New Blog Entry Test
This is a test blog entry from my new MacBook Air using the MacJournal application.
I’m adding a photo from our vacation over Thanksgiving. This photo was added with no sizing changes. How does it appear on the site?
I had to change the image sizes manually so they weren’t fixed larger than the page allows.
k
The Most Important Reason to Use Facebook!
When I get the chance to log into Facebook (or FB as we Internet elitists call it) I am amazed by the people who are actively using it from Lauren(my wife) who is a prolific blogger/writer on FB to my Mother and Godmother who love to post pictures of Family and friends to share.
But when I look I also see all the folks who are not using it.
Tad is a Bad Mamma-Jamma
I recently spoke to my Sister in Law about FB and asked when she was going to get on so she could share more pictures of my super-cute nephew, Tad. She said she had no plans to get a FB page anytime soon. She wasn’t ruling it out but it would not anytime soon.
I completely understand the idea that many people share which is that FB is a fad and will quickly be replaced by something else. Does any still use MySpace? But Facebook is MySpace refined. Typical reasons cited for not using Facebook:
-
I don’t want to post information about myself on the Internet. (Certainly valid, but remember FB can’t publish anything you don’t give it, so you are in complete control of this one.)
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It’s only for Teenagers and Pedophiles. (Frankly a very dated argument, actually Facebook’s fastest growing segement is Women over 55)
-
I don’t have time for it. (That’s right, you probably don’t. I’m not going to lie you will look up from your computer and say “I did what for three hours!”)
But here are the benefits of using Facebook
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Easily Share Photos, Videos, and News with Friends
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Reconnect with Friends and Classmates from High School or College
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Use it for Networking with Colleagues and Business Contacts
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Kill Hundreds of Hours Playing Mostly Awful Games (Completely Optional)
But perhaps the most important reason to use Facebook is because you are already on it. That’s right your photo is already plastered all over Facebook and it has your name on it. Remember that embarrassing night in college . . . yeah that’s right . . . the one with the leather chaps and the wig . . . it’s on there. You see when your friends use Facebook they post pictures that include you AND they are putting your name on the picture in a process called Tagging.
IF YOU WERE ON FB you would have the chance to Approve or Disapprove that Tag taking your name off of that embarrassing photo, but since your not . . . that photo will have to stay.
So let’s try an experiment. Let’s take my brother, Steve. He is not on Facebook, but look in just a few minutes I’ve pulled all of these photos of him from other profiles.
Photos of Steve on Facebook
Steve has never posted a single photo of himself on Facebook yet he probably has upwards of 20 photos already published.
How many photos of you are already on FB?
So why do you need to be on Facebook . . . .the fact is you are already on it . . . you might as well make it official.
Disney’s Photopass a Do Over
The Kovacs clan took a trip to Walt Disney World in January whil the boys were tracked out of school. Before we left we received an offer to pre-purchase a Disney Photopass for $100 before we left. Not really understanding the Photopass system we disregarded the offer providing only slightly more consideration than a Shamwow commercial.
Boy was that a mistake. If I had one thing to do over about our trip I would have planned our meals and park visits a little more closely, but if I had two things to do over I would have pre-purchased that Photopass CD.
First here is how it works, when you get to the park on the first day you will see Disney photographers stationed at key spots throughout the park. Have one of them take your picture and they will give you, for free, a photopass card. Something like this
Sample Photopass Cards
This card contains a 16 character code on the back, which you should take a picture of or write down. (In case you lose the card).
With your card in hand you can roam the park and have your photos captured all over the park, with characters or shows and events. Each time you hand your card to the photographer and they will tag each photo they take with your card’s ID. Then when get home you can visit http://www.disneyphotopass.com enter your card number and all of the photos are available for purchase or download. A download costs $14.95 per picture, but remember that offer we turned down for the $99. That right we could have had ALL of the photos they took for $99 on a CD that they would mail to the house.
In our case we did not catch on to the photopass until too late in our visit. But a visit to the Jedi Training Academy in Disney’s Hollywood Studios resulted in 47 photos of the boys including these:
Padawan Aiden
Padawan Wesley
Wesley Fights Vader
These are much better photos than when I was able to get while I was video tapping the event from a different angle. So when I sat down to order these, they were going to cost me $44 just for these three pictures . . . . so I spent $125 for all of them (on the CD) . . . lesson learned. Next time we will pre-order the photopass CD and use the Bejesus out of the card in the park.
With a fixed price of $99 you can use the heck out of the card and get CD full of memories shot by a professional photographer. If you are planning a trip to Disney do not pass on this valuable offer.
Darth Wesley
So Wesley tried his Halloween costume on and started to get into character. We rolled video tape and we ended up with this great video:
We’ll add this to Wesley’s Movie Collection. You might have prviously seen this video: Col. Wessup
Happy Halloween!
WordPress Under Siege
So . . . . right after Obama finishes his speech his millions of supporters all run to post their warm and fuzzies on WordPress and bring down the site:
If you wondered what the role of the new media is going to be during this election or what impact it’s going to have just check this out. This election is going to be very different than anything we have seen in the past!
Spring Cleaning Your MySpace Page . . The Contest!
Please for the love of God update your Myspace page. It’s spring, update your lay out, your status update, your profile song, your pictures . . .anything.
Do you still have those photos of you at the Halloween Party on your myspace page? It’s time to update them. Your friends care about you, all except for Tom, they want to know what you are doing.
Let’s have a contest. Post a reply showing your original MySpace page and your updated one. Let’s see who can create the most improved MySpace page. Then send this blog to your friends and challenge them!
Kris
Idea Generators for This Week – 3/16/2008
News Updates and Articles for 3/17/2008
Interesting Articles from This Week – Idea Generators
Preserve Your Time – This article appeared in the N and O this weekend and has some novel ideas about managing your time at work.
A Lesson From Apple: How to Make Users Fall In Love With You – Discussion of Apple’s design principles and link to their development guidlines for the iPhone
The Connected Generation – The idea of Presence in business communications.
Latest Facebook Application Pays Users - A new feature in Facebooks allows you to profit by recommending products to your online group of friends.
Message From Col Wessup
So I’ve had this idea for a while. To recreate famous scences from famous movies but do it with kid actors. So today I actually took a swing at having my son Wes recreate that famous speech by Jack Nicholson, as Col. Jessup, in A Few Good Men!
Here is the text from the original scene:
“Son, we live in a world that has walls, and those walls have to be guarded by men with guns. Who’s gonna do it? You? You, Lieutenant Weinberg? I have a greater responsibility than you can possibly fathom. You weep for Santiago, and you curse the Marines. You have that luxury. You have the luxury of not knowing what I know — that Santiago’s death, while tragic, probably saved lives; and my existence, while grotesque and incomprehensible to you, saves lives.”
Here’s Wes be sure to stay through the end I’ve included some other famous movie quotes and bloopers:
It was alot of fun and Wes loved seeing himself on the computer . . Because someone is bound to ask I created the video using Ulead Video Studio and shot the raw footage on a Sony Digital Handycam(DCR-SR40).
Kris
Have You Videotaped Your Legos Today
One of the greatest things about the internet is it’s abiliy to showcase new and creative things people are doing. Maybe the’ve always done them but have never had a place to post it and share it with the world.
The boys have gotten very into Legos since Christmas so I’ve been enjoying my second tour of this brick built universe. First as a avid builder myself as a child and now as a parent. But as much as I played with Lego’s I never did this:
So Grease isn’t your thing . . . . how about Monty Python:
Maybe a remake of a famous music video:
You can search YouTube for Lego Motion and see hundreds of Lego Motion Videos. A warning . . most are very bad, but some like these are very well done.
Enjoy.
-Kris
Part II: YouTube.com and the Presidential Election
YouTube.com and The Presidential Election Part II
So you will recall our plan to review the number of “channel” views for the major presidential candidates on YouTube.com. Each of the campaigns has a dedicated channel on YouTube where all of their election videos are uploaded and made available to the public. In Part I we established our baseline and now a week later we can see who is gaining momentum from the online video perspecitive.
|
Candidate |
Party |
Views 12/17/2007 |
Views 12/26/2007 |
# Growth |
% Growth |
| Barrack Obama |
D |
11,454,594 |
11,485,494 |
30,900 |
0.27% |
|
Ron Paul |
R |
6,413,367 |
6,487,426 |
74,059 |
1.15% |
|
Hillary Clinton |
D |
1,132,922 |
1,155,400 |
22,478 |
1.98% |
|
Rudy Guiliani |
R |
781,791 |
792,099 |
10,308 |
1.32% |
|
John Edwards |
D |
721,953 |
731,288 |
9,335 |
1.29% |
| John McCain |
R |
541,783 |
549,497 |
7,624 |
1.41% |
| Mike Huckabee |
R |
344,667 |
372,505 |
27,838 |
8.08% |
During the last 9 days it’s clear that both Ron Paul and Mike Huckabee have been gaining momentum on their video channels. Ron Paul had the largest growth in numbers with 74,000+ new views (40% of traffic across all candidates) . But Mike Huckabee had by far the largest percentage of growth with more than 8% of his total views coming in the last 9 days. Much of his growth can be attributed to his “controversial” Christmas commercial where critics saw a “floating cross” in a bookcase. A video which has not been posted, BY THE CAMPAIGN, on YouTube. So lot’s of people came looking but all they got was a lot of standard campaign video offerrings. Nice Move!
Other observations would include the fact that Hillary has the largest % growth among major Democratic candidates with a robust 1.98% growth in the last 9 days, maybe the “Hillary I Know” campaign is getting the message out. While Obama’s numbers lead Demorcrats . . . but he only showed a meager 0.27% growth rate.
Keep tuned to KoFacts.com and we’ll revist their YouTube.com traffic reports just prior to the Iowa Caucus in 8 days.
kris
YouTube.com and the Presidency . . . An Introduction
If you know me at all, you know that I love politics. I’m not sure if it was growing up in DC or not but I am constantly plugged into what is happening in the political environment. In fact, I’m probably a politics addict. I would rather watch Meet the Press on Sunday morning than go to church . . . I know that’s scary but it’s true. Thus far I’ve tried to insulate my readers from including too many political articles in my blog because I did not want to turn this into just another politico blog. That would be the fastest way to lose readers. But I had an idea that I wanted to share.
The recent YouTube debate with the Republican candidates for President got me thinking about the impact YouTube and Web 2.0 technologies may be having on the election itself.Acknowledging the power of the internet all of the major candidates are posting videos on the web trying to tap into the viral nature of “user contributed content”. In fact all of the candidates have Channels on YouTube where their videos are posted and available. An astute viewer can track and compare the number of views for each of the candidates and track them overtime.We’ll I’ve isolated those numbers and as of 11:30PM this evening, here are how many views their videos have received.
Views on YouTube 12/17/2007
Democrats
Hillary Clinton 1,132,922
Barrack Obama 11,454,594
John Edwards 721,953
Republicans
Mike Huckabee 344,667
Rudy Guiliani 781,791
John McCain 541,783
Ron Paul 6,413,367
It’s very interesting to see the commanding leads of Obama and Paul . . how will their online popularity translate to political success . . . .we shall see. I’ll update these numbers weekly and provide an analysis of their growth in the coming weeks.
Kris
Next Up . . Another Tech Bubble?
As the reminents of the real estate bubble float back down to earth and well intentioned friends discuss the value or harm of freezing interest rates for those who are over extended.
It’s time to turn our attention to the next bubble . . . .could it be tech’s turn again?
Let’s hope not. I’ve gotta sell my Google stock first.
Kris
No More Travel For Me a Google Maps Tour . . .
So I’ve just come off a whirlwind tour of America for the purpose of reviewing datacenters for a new business venture we’ll be launching. In a matter of two and a half weeks I’ve visited: Las Vegas (7 Days), Los Angeles (4 Days), Portland 2 Days, Washington DC (2 Days), and Boston (2 Days). I am done. I swear right here and now that I will not visit more than two places in a 30 days timeframe again.
But while this travel was exhausting it got me thinking about how much travel I’ve done in my 16 years of professional work. And while I’m certainly no traveling sales man I’ve seen alot of cities in the US and some I’d even like to visit again. In order to see all of the places I’ve traveled to I wanted to put together a online map that I could use to track my travel. So I went to Google and used the “My Maps” feature to create my own online map.
While this map is very basic, I wanted to create a map with small push pins in the places I’ve visited. Using My Maps I created a new map called My Travel and after searching for each of the cities I wanted to mark I could right click and place a placemark on the map and fill in some information about that spot. You can even link to online photos of the area which I will tackle in an upcoming blog post. But here is the net result:
As you can tell this service also allows you to publish your map for your visitors to see and find you. You could easily use this on your site to create an online guide to your locations or points of interest.
Build Your Own News Feed – Right Now
Perhaps the most visible result of the Internet’s world wide use is the explosion of information that is being published by everyone from News Corp to . . .well people like us . . . .bloggers. I beleive that this overload of information has forced most of us to specialize or narrow our interests. this could also be the result of us getting older. If we do narrow our interests as we mature then this deluge of information becomes increasingly more oppressive. How can you keep up with the news you need or want to know about like your hobbies, your employer, or your neighborhood when there is so much information to sort through to find the nuggets you want? The answer, dear reader, is to create your own news feed. It’s actually suprisingly easy and you can do it in less than 5 minutes.
Let’s pretend that I have an interest in Coin Collecting but I’m soooo busy with my collection that I can’t possibly sift through the vast amount of drivel on net to hear what the US Mint is doing. . . this sounds like a great idea for a news feed.
Beginners
Go To Google
When you arrive on Google’s home page check the upper left corner for the link to News – click it.
When you click the link, the page will refresh to show you the top stories of the day. Enter the topic, person, or business you want to keep track of. For mine I’ll enter the US Mint.
After you click search Google returns all of the new stories about the topic, person, or organization you entered.
If you are satisfied with the results and would like to get new articles that match your search term via email, click the “News Alerts” link on the left hand side.
Here you can provide the email address that you’d like to have the notifications sent to and choose how frequently you’d like to be notified of a matching story.
Now if any news article or press release comes out about your topic you’ll receive and email notification with a link to the latest. Talk about being in the loop!
Intermediate
After you have tested your search terms in Google’s news portal click the RSS link just below the News Alerts link on the left hand side.
The page will show the RSS feed with Google’s stylesheet.
Copy the URL and you can now use this in any RSS reader that you are comfortable with. iGoogle, MyYahoo, NetVibes, etc. I used the exact same process to create a custom feed for news about my employer and added it to my NetVibes page. (see below)
This is really easy to setup and can keep you “in the know”.
- Kris
Another Application Moves to the Cloud
If you are a technophile at all, you will regularly have a need to diagram systems, networks, databases, or work-flows. For many years this functionally has been the domain of the very powerful and very expensive Visio program from Microsoft.
Fortunately someone has decided to liberate us from the licensing Goliath that is Microsoft by creating a Web 2.0 version of Visio called Gliffy . . .it can be found at http://www.gliffy.com
Gliffy allows users to create professional images online, collaborate with other desingated people or keep them private for your records alone.
Here is a very simple example that I created showing my home network:
The interface is exceptionally easy to use and there are a variety of shape groups you can choose from. This is great piece of software, I have not doubt they will soon be picked up by Google and added to their suite of products.
Once you have created your image online you can link to it or embed it in your website or blog:
Is is a pretty cool site.
Hi, My name is Kris Kovacs and welcome to KoFacts my blog about everyday leadership, management, technology, politics, scouting and other fun stuff. I have a diverse background in financial services and information technology so the topics I cover tend to be applicable to business and IT. Thanks for stopping by. Please subscribe to my blog or bookmark it and visit often.
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