Remember, your slides are there to support your talk, to make it more interesting. Find some great images or dynamite illustrations to burn your story into my brain. They are an (and usually hate this word) opportunity for you to turn a boring old talk into a multimedia event akin to the U2 Zooropa tour. Okay, that may be a stretch.

However, if you must read to me, please bring milk and cookies and offer a nap time afterwards. Or during, for that matter.

P.S. I’ve perpetrated this odious deed myself. Let’s all get better together.

Pep Tse, master of the ancient art of product placement

This is a post about Gurus, with a capital G. They have books, they have accessories and they have the answer to everything. If they’re a big enough Guru, they can become a lifestyle choice in and of themselves. They will sell and resell their “5 Secrets to Better Pancakes” or “12 Simple Steps to a Nutmeg-Free Life”.

But the real secret is that there are no secrets. The Guru makes money off those who want to buy a book instead of doing the work.

If you ever find yourself in a position where you think the only thing standing between you and your dreams is writing a check to a “Guru” to unlock the secrets of the universe, do yourself a favor and don’t. Save your money. Remember that success is very closely bound to hard work and is accelerated by God-given talent. A positive attitude is also a nice-to-have.

Chris Brogan talks about being an overnight success. It only took about ten years of non-stop speaking, blogging, writing, networking and entrepreneurship. Chris is no “Guru”, he’s a smart, humble, hard-working guy. It’s a grind. So you better love what you do, and you have to be willing to do it and do it a lot.

Remember that the mighty Beatles started as a gig band a the Cavern in Hamburg. From 1961 to 1963 The Beatles made 292 appearances there (see Wikipedia). So instead of climbing the mountain to find your guru, find yourself a cavern. Go hone your talent, eventually people will seek you out.

I’d love to hear what you think. Bonus points to the person who can guess my secret concern about these doodles.

What a stinking badger might look like.

Illustration for an article by Troy Janisch (@socialmeteor) on SmartBlog over at SmartBrief: Badges? We love those stinkin’ badges!

For those of you in Pittsburgh and Green Bay enjoying your “wear your jersey to work” day, remember that management is setting a precident. One that can (and probably will) go horribly, horribly wrong.

I doodled this for a post by Troy Janisch for SmartBrief

Jargon and biznospeak has no place in social media. Social media was designed for human interactions. You know, stuff like LOLCats and pictures of that omelette you’re about to eat. Here’s a link to the post, Social Pro Files: Considering the human costs of social currency and here’s a shameless link to my Zazzle store where you can buy a t-shirt of the angry rampaging robot.

I just had a powerful experience with Twitter that has cemented it in my mind as a powerful marketing tool.

In preparation for a meeting on a site UI this morning, I revisited An Introduction to Using Patterns in Web Design on 37signal’s site. It’s a fantastic overview of Christopher Alexander’s approach to design based on “chunks” or patterns.

After I read the article, I tweeted about it. I was sure that any number of my followers might have an interest in it. If not for their personal use, then for a reference if and when they work with me.

Here’s the tweet:

Doodlehaus tweet about Designing with Patterns by Ryan Singer

Here’s where it gets interesting. Minutes later, Jason Fried, owner of 37Signals tweets about the same article. He noticed someone was revisiting some older content produced by his company and saw it as an opportunity to promote 37Signals’ expertise on the issue.Check it out:

Jason Fried of 37Signals tweets about Pattern Design

From a random shout into the Twitter void to nearly instant recognition from the owner of one of the Web’s most innovative companies. Now that’s cool.

There are other halo effects from this exchange. Ryan Singer gets props for his article. 37Signals gets more exposure as a leader in clean, usable interface design. Christopher Alexander sells some more books. Hey, I write this post that references all these things.

All because of one little tweet.

Social Networking Sites
Facebook
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook
Originally designed for college students; facilitates interaction between friends and colleagues who can leave messages, post articles, photos, add applications; virtual equivalent of “hanging out”

MySpace
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myspace
Social networking site targeted towards a broader audience; more garish, wild and wooly.

Linked In
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linked_in
Professional networking tool; individual fill out a profile and invite colleagues to join; connections are suggested in a “7 degrees of Kevin Bacon” fashion.

Twitter
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter
Prefaced on a simple question, “what are you doing?”, Twitter helps its users broadcast their status over the internet to IM clients and SMS-enabled phones. Twitter feeds are published as RSS feeds.

Social Media Sites

YouTube
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YouTube
YouTube allows users to upload video where visitors can view and comment. YouTube videos are also distributed via RSS feeds and can be published on remote sites and blogs.

Flickr
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flickr
Photo-sharing site where users can upload and tag their photos. Visitors can view and comment. Photostreams can be delivered via RSS.

Wikipedia
Wikipedia is a free-for-all encyclopedia that is the scourge of educators everywhere. Editable by anyone, Wikipedia relies on volunteer editors to keep the mob in check. Often a great quick resource, a best practice is to verify Wikipedia information with more reliable sources.

iTunes Podcast Directory
A podcast is little more than an RSS feed with links to mp3 or mp4 files. iTunes and other RSS aggregators alert users to new episodes of their favorite amateur (or not-so-amateur) radio or TV show.

Technorati
A search engine for blogs

Slashdot/Digg
Users submit news articles and engage in discussions about said article. Both sites are known to cripple smaller sites by directing unexpectedly large numbers of visitors to a single page.

Social Bookmarking Sites
Del.icio.us / Ma.gnol.ia / Stumble Upon, etc
Ever say “I found an article online but I bookmarked it on my computer at home”? If so, then social bookmarking might just be for you. Sign up for an account and you can save your browser bookmarks online and access them from anywhere. Delicious allows users to tag their bookmarks, creating a “folksonony” where users give their opinion of what an article is about.

Concepts and definitions

Cluetrain Manifesto
“if you only have time for one clue this year, this is the one to get… ‘We are not seats or eyeballs or end users or consumers. We are human beings – and our reach exceeds your grasp.’” Written and signed in 1999 this document is one of the seminal statements of the Web 2.0 movement.

Blogs
Short for “weblog”, blogs are the digital equivalent of the printing press. Anyone can sign up at TypePad or Blogger and start publishing their opinions online. No real understanding of HTML, FTP, Apache or any other web technology is needed other than an internet connection and a browser.

Wikis
As described earlier, a wiki is a document that can be edited by anyone. Every iteration is logged and saved allowing for rollback to previous versions in the instance of vandalism.

RSS
“Real Simple Syndication” is a standard XML format that allows for standardized distribution of information. It is the backbone of the Web 2.0 movement.

Tagging / Folksonomy
Tagging is a more organic system of categorizing content. Blog postings, YouTube videos, Flickr photos are all “tagged” with short, descriptive words to facilitate sifting and winnowing through content more organically.

Web 2.0
The post-bubble internet trends towards social media via RSS as well as the prevalence of APIs to allow the sharing of data and content between web sites and applications.

Not so fast.

The New York Times article How Sticky Is Membership on Facebook? Just Try Breaking Free describes how difficult it is to close your Facebook account completely. It seems that even when you leave, Facebook retains your profile in the event you decide to opt back in. This makes it really hard to become fully removed from the Facebook databases.

From a user support angle, I can actually see the logic in this practice. No matter how many “are you sure you want to delete this?” dialog boxes, someone invariably will complain that “I didn’t think you would delete it completely.”

From a higher ed marketing perspective, however, this inability to completely hide data you have entered raises some serious privacy issues. If an institution decides to use Facebook or some other social networking tool as a means to connect students, faculty and staff only to find in the end that they cannot completely wipe the data even after explicitly requesting that very thing, it opens that institution to everything from bad publicity to legal action.

Hopefully Facebook will address these concerns and adjust its account deletion polices and procedures. Sure the tech support staff will be faced with the unavoidable “I didn’t know that deleting my profile would delete my profile” complaints, but maybe they’d be better off without those customers anyway.

Some quick numbers from the article:

• only 15.8 percent of iPod users ever played any video content on their iPod or iTunes
• only 1 percent of the content items played on an iPod or iTunes was video content

Unfortunately, the article doesn’t talk much about the demographics of the 400 iPod users they sampled. It would be interesting to run a similar study of college student iPod use where lecture videos were available via iTunes.