Prezi is a cloud-based presentation software that opens up a new world between whiteboards and slides. The zoomable canvas makes it fun to explore ideas…

TED is a cutting-edge conference featuring “ideas worth spreading”

It goes without saying that people want to be entertained, and video may be the ultimate entertainment. The use of [...]]]>

Prezi is a cloud-based presentation software that opens up a new world between whiteboards and slides. The zoomable canvas makes it fun to explore ideas…

TED is a cutting-edge conference featuring “ideas worth spreading”

It goes without saying that people want to be entertained, and video may be the ultimate entertainment. The use of video in marketing, and education is also becoming more prevalent. In my workshop, a student recently declared that most of her listening exercises were conducted with video. I feel mostly the same way, and maybe that has to do with the fact that we often source our media from the Internet.  The Internet, with its steady increase in content and bandwidth is an ideal platform for video.

When I conduct my “CALL workshop” – on Educational Technology – I have found that if I ask for “interesting sites” that I get a few predictable responses. In no means do I mean “predictable” as “dull.” But the two sites that are recurring with some frequency as possible teacher/student tools are TED Talks and Prezi. They are both very worthy of your time.

Presentation has come to mean two things: one a series of text and images, presented using tech like PowerPoint, and two, the actual process and art of giving a talk, with the slideshow of images and information playing a major role. the conventional knock against PowerPoint is that it is dull. In my opinion, it is not the technology at fault, but the skills and imagination of those who create them (to be simple we see too many bullets, too much text).

I happened upon some links I can share that bring it all together, and show the synergy between presentations and online video. First off TED Talks which is an amazing wealth of ideas and eloquent people speaking – and a worthy mention as great resource online. And the second, Prezi, has crept up in frequency and my be on the cusp of great things. It just so happens that I found a “talk” and a “Prezi” by TED head Chris Anderson, and it’s a cool reference from Prezi’s own blog to share with you.

Chris Anderson, not to be confused with Wired editor of the same name, is both the TED head, and one of a number of respected presenters who has shared a presentation using a web-based tool. Slideshare is a well known site, and experts such as Garr Reynolds, author of the amazing book “Presentation Zen,” has posted numerous presentations there (Check Presentation Design 411, which starts to really break the fundamentals down around slide 11). You can view Chris Anderson’s Prezi to see some of the format’s potential to be engaging and truly interactive. Watching his Prezi presentation I was reminded of the power of motion graphics tools like Adobe’s After Effects – it’s truly a visually dynamic format – the “camera” perspective pulls away, rotates and zooms in on featured content areas (which would represent slides in a tradtional Powerpoint format). Chris samples some “baby break-dancing” videos and other eclectic international footage to complement the message he has to share, which is that Internet video is changing the way we communicate in an increasingly globalized world.

If you are keen to create a whole new kind of animated Powerpoint, with highly visual transitions and different kinds of embedded media, you should check out Prezi, and Chris Anderson’s Prezi is indeed a true inspiration (see first link below).

Links:

There’s only one link you need that connects you with both Chris Anderson’s Prezi presentation and one of his TED talks:
http://blog.prezi.com/2010/09/16/watch-ted-head-chris-andersons-prezi/

Prezi – “Create game-changingpresentations online.”
http://prezi.com/

A blog article on the features of Prezi – “Finding an alternative to PPT”

http://www.k-international.com/blog/finding-an-alternative-to-powerpoint/

Presentation guru Garr Reynolds wrote about this same topic here
Garr Reynolds’ blog entry on Chris Anderson’s Ted Talk and Prezi

Alternative Online Presentation Tool – Slideshare -” Offers users the ability to upload and share publicly or privately PowerPoint presentations, Word documents and Adobe PDF Portfolios”
http://www.slideshare.net/

Alternative Online Presentation Tool - Google Docs (also create text docs, spreadsheets and more)
https://docs.google.com 

For those of you who would like my take and synopsis, please read on. (Link at end of this blog post).

The basic premise of the article [...]]]> I picked up the September 2010 issue of Wired Magazine and was struck by the amazing cover story and (design!). It boldly declares that the “Web is Dead!”

For those of you who would like my take and synopsis, please read on. (Link at end of this blog post).

The basic premise of the article is that the Internet, still essentially a relatively new technology and communications medium, is expanding, while the “web” is dying. Web in this case means the old school ‘net, the one where we often kept to the first few sections of the home page at media giant “portals”, surfed randomly and explored hyperlinks that took us far and wide, and often avoided downloading media because our bandwidth was so limited (dial-up connections etc).

Here are some of the main ideas:

• These days we don’t surf – we “get” (we know what we want)
• We do the “getting” with “apps” rather than web browsers
• “Walled Gardens” like Facebook may eclipse the free/open “Googlverse”

The “World Wide Web” has long been falling our of fashion (and use/necessity). Indeed, most web servers are configured to allow for “www” or simply “http” at the beginning of a domain name. Most recent browsers allow you to type “domain.extension” and go directly to your website of choice. The idea of the web has been dying too. This is key. In practice, many of us no longer randomly “surf” the Internet (unless we are bored, killing time etc). We spend most of our time doing very specific tasks, and we don’t always use web browsers to access “the cloud” (Our data in web servers around the Internet).

A few examples come to mind. Applications like Skype and Facebook help us connect with friends. Many spend their online time downloading media (technologies like BitTorrent clients have helped boost video to encompass more than 50% of all Internet traffic these days). People often use Facebook with a computer/browser, but the long-term trend is that in the near future more and more folks across the globe will use Smartphones and iPads and the like, and use applications that bypass web browsers (and obviously even conventional computers).

The concept of the “walled garden” is something I saw a lot when reading a recent book about Google (“Googled: The End of the World As We Know It” by Ken Auletta). Google’s mission is to get you to your desired content as quickly as possible (and yes sell a few text ads along the way). A traditional “old school” Internet powerhouse like the former AOL or the still powerful Yahoo seeks to create or aggregate content and make their websites “sticky.” Facebook may be the stickiest yet – a very powerful walled garden with built-in communication tools and tons of links and compelling user-generated content. There are suggestions that, with 500 million users, Facebook is blowing Google’s doors (outdoing them in the race for Internet supremacy).

A company like Apple is fully engaged with these trends too. Media production companies digitize their releases and figure out ways to rent or sell this content online. Apple’s portable devices (iPhone, iPod, iPad) help drive a large amount of the Internet traffic. We’re talking about growing demand for legal downloads that stream in a dedicated media player like Windows Media Player, iTunes, VLC or Divx Player.

Truthfully the web is hardly dead and web browsers as we know them will probably exist for quite a while. But long-term people will increasingly “get” rather than “surf”, and continue to use more applications on an increasingly wide array of electronic devices. Wired’s magazine feature is a little abstract at times and suffers from some mild hyperbole but offers some great insights into Internet trends that affect us all.

It’s a fascinating article that features the writing of two senior writers/editors – and the introduction provides a nice overview:

“Two decades after its birth, the World Wide Web is in decline, as simpler, sleeker services — think apps — are less about the searching and more about the getting. Chris Anderson explains how this new paradigm reflects the inevitable course of capitalism. And Michael Wolff explains why the new breed of media titan is forsaking the Web for more promising (and profitable) pastures.”

Read the Wired Article:

http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/08/ff_webrip/all/1

The Contact Photography Festival just passed and my blog’s Google rank was higher than EYE weekly magazine and both the Facebook page for the fest and a page in Yahoo Business. [...]]]> Can my site rank higher than Facebook and Yahoo? Yes, in the right circumstances, and with a terrifically crafted post on a specific subject.

The Contact Photography Festival just passed and my blog’s Google rank was higher than EYE weekly magazine and both the Facebook page for the fest and a page in Yahoo Business. The Google result for “Contact Photography Festival” placed me on the third page of results (out of millions) and confirmed to me that my online marketing strategies are paying off.

People do come to my site, read my articles and check out my videos. The question is: “How to convert that into something tangible”? You’ll also note that my blog contains no advertising of any sort, so some might ask the more elementary question “Why blog?”

It’s interesting to mull the answers and talk about what motivates me and how I’m marketing myself on the WWW.

Motivations to Blog

First of all I am an expressive person and I’ve always liked writing. Designing a blog was fun and graphic design is my main focus, but I’m interesting in reaching a wide audience and exposing people to interesting people, places, and events, and engaging people in issues I care about. If you check out my site, you’ll see I have postings on a variety of topics but they fall mainly under these 10 categories: art, design, Toronto, film, books, blogging, WordPress, education, school, workshops etc. I write about what I know and what I’m interested in.

Recently I had an interesting experience while taking an informational interview with a design industry person many years my junior. After I introduced myself and my wide background of work, the designer took a deep breath and offered up this comment: “I think you have to ask yourself, ‘Do you want to express yourself or do you want to communicate?’” Later I had a chance to mull it over. I realized that I was doing both. I understand how communication works in the digital age and I’ve capitalized on it — and I express myself through my art and my blog (and other sites).

Represent Yourself – Online Identity and Branding

“Whether you realize it or not, you have an online “brand,” too. Do you have a Facebook or MySpace account? Do you comment on blogs? Have you tried out Twitter? When you post content, engage others or share information about yourself on the Web, you are creating a unique identity—branding yourself, in a sense.”

- Patti Church / Whyhire.me

In an article in Career Options magazine, which is targeted toward Canadian college students, Ms. Church describes trends in branding and marketing and puts forth the argument that we all need to fine tune our online brands, because if we don’t, others will do it for us. She quotes the amazing statistic that a giant majority of employers will google a job seeker, and often they find publicly accessible web pages, such as Facebook, Google or blogs and forums. Read Patti’s terrific article at: http://careeroptionsmagazine.com/creating-your-online-brand/

In “The Long Tail,” one of the more interesting business books of the last decade, Chris Anderson of Wired Magazine analyzes trends related to business and the rise of the collaborative community-based Internet. There are two things he writes about which I find relevant and interesting. One, products are increasingly being made and distributed by prosumers (yes – it implies a combination of professional /producer and consumer) — regular folks who take it upon themselves to avail themselves of some semi-professional gear and produce hi-quality art, music, books and utilize the digital tools of our age to get their message out. An important chapter takes a look at the “Democratization of the tools of Production.” Anyone today can develop their own product and marketing materials – and online aggregators like Amazon and  iTunes allow us to pitch our product to the whole world. Two, a smart person can develop what might be called “traction” or “cachet” – a certain respect and professional prestige which, if it doesn’t directly earn money (and it can if you publish a book for instance), can indirectly boost your career by opening up opportunities to you in your industry. Some speaking engagements might be non-paying but that presentation, like the blog entry, impresses upon your peers that you have a valuable contribution to make. Convert your reputation, in other words, into professionally-related reward.

You are a product, a brand. What are you doing to promote yourself? Are you pro-actively managing your online identity? If you build a website or blog, Google will find it and rush your personal page to the top of the results page. this ensures you present the most professional side of yourself when the world comes calling through digital age channels.

Build it and They Will Come

If you put a modicum of time and energy into a blog you shall reap some reward. If you pay attention to certain practises and principles then it should bring you traffic and reach a lot of people. I have some basic recommendations and they can all easily fit into a summary I could just describe as “Google-ize” yourself. Are your meta tags tweaked? Do you even know what I’m talking about? Here are some tips to help you get going.

Google / Search Engines – Make sure you update your site frequently, use relevant keywords in your headings and page titles, and always be sure to add media to your posts and pages. I am convinced that much of my success has come from exploiting tools like Google Maps, YouTube, social media websites etc – in part to diversify the kinds of content on my site, and also to simply provide links back to my content. Your site probably has the ability to put “meta tags” into the source code – meta tags includes areas like “description” and “keywords” – this helps search engines understand your site and what it’s all about.

Overall there is probably no substitute for good craft – take some time for design and write well. Or hire someone like me to get the job done.

Thanks for reading!

Mike

mike | strongandfree.ca

This year’s theme is “Pervasive Influence: Exploring the social and political consequences of the medium of [...]]]> The annual Contact Photography Festival is taking place through the month of May. Unlike the other famous Toronto festivals, including HotDocs and TIFF, this one is completely free – so there are no excuses – check some stuff out!

This year’s theme is “Pervasive Influence: Exploring the social and political consequences of the medium of photography, in a world devoted to the image.”

The following is from the Contact website:

“…In this era of instant information the image is stimulating unprecedented change in the way we communicate… In 1964 Marshall McLuhan wrote of the photograph as “the brothel without walls”. He described photographs as “dreams that money can buy” which could be “hugged and thumbed more easily than public prostitutes.” If we consider his metaphor within today’s global culture rife with image saturation, is the illusion images create now preferable to reality? …Is its ability to convey meaning now diluted by the widespread dissemination of images?

CONTACT 2010 will consider the ways in which photography informs and transforms human behavior. The festival will recognize the influence of Marshall McLuhan, on the 30th anniversary year of his death. We will present images that examine connections between mass media, advertising, art and photography.”

Primary Exhibitions include:

The Brothel Without Walls – U of T Arts Centre

Susan Anderson, Evan Baden, Douglas Coupland, Jessica Dimmock, Marina Gadonneix, Clunie Reid, Stefan Ruiz, Joachim Schmid, Christopher Wahl
http://scotiabankcontactphoto.com/primary-exhibitions/182

Media satirist Barbara Kruger — AGO – Art Gallery of Ontario – installation
http://www.nationalpost.com/arts/story.html?id=2962693

Toronto Star Recommended exhibits by writer Murray Whyte
http://www.thestar.com/entertainment/whatson/article/801893–contact-festival-plenty-of-eye-candy-in-the-brothel-without-walls

Murray Whyte’s recommendations (first 3):

1. The Mechanical Bride, Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art: The festival is heavy on Marshall McLuhan this year — the exhibition title is borrowed from the legendary media theorist’s book of the same name — and, in a nutshell, tries to embody his remarkably prescient notion that photography was being enslaved by an advertising industry amping up seductive lifestyle appeals as a way to push product, with the female form as the main lure. Imagine that. Here, 60 years on, artists like LaChapelle, with a disturbingly robotic image of Lady Gaga, and Dana Claxton, who filters the appropriative gloss of marketing through her lens of First Nations’ experience, underscore McLuhan’s role as a soothsayer, proving him right, only more so. May 1

2. The Brothel Without Walls, University of Toronto Art Centre: Further on the McLuhan theme — in his landmark 1964 book Understanding Media, he called photographs exactly that, and “dreams money can buy”— this show includes work by, among others, Douglas Coupland, Jessica Dimmock and Evan Baden, whose images of amateur online exhibitionists seem to take McLuhan’s notion, of an artificial reality spurred by the easy ubiquity of picture-making, to its logical extreme. May 1

3. Untitled (It), Art Gallery of Ontario, Dundas St. façade: For decades — long before it became a de rigueur street-art standard—Barbara Kruger’s withering satires of advertising in the public realm made her an art-world superstar. Kruger’s iconic aesthetic of text and found images speaks advertising’s language of vapid non-sequitur-ese so fluently, at first glance, as to be near-indistinguishable; a double-take yields results both hilarious and sobering. Here, she festoons the AGO’s 90-metre-long Dundas St. glass awning with a new work commissioned specifically for the festival — a coup

Today I fired up Google Chrome and saw the Olympic graphic (or “doodle”) Google created for their homepage. (It’s pictured at the end of this article). The image is subtle and appealing. It doesn’t even [...]]]> The branding and identity work for the Olympics features some stunning illustration. Kudos to the Vancouver Olympic committee!

Today I fired up Google Chrome and saw the Olympic graphic (or “doodle”) Google created for their homepage. (It’s pictured at the end of this article). The image is subtle and appealing. It doesn’t even use the color scheme that the Vancouver Games have been using – relying instead on a range of subtle blues punctuated by a dull orange flame. On the other hand, I’m fed up already with the punishing barrage of TV commercials from CTV, McDonalds, HBC, and the dozens of other companies that have jumped on the back of the Olympics in an effort to increase their brand appeal.

Perhaps you have seen the amazing illustrations that were created for the games. I didn’t know much about who created these icons and images until I picked up a couple of magazines recently – Applied Arts, and How Magazine – both of which feature articles on the talented people behind the look of the 2010 Olympic graphics. A Vancouver company called Karacters Design Group consulted on the project but the work was done in-house by the Vancouver Olympic Committee. The key designer on the VOC project, Leo Obstbaum, apparently passed away in the summer of 2009.

Google Doodle for Vancouver 2010 by artist Dennis Hwang

Links:

How Magazine article on Olympic Design Process

http://www.howdesign.com/article/winterolympics/