesn’t like him or respect his accomplishments.
This comes as kind of a shock to me and a few others that I have talked to. I will bet anything that he shows back up in politics at some point in the future, possibly the Governor’s Race.
Here is a snippet I found on the homepage of the Log Cabin Democrat. This story is also being reported on Arkansas Business and a few other statewide News Outlets…
The University of Central Arkansas Board of Trustees will hold a special meeting today to discuss president Lu Hardin’s future with the university.
The meeting will take place at 11 a.m., and Rush F. Harding III, vice chairman of the board, told the Associated Press that Hardin offering his resignation may be one of the university president’s options.
Vice president for university communications Warwick Sabin said he hasn’t heard of any plans for Hardin to resign and said he has not been able to confirm the 11 a.m. meeting of the Board of Trustees as of 7 p.m. Wednesday.
“I’m confident the president has the votes to stay, if he would choose,” Harding said. “However, I know the president cares deeply about the institution and he’s assured me that he wants some resolution to this issue and he will put the interest of the university above his own.”
The controversy began when news surfaced that Hardin had secretly received a $300,000 deferred-compensation bonus in May. Hardin has since repaid the money and said he would not accept it until faculty members receive raises and enough private funds are acquired to cover the early payment of deferred-compensation.
UCA administrators first said the money used to pay the bonus was public funds, but Attorney General Dustin McDaniel said in an advisory opinion that the money used to pay the bonus was public money because it came from student book and food sales.
“The board is having a meeting in the morning to sit down with the president and figure out how to get this behind us,” Harding told the Associated Press.
Information later surfaced that a memo had been distributed with typed names of three university vice presidents containing talking points on why Hardin’s bonus should be kept secret. All three vice presidents denied authoring, or seeing, the document before it was distributed.
The university Faculty Senate met last week where faculty addressed concerns about Hardin and the administration. A Faculty Affairs Committee was to review and deliberate the facts considering Hardin’s bonus and, if they feel action is necessary, recommend it to the senate. Faculty senator Ed Powers was selected to chair the committee.
Powers has previously said that “much of the action suggests there might be corruption in the system.”
A vote of confidence and a request for Hardin’s resignation are two of the options Powers said the committee could suggest to the senate. A closed meeting of the committee was scheduled to take place today.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
TheCabin.net ·· Log Cabin Democrat of Conway, Arkansas
MODx CMS Groups…
I have started seeing a lot of MODx Groups starting to form on various social networks out there. Jay Gilmore, a developer from Canada, has been making his rounds getting the word out about MODx and setting up these user groups, he’s doing an excellent job! Today alone I have seen MODx groups forming on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Plaxo Pulse.
If you aren’t familiar with MODx, it’s an open source PHP Application Framework that helps you take control of your online content. It empowers developers and advanced users to give as much control as desired to whomever they desire for day-to-day website content maintenance chores. I have blogged about MODx a few times on here and a lot more information can be found on my partner Greg’s blog about MODx and our experiences with it.
It’s great to see these communities starting to form across the social landscape because with open-source software, the one way to insure that it’s going to grow and thrive is for it to have a large community of supporters backing it’s development and overall direction…
Microsoft Social Bookmarks
Looks like Microsoft is going to launch a social bookmark service that is very similar to delicious in the next few weeks. From what I have gathered it is going to operate very similarly to delicious but will have some features and similarities to other popular social bookmarking services as well.
I am an avid user of delicious (click here to see my delicious account) and have been for a while now, I absolutely love the concept of social bookmarking. I have accounts on Digg, Magnolia, and a few other places around the net but I keep coming back to Delicious to tag my links out. I am probably one of only a few power-users out there that really likes the new delicious interface too. Since no one else in our organization uses social bookmarking I am more or less a standalone user, although I hope one day I can get my partners turned onto this cool concept and actually utilize the social aspect.
Hopefully Microsoft can pull another rabbit out of their hat with this service offering kind of like they did with Windows Live Writer. It’s going to be cool to see how this is embraced. I am not completely sure how they are going to roll out the service but I do know that it will be release first in their MSDN and Expression communities.
Also, in what little bit of information I have gathered anyone who already uses a service like delicious will have the ability to import their existing links and tags into the new solution, that should be pretty nice. Here is a preview to the beta of the service, Social Bookmarks – Preview.
Wordpress 2.6 / PodPress Bug
I had someone send me an email today about not being able to download audio files from our Church podcast. I recently did an upgrade to the newest version of Wordpress and didn’t realize until after the fact that the newest installation breaks the PodPress plugin.
Wouldn’t you know it? I did a little research and finally ran across a blog post that mentions a possible no-hack workaround and I am going to give this a try, hopefully this will work because I really hate to get in and hack around on Wordpress’s core code.
A lot of people are reporting incompatibilities between Mighty Seek’s PodPress, the popular free podcasting add-on for WordPress, and the recently-announced WordPress 2.6. Earlier in the week, we reported a simple hack you could use to get things working again.
A reader, John Leavitt, sends word of an even easier fix – the No Revisions plug-in. It disables the new Revisions feature, which seems to be the source of the PodPress problems.
I tested this out on a site that uses PodPress and WordPress. After upgrading to 2.6 about a week ago, I had been unable to add audio podcasts using PodPress.
After installing the No Revisions plug-in, PodPress seems to be working again on the site. If you haven’t upgraded to WordPress 2.6, you’ll probably want to wait until PodPress gets updated for compatibility. If you already broke your podcast site with the update, though, give the No Revisions plug-in a try.
Plug-In Fixes PodPress Problem With WordPress 2.6 – Podcasting News
Getting Content from Clients…
I have three projects that are slated to begin this week, and at the close of business on Monday I am still waiting on three project outlines from my clients, ha. One of my partners, Greg Smart, posted a good article on his blog a while back about this same topic.
This is something that all of us in the development community run into from time to time, we have our task lists emptied out and are ready to embark on a new client project and all of a sudden we find ourselves waiting on content or a project outline from the client.
It’s not the client’s fault, they are usually just wrestling with the reality that putting together a website outline or writing content for the web is a little harder than they had first thought, and unless you have done it you really don’t realize this up front. It’s still a frustrating thing for us as developers because here we sit ready to go to work and have all of our ducks in a row and we have to wait…
Over the years I have learned that one of the biggest mistakes a developer can make is to rush his client to make critical decisions regarding their project outline or “navigation”, they will inevitably “miss something” that will need to be coded in later and it usually ends up adding a few additional hours to the project, if not more down the road. The best thing I have learned is to just be patient.
There are a few things that you can do to sort of get the ball rolling during the discovery phase of a project that I have used in the past with mixed results. One of these tricks is to build a discovery document, MS Word or Excel work great for something like this, just build the document with standard questions that will enable you to build an outline for the project and at least get a starting point. In this project discovery you should ask some tough questions that maybe the client hasn’t considered before and make them think. By putting together a discovery document on the front end of a project you can probably cut out a few hours of development time down the road…
Another technique that I have been exploring lately is the use of UML (universal markup language) to build a project outline in flowchart form. This helps put a visual face on project and gives the client a better perspective to what their project is going to include as well as how it is going to be organized.
These are just two examples, I would love to hear from some other developers out there that have ran into this situation before and what techniques they use to overcome this fact of life. Please be sure to comment…
Facebook Narrows the Gap on MySpace
Since I have to advise my clients on a day to day basis how they can get the most from the web I try to keep a close eye on social networking since it is all of the rage these days. One of the ways I do this is to read mashable.com.
I was just getting caught up on my Mashable Newsfeed this morning and ran across an interesting article about how Facebook had recently taken the worldwide lead in social networking traffic from MySpace. This just goes to add credibility to my opinion that Facebook is a far superior network to MySpace.
While Facebook recently took the worldwide lead in social networking traffic, MySpace has been quick to point out that they still lead by a wide margin in the more lucrative US market. But that gap is continuing to narrow, according to the latest stats from Nielsen Online. Sporting 76% year-over-year growth, Facebook slimmed the margin it trails MySpace in the US by more than 5 million monthly unique visitors.
With 34.3 million visitors in July, Facebook still sits well behind MySpace (59.2 million), but considering that the latter has essentially stopped growing in the US (down 3% y-o-y according to Nielsen), it would appear that Facebook is within striking distance. Additionally, considering the school year is traditionally Facebook’s busy season, the gap may be even narrower than the most recent stats suggest. Compete’s data for July shows a similar trend, with an even smaller margin between the two sites:
Why does it matter? In addition to competitive bragging rights, the growth and size of the world’s two biggest social networks have major implications on their respective search partners – Google and Microsoft. Google has been disappointed with their MySpace results to-date, while Microsoft is expected to roll out Live Search on Facebook later this year.
Elsewhere, LinkedIn continues to grow quickly, registering more than 10 million monthly uniques in July. Music focused social networking application provider Imeem also had a big month, registering 3.9M unique visitors, placing it handily above competitor Last.fm (2.4M).
Facebook Narrows the Traffic Gap on MySpace in the US
U.S. Cyberattacks?
Just reading CNN.com this morning (my morning ritual) and ran across this news report that was apparently filed earlier this morning and I thought it was pretty interesting. This isn’t anything that those of us in the hosting industry haven’t been hearing off and on since 9/11 but given what happened to Georgia just prior to Russia’s invasion I think that Cyberattackers are something we are probably going to have to take a closer look at, especially from a security standpoint with our financial institutions and governmental clients. Here’s the story from CNN.com:
(CNN) — The next large-scale military or terrorist attack on the United States, if and when it happens, may not involve airplanes or bombs or even intruders breaching American borders.
Cyberattackers shut down one Georgian government site and defaced another with images of Adolf Hitler. Instead, such an assault may be carried out in cyberspace by shadowy hackers half a world away. And Internet security experts believe that it could be just as devastating to the U.S.’s economy and infrastructure as a deadly bombing.
Experts say last week’s attack on the former Soviet republic of Georgia, in which a Russian military offensive was preceded by an Internet assault that overwhelmed Georgian government Web sites, signals a new kind of cyberwar, one for which the United States is not fully prepared.
“Nobody’s come up with a way to prevent this from happening, even here in the U.S.,” said Tom Burling, acting chief executive of Tulip Systems, an Atlanta, Georgia, Web-hosting firm that volunteered its Internet servers to protect the nation of Georgia’s Web sites from malicious traffic.
“The U.S. is probably more Internet-dependent than any place in the world. So to that extent, we’re more vulnerable than any place in the world to this kind of attack,” Burling added. “So much of what we’re doing [in the United States] is out there on the Internet, and all of that can be taken down at once.”
“This is such a crucial issue. At every level, our security now is dependent on computers,” said Scott Borg, director of the United States Cyber Consequences Unit, a nonprofit research institute. “It’s a whole new era. Political and military conflicts now will almost always have a cyber component. The chief targets will be critical infrastructure, and the attacks will emerge from within our own computer systems.”
Hackers mounted coordinated assaults on Georgian government, media, banking and transportation sites in the weeks before Russian troops invaded. Known as distributed denial of service, the attacks employ multiple computers to flood networks with millions of simultaneous requests, overwhelming servers and crippling Web sites.
Hackers shut down the Web site of the Georgian president, Mikheil Saakashvili, for 24 hours and defaced the Georgian parliament site with images of Adolf Hitler. Saakashvili blamed Russia for the attacks, although the Russian government said it was not involved.
Web sites and computer networks have been targeted by hackers for decades, although large-scale, coordinated cyberattacks are still a relatively new phenomenon. Some Internet-security experts believe that the Georgia conflict marks the first time a known cyberattack has coincided with a ground war, but others said that similar computer attacks have accompanied military operations in the Middle East and elsewhere.
The challenge to U.S. security experts is that such attacks can be mounted anonymously, and relatively cheaply, from anywhere in the world. Georgia’s attackers employed “botnets,” or malicious automated programs that take root undetected in far-flung computers and barrage their targets with useless data. By last Friday, some of those botnets were originating from Comcast Internet addresses in the United States, Burling said.
“It only takes a couple of experts; it doesn’t take a whole cyber infantry division to pull something like this off,” said Don Jackson, director of threat intelligence for SecureWorks, an Atlanta-based computer security firm. “For a very small investment in resources, you can have a huge impact.”
In the United States, government computer networks parry millions of attempted intrusions every day, Internet-security experts say. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security created a National Cybersecurity Center this year to coordinate federal cyberdefense efforts and quicken responsiveness. However, a recent Homeland Security Department intelligence report, obtained by The Associated Press, concluded that there are no effective means to prevent a coordinated attack on U.S. Web sites.
“When it comes to our government IT security, we’re pretty strong in protecting against [attacks],” Homeland Security spokesman William R. Knocke told CNN. “But I wouldn’t say … we’re 100 percent impenetrable.”
So what would a cyberattack on the United States look like? And where is the U.S. most vulnerable? It depends on who you talk to.
Borg does not believe that the U.S. is susceptible to the kind of attacks launched at Georgia.
“We can command so much bandwidth that it’s hard to overwhelm our servers,” he said. “We are vulnerable to more sophisticated attacks, but right now most of the people who want to do us harm don’t have those capabilities.”
The Web sites of key government security agencies, such as the Pentagon and the Central Intelligence Agency, are difficult to bring down, experts said. So are the computer networks of large American banks. But experts say a successful, large-scale attack on U.S. computer systems could hobble electric-power grids, transportation networks and industrial-supply chains.
“You’d see some disruption of essential services, like electricity. You’d definitely see espionage,” said James A. Lewis, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. “Would it be decisive? No. Nobody’s going to win a conflict with the United States in cyberspace. But would it be disruptive and irritating? Yes.”
Federal researchers who launched an experimental cyberattack last year in Idaho caused a generator to self-destruct, prompting fears about the effect of a real attack on the nation’s electrical supply.
And a May report by the Government Accountability Office found that the Tennessee Valley Authority, which supplies power to almost 9 million people in the southeastern U.S., had not installed sufficient cybersecurity measures. Spokesman Jim Allen said the TVA, the nation’s largest publicly owned utility company, is “on track” to correct the problems.
What frustrates computer-security experts is that the features that make the Internet such an invaluable resource — its openness and interconnectedness — also make it easier for hackers to do harm. As a staple of 21st-century warfare, cyberattacks will become increasingly sophisticated, forcing governments and private industry to build ever-stronger firewalls and other defenses, experts said.
Also, vague international laws and a lack of accountability will continue to make tracking down and prosecuting cyberattackers difficult.
“We don’t know quite what the rules are for this kind of conflict. If it’s spying, it’s illegal. But is it an act of war? And who do you arrest?” Lewis asked. “We’re much safer [in the U.S.] than we were a year ago. But we still have a long way to go.”
U.S. at risk of cyberattacks, experts say – CNN.com
Microsoft® Expression® 2
While I admit that I am not a huge Microsoft fan by any means, I have to confess that I still use FrontPage at least once a day to tweak a layout no matter how hard I try not to.
I haven’t been able to totally embrace Expression 1 like I had hoped that I would simply because it kept dropping in weird characters into my PHP Code each time I would save out a project and I would find these characters spread out across multiple locations for no apparent reason.
My partner Greg and I both have been pretty put out that the preview tab was also missing from Expression 1, I am not for sure if they brought it back for version 2 or not but in my opinion they sure need to. I know it’s not that big of a deal, especially when you can preview across multiple browsers from inside of Expression but that little small preview tab was something that I really had gotten used to over the years and having it taken away is a bum deal, and I was one of the first developers to post my dissatisfaction on the Expression Team Blog while the product was still in beta.
I think that I am going to give version 2 a shot and see what I think of it, I will probably post back my comments on the experiment once I have had a chance to take a closer look. I also blogged a while back about an add-on for Expression by Eric Meyer, here’s a link to that post in case you missed it, I am thinking about bolting his product onto Expression and running them in tandem.
More Information: Microsoft® Expression®
Web 2.0 Non-Profit Marketing
At Pleth we work with a wide variety of clients, from Fortune 500 enterprises to Small Businesses. We do our best to stay up on the best ways to market our clients websites to their target audiences.
Lately, I have been working on a couple of projects for some non-profit clients, primarily churches. One of the things that I have been urging these clients to become more active in is social networking. I have even made this same recommendation to many of our private firms and business clients, I feel that strongly about the social networking aspect of the web today.
In doing some marketing research for a non-profit today I ran across this website that has some great resources available such as a “best practices” guide for Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, and a few others. This is a great resource and I am sure that I will share this quite a few times with my clients down the road, here’s an excerpt from the Facebook Marketing Guide:
1) Use your organization’s logo as your profile photo.
Facebook Pages are the perfect opportunity to further showcase your logo and build brand recognition. When possible, configure your logo image for your Facebook Page so that it is in the shape of a square or at least a full rectangle. Very narrow logos are unreadable in your fan’s “My Pages” and are severely cropped when you send “Updates” on Facebook. View Example: Hispanic Scholarship Fund.
2) Keep text to a bare minimum.
Your website is where your fan’s will go to read more in-depth information about your organization. On your Facebook Page, keep text to a bare minimum. When editing “Detailed Info” under “Company Overview” enter 1-2 paragraphs about your organization and under “Mission” enter your organization’s mission statement. Don’t use the products section. If you have an online store, list it under the “Website” category. View Example: The Humane Society of the United States.
3) Link to your website, blogs, social networking profiles, etc.
When editing “Detailed Info”, in addition to your website, list links to your organization’s profiles on MySpace, YouTube, Change.org, or blogs that your organization maintains. View Example: ACCION International.
The Change.org App allows you to add “Donate” and “Subscribe to e-Newsletter” buttons, as well any actions your organization has created on Change.org, to your organization’s Facebook Page [View Example: Amnesty International]. If one of your fans on Facebook donates, subscribes, or takes action, you can then download their supporter and donor data through your Nonprofit Admin Account on Change.org [Sign up].
The Causes App allows individuals and nonprofits to fundraise for their favorite causes/nonprofit organizations. Many nonprofits on Facebook already have created numerous Causes [View Example: National Peace Corps Association]. Since Facebook Pages are compatible with Apps, you should add the Causes App to your Facebook Page in order to centralize the Causes that your organization has created in one place on Facebook.
This native App of Facebook essentially allows you to run a blog on your Facebook Page. Like a blog, notes are listed chronologically and allow fans to post comments. In addition, new Notes show up in the Mini-Feed on your page. Be sure the drag your Notes section to left of your page so that the first sentence of your Note can be read. [View Example: The Sierra Club]
7) Add the Profile Box App or the Profile HTML App to insert HTML into your Page.
The Profile Box App is a simple tool that allows you to add images, links, and tables and forms that are written in html to your Facebook Page. This allows you to use Facebook Pages to drive traffic to your website and recruit online activists and donors. Another App that allows you to insert HTML into your Facebook Page is Profile HTML App. [View Example: Harvesters] Don’t know HTML? View this HTML Tutorial.
Use your Facebook Page to drive traffic to other social networking sites.
In the era of Web 2.0, at the very least nonprofit organizations should be using Facebook, Change.org, MySpace, and YouTube in their communications and outreach strategies. Using the Profile Box App, add the Web 2.0 icons below to your organization’s Facebook Page and website to drive traffic to your communities on other social networks. [View Example: Carolyn's Compassionate Children]
9) Add the YouTube Video Box App.
Since YouTube is one of the most visited websites in the world, add the YouTube Video Box App to import and display the videos that your organization has already uploaded to YouTube. This will increase the video views on your YouTube Channel as well as increase your nonprofit rank on YouTube. [View Example: Harvesters]
10) Add the Blog RSS Feed Reader App.
The Blog RSS Feed Reader App allows your organization’s RSS Feed or any other RSS feed to your Facebook Page. The App automatically downloads your most recent blog posts and post them on the right side of your Facebook Page. It’s a great way to drive traffic to your blog or website and your blogs also show up in the News Feed on Facebook.
If your organization does not have its own RSS Feed or organizational blog, you can use the RSS Feed from your MySpace blog. [View Example: DIOSA | Communications]
11) Send out one or two Updates per month.
Just like in e-mail marketing, if you send out too many Updates on Facebook to your fans, your run the risk of crossing that thin line of being that “nonprofit that sends out too many updates”. The option to “Opt Out” is front and center in your fan’s Inbox > Updates and can be done with one simple click. When it comes to online communications, less is more. Just like in e-mail, your fans will opt out less and read your emails more if your organization only sends them out once or twice a month.
The Inbox > Updates is unique on Facebook in that only one Update is displayed no matter how many Updates a nonprofit may have sent out. Still, the total of sent Updates is listed on the right side of your fan’s Inbox > Updates. It doesn’t look good if your organization has 5-10 Updates listed while others are at one or two. Individuals on Facebook don’t check their Updates as often as they do their Inbox, so if they have 5 or 10 waiting it is just too much information to digest. Again, it’s a thin line but one or two is a safe bet.
12) Link to your website(s) in Updates.
Whether is a link to your website or your organization’s MySpace Profile, use Updates to increase traffic to your organization’s website, blog, or social networks. IMPORTANT: Make sure that you have the “http://” in front of the website URL [such as http://www.wildaid.org] so that the link is automatically hyperlinked in your Update so that individuals can visit the website with one simple click.
13) Do not leave your “Cause” donation amount at $0.
Most people are unwilling to be the first to donate to a Cause on Facebook. To get the donations rolling and add crediblilty to your Cause, donate $10, $25 or even $50 to your organizations Cause.
14) Use contests to increase the activity on your Facebook Page.
Using the Facebook Discussion Board, the Notes App, your website, and/or your blog, hold contests asking people to become a fan, post comments on your wall and/org donate to your Cause/Change.org social network within a certain time frame and then reward them with a free membership or gift. [View Example: Catholic Relief Services].
15) Thank your donors with Wall Comments!
Web 2.0 donors are a completely breed. They don’t want your organization to waste time or resources sending print thank you letters. They much prefer that a staff person at your organization post a thank you comment on their Wall! They will appreciate the public acknowledgement.
PLEASE NOTE: This is your only option in thanking your donors if you use Causes since the App does not provide the nonprofit the contact information of your donors.
As I mentioned, this is some great information for Facebook. DIOSA also has some great information available for MySpace and the other social networks out there, it’s definitely worth checking out…
DIOSA | Communications: Web 2.0 Marketing Services
