Tablets could be awesome for language learning

January 13, 2010 · Posted in Education, Technology · 2 Comments 

What I really want when it comes to new tech is a cheap, ultraportable, lean text writing and editing device. Which means a keyboard, probably. So I haven’t been all that interested in the rush of tablets. But last night I was thinking about how I struggle to keep fresh the foreign languages I know, and it occurred to me that one of the killer uses for a tablet would be language learning and maintanence.

Language learning takes place best in an immersive environment that can be entered consistently and provides a variety of ways to gain spoken, written and reading comprehension competencies. A tablet would be a great way to present video, audio, photos, words, quizzes, etc. Yes, that’s all content that is currently available through websties and software on desktops and laptops and smartphones. But I do think that a tablet form, that allows one to interact in a comfortable, casual setting and requires touch feedback (rather than the mouse or track pad) and has a bright, well-designed screen and an app-driven interface presents enough improvements and enticements and sensory experiences to really make language learning much better.

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Features I want from Hulu, Netflix, Gmail and other web services

September 4, 2009 · Posted in Social Media, Technology · 3 Comments 

I have no major complaints about most of the web services I use*. Of course, that’s a bit tautological because if I hated them, I wouldn’t use them. But anyway, I do have some suggestions for minor improvements to the following web services:

Hulu: I would like a smarter queue that tracks what I have already seen. It’s great that you can subscribe to shows and when new episodes get loaded on to Hulu, they pop in your queue. But because episodes sometimes get taken down (after I have seen them) and then put back up (for example, to drum up excitement for the start of a new season), the queue oftens clogged with episodes of a show that I have already viewed on Hulu. I want an option to only show ones I haven’t viewed already — and for re-uploads to recognize that I saw them on the first go round.

Netflix: I would like a queue that’s just like the current queue but is for tracking purposes only, and I want to be able to subscribe to actors, directors, writers, studios, awards lists, certain critics picks, sub-genres and sub-sub-genres and when something new is acquired by Netflix that features the keywords and  individuals I’ve subscribed to, I want those titles to appear at the top of that tracking queue.**

Gmail: I love Gmail. I’m one of those who immediately took to thread conversations and tags instead of folders.  There is one feature I’d like though: the ability to tag an e-mail before (or as you go to) send it.

Google Docs: Yes, you can export Google Docs in a variety of formats, but there are occassions where I like to simply publish a Doc. For those instances I’d like to be able to have the option of auto-pagination (and be able to specify how many paragraphs or words for each page).

Twitter: I know this is supposed to be on the way, but, imo, the ability to RT from the web interface can’t happen soon enough. Yes, I use Tweetdeck and Hootsuite fairly often, but sometimes the web interface it just easiest to use, and I’d like to be able to easily retweet from it.

YouTube: I want 20 minute video uploads. Some better metrics tools (and even integration with Google Analytics) would be nice too.

Flock: I want it to open faster.

Flickr: I want the ability to batch organize sets and collections without going in to Flickr’s Ajax (sometimes browser resource heavy) Organizer e.g. just using titles of everything without thumbnails and the drag and drop feature — a light version, I guess, of the Flickr Organizer.

GoodReads: I want the ability to easily order titles on  shelves (both drag and drop and enter number) and the ability to select multiple shelves and only show the titles that match all the selected shelves.

*Facebook is the Big Exception, but I’m not going to go in to all that in what is intended to be a light, quick post.

**I also want Linux supported Netflix On Demand, but that’s not a feature  improvement, per se.

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I want non-destructive editing for photos

August 10, 2009 · Posted in Technology · Comment 

I encountered two things recently that crystallized for me an issue I have been having with image files. The first was doing some reading on Final Cut Pro and finding out about non-destructive editing. The second was this Signal vs. Noise post by Jazon Z. titled Work in Photoshop, don’t Save in Photoshop. Jason talks about how when he works in Photoshop on user interface concepts, he no longer saves the results as PSD files (complete with layers), but instead he just takes a screenshot of the various iterations.

As I thought about those two bits of information, I began to realize that image management and editing is fundamentally lame because you have to save image files for every iteration of any photo you work with. Maybe I’m just doing it wrong. But there are times when I end up with a source photo, a photo with a conservative crop, one with a funky crop, the photo I upload to Flickr, the one that I size for placing on a web page, the one that I e-mail to people that’s print quality but under 3 mb (because that’s the attachment size limit at work), etc. etc.

What if there was some killer piece of image management software that helped you catalog and tag your photos AND kept a record of all the various pieces of specialized software that accessed the image, but didn’t keep any of the edits/filters/resizings you used. But then if you open the image in Photoshop (or GIMP or Aviary’s Phoenix, etc.), Photoshop itself has saved the various versions of the image that you told it to save and brings those up in a dialogue that you can scroll through and as you view each one, Photoshop is applying those parameters or filters, but the source image itself isn’t touched e.g. non-destructive editing. The same is true if you open it in Fireworks or Dreamweaver. The source file is the same but the filters native to that program and attached to that image come in to play when you’re actually working with it. And then, of course, the image that gets uploaded to the server is the correctly edited and sized jpeg or png or gif (or maybe even not then, but that’s getting in to some issues with cloud computing and future versions of html that are beyond my ken).

And did I mention that the source file will keep data on where it’s been uploaded via the image management software (whether that’s Picasa, iPhoto, F-spot, or Lightroom or Aperture, etc.) so you can see if you uploaded it to Facebook or Spreadshirt or icanhascheezburger or Google Presentation (and when)? Because that’d be cool. Frankly, image/photo management is a huge pain and the number of different versions of a photo or image one needs is verging on the ridiculous. Is this an unreasonable request? Is something like this already being worked on? Is anybody else as dissatisfied as I am with the state of photo management?

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A method for composing stories/pitches/releases (or: throwing off the shackles of Microsoft Word)

April 2, 2009 · Posted in Media Relations, PR, Social Media, Technology · 1 Comment 

A few weeks ago I realized that the current system our office had for information management for our stories, pitches, news releases, event announcements, etc. just wasn’t working. I was tired of formatting issues cropping up as I moved content between platforms. I was worried about how much was stored in the e-mail in-boxes of me and my co-workers rather than on our share drive. And I was beginning to understand that engagement with social media — even on a straitlaced, low-frequency scale (which I’m not necessarily happy about, but we’re doing the best we can with a small shop) — meant that viewing content as A News Release or A Magazine Story wasn’t going to work.

Here’s the solution I came up with the help of one of my co-workers:

  1. Everything is now a story — we don’t think of content by what platform it’s going to be featured on/in.
  2. Any story, no matter how big or small or important or whatever other adjective you want to apply to it, gets a text file created about it (in Notepad) as soon as we know about it. This text file is placed in a Stories folder on our department’s shared rive. The filename consists of a status tag, key words, and a month. The status tags are a = active, t = tickler, z = archived e.g. a_NewStoryMethod_April09.txt. The idea here is that stories with the same status will group together.
  3. The text file is set up with three basic areas separated by a few hyphens as a visual divider. The areas are: Publishing , Story and Source.
    • In the Publishing area we list the platforms we think this story should be published too. This includes News release, Web site, faculty/staff newsletter, student newsletter, alumni newsletter, alumni magazine, Facebook, Flickr, YouTube, Twitter and more. When we publish to those areas, it gets noted next to the platform. Sometimes that’s a date and URL. Sometimes it’s just a date posted. Sometimes it’s a reference to an edition. Whatever makes sense so we can look it up later if we need to. If we’re sure this story isn’t going to be represented in one of those areas, that tag gets deleted.
    • In the Story area we have a bunch of different content fields. How many all depends on the story, but the possible fields so far are: Photos, Video, Headline, Subhed, Excerpt/Summary (1-2 paragraphs), Story (with a lead paragraph and as many paragraphs as the story demands — in some cases this may be Bullet Points or the Who/What/When/Where of an event listing rather than Story), Quotes (with notations about approvals or needs), and Boilerplate. For photos or video we copy and paste the file path to where those photos or videos are located. And these fields change depending on the nature of the story. Basically we dump them all in the template and then remove when we’re sure we don’t have to worry about that field.
    • In the Source area we dump everything that we get as raw sources — the text of e-mails, resumes, the results of Q&As, transcripts of tape-recorded interviews — with a note on where that info came from.
  4. Obviously this is just the source product. If we need to create a formal news release in Microsoft Word complete with letterhead then we do that and it’s housed in the News Releases folder just like ones created before this new system. And created isn’t the right word — it’s assembled from the pieces — the quotes, the explanatory paragraphs, the lead, the boilerplate. And for our alumni magazine, we’ll use this as a source and plug in quotes, but probably rewrite the lead and headline so it’s more feature-like. In addition, for pitching the media, I may rewrite the excerpt/summary to make it more relevant to the targeted publication. And when translating the headline for posting to Twitter, I may make it more colloquial. But the point is this the story source from whence all other pitches, stories, news briefs, releases, Flickr set summaries, etc. etc. flow.
  5. This could all change and we could ditch the system next week and it really only works well if everybody who is generating and disseminating content buys in to it. One cool thing is that it allows me to outsource some of dissemination work to a co-worker. And conversely, if a co-worker has a Story that was featured in, say, the faculty/staff newsletter and we decide to elevate it to the alumni magazine or a pitch, I know where to go first to get up to speed on what info we already have.

Hopefully my explanation is fairly clear. If not, I’ve uploaded a sample content_template that may help.

We’ve used this process for three stories so far, and so far I think it’s fantastic. I love not having to worry about formatting issues when I copy and paste*. I like that when I go to post an affiliated Flickr set or a Facebook note, I can pick and choose the language and details I want to add (and then modify if needed for tone and length). I find it soothing to not compose in Word.

Now there are a couple of downsides to this method. First, there’s no spellcheck**. Second, you have to remember to turn off word wrap when you copy and paste from Notepad — otherwise you end up with weird line breaks. I’d love to use Gedit (which I use at home on my Ubuntu box), but we’re a Windows XP shop at work. At some point, I’ll check out other text editors for Windows (anybody have suggestions?). But for now, Notepad is working just fine. It’s pretty sweet how quickly files open and save and close — and how small they are even if I’ve dumped several pages of stuff in to the Source section.

Keep in mind that there’s only four of us in our department, and we don’t publish a ton of content so this may not work for other college pr and marketing offices, but so far it has been a very positive change. And really, the key message of this post is not the method, but rather this: with a million places to publish, you better have some way of storing all the bits and pieces of content you need to tell your stories. And e-mail isn’t it. And a formal news release archive with nicely formatted MS Word docs isn’t it, either.

* Seriously — have you ever seen the crazy html code that MS Word creates when you try to copy and paste in to a CMS like Dreamweaver, WordPress or an e-newsletter service? Or even just in to an e-mail. It’s so annoying.

** I believe there are text editors with spellcheck. I’m looking into it and will post a comment if I find anything interesting to report.

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