Category Archives: Social Media

Today’s updates for Flipboard and Springpad

March 27, 2013 12:32 pm \

Exploring new things

Significant updates were released today for a pair of iPad apps that I have a varying degree of familiarity with – Flipboard and Springpad.

Flipboard I used for a bit when it first came out, and I liked it but preferred a more traditional text-based view of my RSS feeds that I could sort by subject. Flipboard is beautiful, and it works really well, I think, for following things like Twitter and Facebook, but it breaks down and was far less effective for things like Google Reader (which I still haven’t identified an alternative for, with Google’s announcement that it’s being unmercifully killed). So it was a fun social media browsing toy for awhile, but I never did much with it.

Springpad was introduced to me as an Evernote alternative, but it never stuck. I think part of it was that I just have too much information already in Evernote and there wasn’t a “holy crap I have to have that” feature in Springpad to get me to switch. The new version that launched today has some features I don’t recall from the first time I checked it out – mostly in the templates it offers for specific post types like checklists and contact management – so it might be worth revisiting this. I still think I’d be hard-pressed to switch away from Evernote though.

The updates to both Flipboard and Springpad today added the functionality to add what both are calling “magazines” of (UPDATE: actually, only Flipboard is calling this a “magazine”; Springpad is calling them “Embeddable Notebooks.” Thanks to Springpad VP Brian Carr for pointing this out to me!)  user-created content, but both approach the idea from different directions. As we search for ways to launch a digital version of our magazine that work with our office, any time a service like this mentions “magazine” my interest is immediately piqued. Ultimately, while the new functionality in both apps is significant, neither really match my definition of a magazine (although Springpad is closer than Flipboard).

Flipboard’s implementation essentially creates a completely custom RSS feed. I created a magazine called “College Hockey” where I dropped a couple of stories from College Hockey News, and I could easily add any other information off the web that I found and wanted to add. Flipboard users could find and subscribe to this magazine and then get anything I added to the feed pushed to their board. I could add self-generated content to Flipboard’s magazines by creating a blog post somewhere and then manually adding that page to the feed. There currently isn’t an automated way to have my magazine auto-detect new content and add it to the feed, though; every post must be added manually. For what basically amounts to a custom RSS feed, that’s somewhat of a drag. Flipboard’s implementation is, for all intents and purposes, its version of Storify – and Storify is already pretty good and has traction.

Springpad’s implementation  is essentially a shared notebook on the service. Evernote’s had shared notebooks for awhile. Like Flipboard you can add pretty much any sort of content you wish to a notebook – sharing a link or whatever content you want to put in a Springpad note – and there are templates for adding specific content like movies, music, recipes, products, checklists, events, to-do lists, contacts, etc. So you can create content and bundle it up and share it as a “magazine,” but it seems like somewhat of an odd implementation as it forces you into one of two options for storage – either using the magazine to gather content that is stored in Springpad (which is a free service without a paid upgrade option like Evernote, meaning your content is at the mercy of the survival of the parent company) or linked from elsewhere online, making it the same implementation as Flipboard’s magazines.

As I said earlier, neither of these things really fits my idea of a “magazine,” although Springpad probably comes the closest.

Posted in: Social Media, work

So I’ve been distracted

February 27, 2013 10:37 pm \

To say I’ve been distracted and a bit over-extended lately would be putting things mildly. Here’s a rundown of my activities over the last couple of months (since Christmas really).

Social Media Strategist Certification

I joked about this on Facebook last night; I’ve started working on an online training course to prepare to take the National Institute of Social Media‘s exam to become a certified social media strategist. The course just started on Monday so I don’t remotely have a good handle on it yet, but so far it’s incredibly basic and actually isn’t all that different from the grad school courses I’ve taken online for my degree program at Winona State. I’m hoping that things pick up considerably as the course progresses.

New comic day

Roy’s had a big pile of Marvel’s Essential Horror volume 2 today; they were running a cool deal where they were giving it away for free with the purchase of a trade collection out of this pile that they had assembled on the counter, or for five bucks on its own. So I paid the five bucks and picked it up along with this week’s small three-book haul. That’s going to be a fun addition to the reading list.

One of the things I picked up today was last week’s release of the first issue of IDW’s second reset of its G.I. Joe franchise; after the second “season” of books completely fell apart after the Cobra Command storyline wrapped up, I didn’t have much hope for it. But it was actually pretty good. I’m interested to see where new writer Fred Van Lente takes the series.

Work

Work’s been crazy, to put it simply. We have so many things going on right now, and we seem to absorb more significant projects at an astonishingly rapid rate. But somehow we’ve managed to successfully juggle everything so far, and good work is getting done. The next two months until we get to commencement are going to be a sprint; the whole year has been a sprint really. Getting a breather this summer is going to be welcome.

 

Posted in: comics, Social Media, work

Things I’ve read today

November 16, 2012 10:44 pm \

Like a vast number of users of Apple’s products, I read every post at Daring Fireball every day. It’s an Apple-centric news, information and review blog, but it’s also about whatever else its author, John Gruber, finds really interesting and things is worth the time and effort for his readers to explore, as well.

Well, Daring Fireball has been on fire for the last couple of days.

Yesterday, links to this quite excellent (albeit quite unsafe for work due to language) piece by David Simon on this absolutely ridiculous Gen. David Petraeus “scandal,” with an equally excellent followup about an FBI agent named John O’Neill. Even if you find the language offensive, read both of these pieces very carefully and consume the key message – then ask yourself what’s really important to you when we make decisions about the people we want to protect us from the dark parts of the world. When you’re done with that, do some serious soul-searching about the notion that a person taken down by some stupid sex scandal just might have had the ability to prevent 9/11. Then ask yourself again what’s really important to you.

Then, tonight, Daring Fireball had a link to a piece called “Twitter is pivoting,” by Dalton Caldwell. I’ve thrown around the phrase “500 ways to kill yourself” when describing Twitter’s behavior as a corporation over the last year or so, particularly concerning their inexplicable desire to slay the developers of third-party clients which played such a significant role in Twitter’s lofty position in the social media landscape. Caldwell’s piece is a pretty solid analysis of the path Twitter’s taking, and makes some interesting comparisons to another former social media giant that once took a similar path.

More social media news

Pinterest launched brand pages this week; I created an account for BSU back in the spring, and then never cultivated it. The launch of brand pages gave me a reason to at least touch base with the account this week, get it converted to a brand profile and verify our website. I’m still not entirely certain how to go about using this as a social media resource for the University, particularly given the vast number of balls that I already am juggling. But it’s one of those things that just feels like we have to get going.

And, even with the understanding that we’re not using Pinterest and should be, and have no presence on Instagram and probably should, I can’t get out of my head the notion that the relaunched MySpace could be a very useful tool for promoting certain segments of the programmatic and entertainment opportunities at BSU… But it’s also one more thing to manage in an already overwhelming sea of things to manage.

Also, the Twitter battle between the Israeli Defense Force and Hamas over the last couple of days adds a really interesting psychological warfare angle to the fact that neither of those two groups of people seem to be able to find any way to not blow each other up. It’s like Spy vs Spy at this point, only nobody is miraculously back in one piece in the next issue.

Grad school update

I took today off work as a writing day for graduate school. I generated some new material for the final paper I’m doing with one other person in my Systems Thinking class, but the majority of my efforts were spent repairing some abysmal work that was turned in with the last version of this paper. Incredibly frustrating. I’ve got some more writing days next week, but need to shift gears and pour some massive work into my final paper for my other class; completing that is going to be a challenge, honestly. So I want to see if I can have the paper I worked on today essentially done by the time The Walking Dead starts on Sunday. Good goal, that.

Social goals

About the only thing I’m doing with regularity is Pinterest. Twitter is a pain to follow when I’m out and about like I was today (and, the fact that I missed my quota is a good indicator that I was concentrating on my paper instead, which is good). This is only my third post here in maybe nine days since I started the daily goals checklist; that’s probably the one thing I’d like to try and make an effort to do better at.

Legos

For a couple of evenings this week, the girls wanted to bust out the Legos in the basement. Helen has been building this huge elaborate… something. It’s either a ship or a house or a ship with a house on it, or even possibly just an undefined polygonal mass. Whatever it is, she’s put a ton of effort into it and it’s pretty interesting. While she was working on that, I set out to build a version of the Monster Fighters Vampyre Hearse (even though we don’t have the bones or fangs or other skeleton-y bits to really make it work) with a significantly meaner engine than the retail kit. I think Lego’s base kit is pretty awesome, but the front of that vehicle seems very undersized compared to the rest of it. Minifig scale tends to make a lot of stuff seem undersized, I realize, but especially given how chunky the back of that hearse is, the front third is pretty underwhelming.

I ended up building more of a science fiction truck, and I’m pretty happy with how it turned out. I want to spend more time just experimenting with the way pieces can be assembled in different ways to build certain structures, and especially how bits like saws and grates and walkie-talkies and sextants are used in interesting ways to create form and texture. I was able to do a few things with this truck (and I need to get some good pictures of it; there is an in-progress shots on Instagram), but I felt like I was limited both by a lack of parts and by a lack of understanding of how to fit together parts we do have in atypical ways to construct the masses I was going for.

Overall I’m really happy with how this vehicle turned out, particularly given the fact that it was for all intents and purposes designed on the fly as I was building it. In some cases, I found a part, decided I liked it, and figured out a way to shoe-horn it onto the vehicle in a manner that made sense and was visually appealing. There’s really only one part of the vehicle I’d change, and I honestly am not sure what I’d do as an alternative. So, for now, it’s good.

Posted in: Events of the Day, Geekdom, Grad School, Social Media

Social media checklist, Day 3

November 9, 2012 11:37 pm \

Today is Day 3 of my experiment with using a daily social media checklist.

What’s working:

• Facebook. Setting a goal of three status updates per day seems like a good goal; I’ve managed to hit that relatively easily, but not without having to think about it occasionally, so I’m comfortable with that.

• Twitter. The goal of 10 tweets and three responses has been good; the responses especially I like. I’ve been more engaged with Twitter the last three days than I have been in awhile, and it hasn’t felt overwhelming or overly distracting from my other tasks.

• Instagram. It’s forcing me to look for opportunities for photos, which is good for me.

• Pinterest. Five pins seems like a good goal; it’s been tough the last two days to come up with five things that haven’t felt like I was just shoveling content up there to reach the goal. It’s good content.

What’s not:

• Read and three things from Pocket. This wasn’t a good goal, because I quickly found that I don’t have three things a day in Pocket that I want to read and delete. Pocket’s becoming a repository for stuff I want to read and keep track of for awhile. This goal has been adjusted to just “check Pocket.”

• The “write three paragraphs in an offline journal” goal. I just don’t know that I’m going to be interested in doing that every day; this is day three and I haven’t done it yet – mostly because I haven’t had the urge to write anything that couldn’t just go here. I’m leaving this goal on the checklist for now, but I could easily see deleting it in the next few days or, at the very least, finding some way to severely modify the criteria.

Writing workflow
This week I’ve been experimenting with using iA Writer in my production workflow at work for stories. In the past, I’ve drafted stories directly in InDesign and saved an INDD file and a PDF in my archives. This year I began drafting in Pages and then moving text into InDesign; my motivation for starting was to mess around with saving documents to iCloud (I really don’t like iCloud, but I’ll post on this another time. It works just fine, but its limitations when compared to Google Drive or Dropbox are difficult to deal with). I’ve had iA Writer for a long time; I bought it on my iPad when it was on sale a while back, but I’ve never really used it. Likewise with the desktop version; an update to the desktop version brought it back to the top of my mind, so on a whim I decided to just start using it and see how it worked out.

In short, so far I am enjoying writing in iA Writer quite a bit.

The only limitation I’m running into so far is there is not remotely a straight-forward way to get Markdown-formatted text from iA Writer directly into InDesign and save the formatting. The cut-and-paste process works just fine, but then I’ve got to go through and clean up all of the Markdown indicia. For what I’m writing it’s a relatively minor stumbling block (very rarely do I write anything over 600 words), but it’s a factor to consider when thinking about using iA Writer for anything more significant until somebody comes up with a straight-forward way to import and save the formatting.

Skyfall
Mel and I went to see Skyfall tonight; what an incredibly fun movie. It was basically the perfect James Bond film – and so far and away better than the last outing, Quantum of Solace, that it’s hard to believe both movies are consecutive entries of the same franchise. Skyfall even got the opening credits right; Adele’s theme song is fantastic, and the animation was a throwback to the really excellent Roger Moore-era Bond intros. This entry eschewed Bond’s crazy gadgets – and even joked about that, with Q asking Bond if he expected to receive an exploding pen – but was filled with touches that threaded this movie back through familiar elements from the previous Bond movies. There probably will be reviews that savage this movie for its portrayal of women – which aside from Bond’s boss, M (Judy Densch), is pretty horrendous  – but in all it’s a fantastic entry in one of the most enduring film franchises out there. And, it’s simply an excellent action movie that’s well worth seeing on the big screen.

Posted in: Events of the Day, Music and Movies, Social Media

Daily social media checklist

November 7, 2012 9:07 pm \

I love participating in social media – it’s fun, and I get opportunities to easily interact with people that would otherwise be far more difficult for me to reach out to. But, it’s also one of those things that is really easy to ignore if I don’t make a conscientious effort to show up and do it. Shawn Blanc wrote about this back in July in his post, “50 things I’ve learned about publishing a weblog“; he claims his list of 50 things to be unordered, but it shouldn’t be much of a surprise that the first thing in his list is “show up every day.”

I suck at showing up every day.

I’m good at showing up every day for maybe two weeks. I’ve toyed with the idea of creating a daily checklist of things I want to make sure I do on social media every day, across all of my primary presences (Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, etc.). I just hadn’t taken the time to come up with a good system for tracking things. I’ve been using 37Signals Action Method for my work to-do list (the ability to add the notes off to the side is fantastic, even though it could use some functionality tweaks), but it doesn’t have a function to have a standing to-do list that resets each day. There are plenty of apps on the App Store that will manage daily to-do lists, but it took me until today to try and find one.

The one I’m trying is Daily Deeds. Each item on your daily to-do list also is tied to a calendar that will show the days of a particular month you crossed that item off so you can look for trends – see if one item is getting done consistently, or if there is one that’s consistently not getting done, etc.

I brainstormed a short list of the networks I wanted to be sure I hit up every day, then pulled some numbers for daily participation out of the sky and tweaked them a bit. So here’s the list I came up with:

• photo on Instagram
• three status updates on Facebook
• 10 tweets
• reply to five tweets
• find five things to pin/repin on Pinterest
• write a post for andybartlett.com (done!)
• write at least three paragraphs in an offline journal
• read and remove at least three things I have added to Pocket

It’s aggressive, particularly the writing part, but I didn’t want to start with something that would be trivially achievable like, hey, just tweet three times and update Facebook and call it good. If this works, I’ll try and adapt something similar for work — which will probably be more aggressive, since there will be the added complexity layer of having student workers to handle some/most of the load.:)

At first glance the only thing I may end up not liking about Daily Deeds is that you either check off an item from your list or you don’t. For something like the three Facebook status updates, I think it would be nice to have an ability to give myself partial credit for getting 2 of 3 or whatever, but then I also think that might eventually make me OK with not getting to three. So we’ll have to see whether I dislike that feature or not, I guess…

Anyway, that’s what I’m trying. This blog post gives me six of the eight things checked off for today, so that’s a good start. But, the key will be sustaining this. And, as I said – historically, I suck at showing up every day. One day at a time, etc.

Posted in: Events of the Day, Social Media

Twitter stupidity in Kentucky

August 20, 2012 7:46 pm \

BANNED!
At the Chronicle of Higher Education today, there’s a story about the University of Kentucky and the University of Louisville instituting new Twitter policies for student-athletes that include banned-word lists — hundreds of words and phrases that student-athletes are forbidden from using in Tweets.

This is the worst possible way to teach student-athletes how to appropriately use Twitter. First, it assumes that the people making the “banned word list” are savvy enough about the community they’re spying on to have every naughty keyword covered. This will never happen; the community will always be ahead of the censors. Always. Second, the lists are both overly broad; Kentucky’s list includes “fight,” which is a kick in the teeth to any Wildcat student-athlete who’s a gamer and wants to talk about boss fights. Louisville’s list includes brand names for alcoholic beverages, which for student athletes who are of legal drinking age means they’re banned from mentioning products they’re legally able to consume. Third, the only thing this really achieves is to force student-athletes into creating their own slang, or just using other terms, to talk about whatever is banned. Finally, it’ll likely just cause student-athletes to have a profile that administrators know about and track, and a “real” profile where they actually communicate with their friends, free of these absurd banned-word lists.

Also, imagine the nightmare it will be for the compliance staffs at both institutions to parse every single tweet coming from student athletes. It would be great if the athletes would pool together for one week and flood these two compliance offices with tens and tens of thousands of tweets, and simply overwhelm the office’s ability to keep track of them all.

By putting these policies in place, neither Kentucky nor Louisville are ultimately solving the problem they think they need to be solving. Instead of this approach, both departments should be using Twitter as a vehicle to teach their students about the power of these tools in a social, instant-communication world; this aspect of communicating in a modern, global society is not going to change or diminish in importance any time soon. If anything, as time goes on the ability to masterfully use these tools will become more and more important in order to succeed — it’s akin to what email was 20 years ago.

Both Kentucky and Louisville are institutions of higher learning. They should be taking advantage of this opportunity to be teaching ways to effectively communicate on Twitter rather than cracking down on the words student-athletes are allowed to say in order to make things easier on their administration. Because that’s what this is really about — these schools are cracking down on kids as part of some misguided effort to manage the workload for their compliance staff.

What these schools should be doing is running mandatory education sessions, where it is made it perfectly clear that despite the fact that student-athletes may primarily use these tools to talk with their friends, their stature as Division I athletes at high-profile institutions means the public is watching them in that arena. Then give them media training and teach them how to communicate, and teach them how to use the tools to ultimately build their personal fan bases and, therefore, the fan bases for their home athletic departments. Then, everybody wins.

What Kentucky and Louisville are doing here ultimately benefits no one.

 

 

Posted in: Events of the Day, Social Media, Sports

Klout changed again

August 14, 2012 9:23 pm \

Klout algorithms updated
Klout changed again; it’s using an amended scoring algorithm and is rolling out  new website features slowly over time (and, of course, will roll them out to you faster if you troll for users for them — 10 users gets you “priority access.”). My score changed with the new algorithm, increasing by about three points — I had been hovering in the 57 range, and now I’m sitting at 61 (and, according to them, have been as high as 62). Each of the last two times they’ve adjusted their algorithm, my score has increased.

I still don’t know what I think about the Klout score. Part of the new website features they’re rolling out supposedly includes a “moments” engine that shows how specific activity affects your score, and that’ll be interesting to see.  Measuring influence seems to be a difficult proposition, and to its credit Klout acknowledges this. But, as of right now, Klout claims I’m more influential online than writer Ron Marz – which just seems patently ridiculous to me.

Also, the new scoring algorithm still does not seem to be counting any influence from Facebook pages. I have Klout set up for Bemidji State‘s social presence as well; BSU’s score is 47 today, and it’s 100% derived from Twitter — even though the Facebook page I maintain for BSU is a) appropriately connected to Klout, according to everything available to me to check there, and b) has nearly 8,000 fans, had a post today that is pushing 200 likes, and had weekly reach that was just under 40,000 during our coverage of the Bemidji storm in July. And yet this is having no impact whatsoever on the score. Whether this is a Klout issue or a Facebook issue is unclear to me and, frankly, at this point I’m not sure I care. It just strikes me as another checkmark in the “no” column when asking “should I really care about Klout scores?”

I pay attention to what Klout is doing because, as someone who has social media as a significant portion of my job responsibilities, I feel like I have to. But it’s increasingly difficult to treat it as much more than a curiosity. It’s certainly difficult, at this point in time anyway, to consider treating it as something to be taken at all seriously.

Finally, my “style” changed from Specialist to Broadcaster with today’s update as well. I’d be very curious to get more information about how they assign you to the categories; perhaps that’s coming in the new website tools as well.

Posted in: Events of the Day, Social Media

It’s been one crazy day

July 3, 2012 6:57 pm \

Storm of the Decade
Last night, Bemidji got crushed with the worst thunderstorm I have seen in the 11 years I have lived up here. It was intense even by Kansas standards, which have barely been approached in the decade I’ve lived here. It had everything – the ominous green sky, rolling thunder that continued uninterrupted for around 30 minutes and was enough to keep the house constantly vibrating, lightning that tore through the entire sky, 80-mile-per-hour straight-line winds, and torrential rain. In short, it was awesome.

Mostly, it was awesome because we escaped basically unscathed. We had some decent-sized branches down in the yard, but nothing that was too big to just pick up and drag to a pile, and the only tree we lost is in the very back of our yard and fell over into a brush pile anyway — so honestly we may not even mess with it for awhile. And we lost power around 7:30, but had it back by about 3 a.m. this morning. Some people are still without power, now about 25 hours after the storm started. We got incredibly lucky. There are thousands of trees down in town, reports of more than 100 downed power lines, and the police had a curfew from 11 a.m. until 6 a.m. (and apparently arrested a huge number of kids who were out trying to loot — which is great. I have absolutely no sympathy for anyone who chooses to take advantage of a disaster situation to steal from people).

I did some work covering the storm for Bemidji State’s social media outlets, and overall I think we did a pretty good job with that. Coincidentally, we had just last week talked as a staff about how we might approach a situation like this after discussing how schools in Duluth reacted (or didn’t react) to the massive floods that wrecked that city a couple of weeks ago. So we already had in our heads an idea of what we’d try to do. I won’t go into much detail about what we did; I’m working on a timeline for how we covered the story over on Storify, and that pretty much sums up how the day went.

In short, social media proved its worth in this situation. We reacted quickly, had pictures of damage on campus out to people who were curious to know how the storm impacted the university within maybe two hours after the storm ended, and were continually updating with new photos and new information throughout the morning. There are things I wish we’d have done differently, but they were mostly minor things regarding timing of some of the information we posted. But, especially when you consider that we were running the immediate reaction type information regarding the storm with power out in the entire city, meaning we were limited by the life of our cell phone batteries, I think we did a really good job covering this event for the campus.

Work on home office/studio space
I finally took some time on Sunday afternoon to spend about two hours in my upstairs office at home and get it back into a condition that’s fit for human habitation. It was a mess before, to the point that it was very difficult to be in there to do anything. I bought a drafting table last year out of some guy’s garage for $50, and this weekend was the first time it’d ever been set up anywhere in my house. Everything is set up now, and I’ve got two really nice surfaces to draw on now; it’s a pretty solid studio space. I still have some work to do on lighting in there — it’s horrible — but in terms of how the furniture is arranged things are as good as they’re going to get until I get my ancient PowerMac G5 out of there.

G.I. Joe Retaliation at Retail
Thanks to Apple’s new Podcasts app, out just a few days ago on June 26, I finally have taken the plunge and started listening to podcasts. Podcasting is one of those things that I really could not tell you why it’s taken me so long to get into. It’s one of those things that seems like it should be right in my wheelhouse, and the subject matter of a vast majority of podcasts are things I’m into — computers and nerd stuff. But, the delay is over, and I’m now subscribed to a whole bunch of stuff.

One of the things I started listening to is a G.I. Joe-related podcast put out by a bunch of guys I follow on Twitter called “What’s On Joe Mind?” They did a couple of wrapup shows for the annual JoeCon collector’s convention, which was in New Orleans over the weekend. One of the wrapups featured a group of designers from Hasbro, who were talking about the direction they’re taking the toy line, providing some more insight into some of the things they had on display at the convention, etc.

The discussion turned to the toys for the G.I. Joe Retaliation movie — which was supposed to come out on Friday the 29th, but just a few weeks ago was pushed back to March 2013. The first wave of toys to support the movie was scheduled to come out just a couple of days after the announcement was made to push the movie back, so there was a lot of speculation about the toys being recalled, etc. But the first wave of toys did make it out with a full retail release, and one of the Hasbro reps, when asked how it was selling, said something along the lines of the toys “doing very well at retail” and that Hasbro hopes to use that success as a springboard for further retailer traction when they “re-release Wave 1 in the spring” when the line ramps up to again support the release of the movie.

Re-releasing Wave 1 is a move that seems like it could backfire. The big fear with movie-related toys is that retailers go all in right away, and end up ordering more of the early waves than they can sell. That leaves shelf space full of old figures, which leaves them no room to put out new releases, which makes the new releases difficult to find (the toys for the first G.I. Joe movie were a textbook example of this; retailers massively over-ordered waves 1 and 2, and the subsequent figures became challenging to track down). Hasbro has a situation where Wave 1 has already been at retail, and as it is by their own admission selling well, putting that same product out a second time is taking a pretty big chance that next spring there will still be people who want to buy those toys who haven’t already purchased them.

Hasbro has a lot of great product in the pipeline for 2013, and hopefully sales of the early Retaliation stuff will justify them putting in the effort to get it to market

Grad School
My second summer school course is underway. I’ve got a forum discussion to participate in this week already, and I probably need to get my work on that done tonight to the extent that I can with tomorrow being the 4th. No word yet on grades for the course that wrapped up last week. I think I did well enough in that; I’d like to think that I’ll get an A and keep my 4.0 going, but we will see. There were no grades posted during the course as updates for individual assignments, so everything will be posted all at once. Not having feedback on the progress of my grade during the class is the source of all of my anxiety about this class, I’m sure, since the only thing I’ll see will be the final grade.

Posted in: Computers, Events of the Day, Geekdom, Grad School, Social Media, work

A whole bunch of the updating

June 26, 2012 7:48 pm \

Storify for work
I discovered Storify a few weeks ago, and  found that it was a pretty nice tool for assembling bits and pieces of stuff from all over the web into something that was easy to follow. In other words, it’s proving to be a very effective rear-view window for what has happened on the Internet related to a single topic. People have been doing amazing things with it to track reactions to events taking place in real time all around the world. I’ve been using it to gather and put in order art from various places around the web to support the G.I. Joe comic book reviews I have been writing for The Terrordrome. But I have had this sense that there were scenarios where it would be a valuable tool for work. I didn’t immediately see what those were; I just knew those uses had to be there if I would look hard enough.

I have found the first one — I have found Storify to be a fantastic way to keep track of coverage of a story. I’ve been using it to record the mentions I find of a story on a $3 million National Science Foundation grant that our manufacturing and applied engineering center of excellence has received. There are a lot of things to like about using Storify this way: it’s very easy to compile mentions from a variety of different outlets into one place, and I don’t have to send out an update to interested people every time I find a new mention. I just tell them “hey, I’m tracking mentions in Storify — any time you want to know what coverage I’ve found for the grant, here’s the link.” Then I just dump new links into the story as I find them.

There’s more I can do with this; social media use on and around campus is starting to increase to the point that I may be able to do some basic event coverage with this for things like the fall startup convocation. That will be an interesting experiment. I’ll come up with some other uses for this over the course of the year too, I think; we just need to get the academic year going. I tend to not ideate very well in a vacuum; I find that I work best when there are things going on around me that can help to spark something in my brain.

Mythbusters with Megan
Last night, I stayed up with Megan until almost 1 a.m. watching Mythbusters on Netflix. It was an absolute blast, and it’s one of the very few things that have been “us” since she got back this summer. It’s been incredibly busy; Mel’s done a great job of keeping her entertained with a lot of different things, and we’ve done quite a bit of family stuff, but last night was the first time this summer it just felt like she and I (and, really, it was, since by the time we started watching the show everybody except Millie was asleep. The last three hours we had just the two of us after Millie finally went to sleep were just fantastic. It was just us.

Art, oh my
Tess Fowler is selling some original art from Zenescope’s Wonderland 2010 of a character she designed called The Red Knight. The character reminds me a lot of Warduke from the Dungeons and Dragons cartoon in the 1980s; I kinda want to buy this.

June Birchbox
Birchbox launching a monthly goody box for dudes just happened to fall around the time that I had birthday money to spend; so I took some of it and bought a three-month gift subscription… for myself, from myself.

It’s been really fun. I’m not sure if it’s been $20 a month fun, but I’ve enjoyed getting them in the mail. It’s fun to try products that I never in a million years would have tried — or even heard of really — otherwise. And it’s kindof cool that I got the first three of them that they ever put together for guys. This month’s box came with a couple of neat cord organizers from Quirky – one for iPhone/iPod headphones that doubles as a stand, and one that I will absolutely use on my desk at work to keep up to five cords for a laptop organized (coincidentally, I plug exactly five cables into my Macbook Pro at work every morning. It’s like this was made for me…).

It also had some pre-shave oil; I’ve used Zirh’s pre-shave oil for a long time, and have never even tried anything else. The box came with John Allan’s Slick Water, which is quite a bit different from the Zirh oil; it’s thicker and creamier, whereas the Zirh stuff is just oil. It seems like I need a bit more of the Slick Water to cover my face, but it works really, really well. I’m tempted to get a full-size bottle.

Other stuff in the box: Benta Berry super-moisturizing face cream (used it this morning; love it); supersmile tooth whitening system (haven’t used it yet).

Comic catch-up
I finally got around to picking up last Wednesday’s Saga #4 on the good ol’ iPad; it’s an absolutely brilliant comic. Every issue is better than the last, which is saying something since the first issue is fantastic. Brian Wood is building a very compelling and completely bat-shit crazy universe, and Fiona Staples’ art is panel-to-panel brilliance.

I also picked up the first issue of DC’s preview series for Masters of the Universe; it’s a prequel to the storyline of the 1908s MOTU toy line, taking place a few hundred years before He-Man took possession of the Sword of Power. It’s got that typical Geoff Johns “why is this comic book so incredibly violent?” tinge to it, bu the art is pretty decent and the final-page cliffhanger brings in the bad guys we know and love from the ’80s. It’s 99 cents; there’s no harm whatsoever in continuing to buy it just to see how it turns out, but the first issue wasn’t particularly compelling.

Posted in: Art, comics, Events of the Day, Social Media, work

Thoughts on Minutemen and Prometheus

June 13, 2012 9:23 pm \

What I’m Reading
Behind on comics this week; for the last two weeks really. I’ve got Batman #10, Batgirl #10, Cobra #13, and Silk Spectre #1. I need to get busy and get a review done for Cobra; I’ve been ridiculously bad about finding time to get my reviews written the last couple of weeks.

I had intended to write last week about Minutemen #1, DC’s first shot out of the cannon for its Before Watchmen prequel event, which is about as controversial a thing as there is going in comics right now. Ultimately, there wasn’t much to write about, so I just didn’t; Darwyn Cooke’s art has a retro feel that fits the feel of the series rather perfectly, but the story had no meat to it at all. It was basically a collection of two-page introductions to each of the members of the Minutemen and a brief origin story to explain where their base came from. If you’ve read Watchmen you probably know who these characters are already, and it’s difficult to believe that very many readers of the Before Watchmen event will have not read Watchmen. So beyond the art, this was easy to dismiss. I’m dipping another toe into the Before Watchmen pool with this week’s Silk Spectre launch, mostly because Amanda Conner did the art; after this, there’s a decent chance I’ll just wait for the inevitable omnibus collecting the entire thing in one gimangous hardcover.

What I’m Watching
Melissa and I have been trying to carve out a Date Night to go to the movies for just about a week now, and tonight we finally made it. We hit up Prometheus, and somehow Melissa had no clue going in what the movie was even about. So that was kindof awesome. I, on the other hand, have known full well what it was for many months, and have been excited about seeing it for quite awhile. It didn’t remotely disappoint.

I loved about every second of this movie. It’s not perfect — there’s one action scene in particular that makes absolutely not one shred of sense — but it’s damn, damn good. Michael Fassbender’s “Evil Data” resident cyborg was fantastic; he had a key role in the majority of the movie’s major scenes and he was great throughout. There were a few grossout scenes that were amazing and impossible to look away from. And it fills in a couple of very compelling blanks in the Alien universe while leaving the largest two questions raised in the film completely unanswered, opening the door wide open for further exploration in sequels.

Finally, the last 90 seconds or so were pure, ear-to-ear grin, edge-of-my-seat fantasticness. As a friend said on Facebook, it was Ridley Scott “reminding people why they took a chance on Prometheus.”

New social media toys
I’ve been playing around with Storify this week, both for work and for play. It’s a pretty neat tool, although it seems like it’s got potential to be a lot better (it’s search functionality is basically useless — some Facebook posts can be found easily, some never show up regardless of how I’d search for them); it’s one of those things that I’ll get a better handle on how to use the more I use it, I think. Hopefully they continue to revise it and fix some of the things that don’t quite work the way they should. I could see this becoming something I use for work a few times a year to cover events or other activities.

Posted in: comics, Events of the Day, Music and Movies, Social Media, work \ Tagged: , , , , , , , , ,
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