Posts tagged awesome
12 Awesome Tactics for Crazy Productive PPC Meetings
Jan 24th
For PPC managers, hosting awesome meetings/calls is mission critical. Implementing these tactics will provide you the chance to control the conversation and make sure that the powers-that-be understand what is happening with your PPC campaign.
View full post on Search Engine Watch – Latest
iTunes U 2.0: Not Perfect, Just Awesome
Jan 23rd
iTunes U has been around for a long time, but its expansion last week onto iPhones and iPads, as well as into new content like K-12 curriculum, has truly made this a 2.0 release. And it’s very, very good.
The iTunes U website carries the bold title “Learn anything, anywhere, anytime.” That’s an overstatement for sure, with 500,000 assets it’s more like learn something about many things. But it’s great either way. I spent the weekend neglecting other duties to play with iTunes U and below are some thoughts, positive and negative. It’s not perfect, but I am really excited about it and I know I’m not alone in that. I’d love to know your thoughts about it too.
Sponsor
“Algorithms are at the cutting edge of innovation, because they help move the line between the feasible & infeasible,” says the Prof on the first day’s lecture in MIT’s Introduction to Algorithms. That’s a tasty nugget to ponder, served up in the middle of a lecture which started with 15 minutes of “no cheating on tests” and other administrative advice. Most of the lecture was over my head, but I do spend a lot of time thinking about algorithms so I was very thankful for the opportunity to hear it. Thankful enough that I listened to it once on my phone while walking my dogs and once again on the iPad with the whiteboard visible, propped up in my cupboard while I put away the dishes in my kitchen.
Learn anything, anywhere, anytime? It was certainly feeling that way in the first few hours I was glued to iTunes U.
Awesome, With Limits
“At first, I was excited by this, because it appeared that this was iVLE, aka VLE (Virtual Learning Environment) in the cloud. And the iPad app is very nice. But sadly, the app functionality is not replicated well in iTunes, thus cutting out students who do not own iPads, and all Windows users. iPhones/Pods are OK for listening to a couple of podcasts, but no-one in their right minds is going to attempt a full-blown statistics course on an iPhone. And the content on iTunesU is still as variable in quality as it ever was.
“Presumably Apple could not see a revenue angle in iVLE. Oh, what might have been.”
- Dr Alan Cann, Science of the Invisible
I found that in the business management section, much of the content isn’t classroom lectures. Much of it is short-form video content made by non-traditional educational institutions. I listened to all of Jill Geisler’s What Great Bosses Know segments, each about 5 minutes long, some I listened to twice. I’ll probably go back and listen again. It’s really just a podcast though, from Geisler who is associated with the Poynter Institute.
Geisler’s content is heavily book-ended by promotions for her forthcoming book with the same title. I hope to buy the book. That experience was not like transporting into a college classroom though.
The Cranfield University collection on Leadership is similar, but in video with black backdrop and awesome, knowledgable, 50-year olds with British accents. It’s great, but it’s more like curated video podcasting than traditional educational content.
There are full, traditional classroom courses available though and I’ve subscribed to a few. I haven’t worked through a full one yet and I haven’t tried interacting with any of the worksheets or PDFs. I did jailbreak my iPad this weekend and turn the bottom right of my screen into a hot corner I can swipe from and pop up iTunes U immediately whenever I want. (Top right is Al Jazeera, if you were wondering, bottom left Twitter, swype the title bar launches the Sonos controller. It’s a lot of fun.)
There’s a lot of science and a good amount of humanities on iTunes U. Can you learn about anything? I watched an interesting video about a pizza place and there’s plenty of content about beans, but search for Oregon and it’s a real stretch. Transgender history (something my University in Oregon was great at teaching) – is not a search query that brings much in the way of results.
Existentialism looks ok, psychedelics are a wasteland, rodentia is touched upon but birthday parties as a query is a bust. So it’s a mixed bag! That was my whirlwind tour through brick and mortar University and I don’t know that iTunes U can compete, but now that I’m a boring old 35 year old with a job, I love what Apple’s put together so far.
Former RWW writer and leading education technology blogger Audrey Watters has criticized iTunes U for lacking in the social interactivity that so characterizes the rest of the web today and that delivers so much value elsewhere. At first I thought she was looking a gift horse in the mouth, but in time I’ve grown annoyed by that as well. Please, Apple, would you at least let people post comments on the videos, let other people vote comments up and down, and let us view either all comments or just those from our friends on Facebook, Twitter or…Ping? Ok, so maybe it’s not so hard to imagine why Apple skipped the social this time around. It sure would be nice if I could post a link to iTunes U content out to the web, though.
It is a walled garden, it’s part of the iTunes Empire of Blah and there are other problems with it – but great content overcomes many things.
Witness the story of Jeremy Gleick (via), for example, a young man who has spent one hour per day learning something new, over nearly 1,000 hours now, often from iTunes U.
“Maybe you don’t become an expert,” Mr. Gleick says, “but you can get really good at something.”
Maybe.
“What iTunes U is missing,” argues web commenter Brian Crumley, “is a way to show you the steps needed to master a subject. We can all learn physics 101 but without a simple and easy way to find 102 and beyond it can get frustrating. Also the quality of many of the recorded lectures is not all that good.”
Indeed, some of the lecture series aren’t even in the right order in the app.
“Even though I am complaining here I still think it’s an awesome service and hope it expands to anyone, not just schools,” says Crumley. “If I have knowledge let me teach it to anyone in the world.”
That sounds great, and it is in fact the world that is consuming the content that’s here already. Estimates before the release of iTunes U on mobile were that 60% of the service’s traffic comes from outside the United States.
The courses and content available on iTunes U are expanding the minds and lives of people all over the world, for only the price of an expensive machine to consume the free content. It’s the only thing I’ve been interested in listening to when taking my dogs out lately (sorry HuffDuffer) and I’ll be interested to see if I can take the time to work through some of the full courses it makes available.
Anybody that even claims to help me learn anything, any time, anywhere starts out in my good favor.
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
Making You More Awesome: The Red-Hot World of Online Learning Services
Dec 23rd
The joy of learning is among the most valuable ways to find meaning in life. Combine that with the substantial imbalance between supply and demand of skilled labor in the United States, and a period of economic upheaval, and you’ve got a recipe for for something magical to happen.
While traditional schools struggle to fit the bill, the internet is finally rising the the occasion. Startups like Treehouse, CodeAcademy, Lynda.com and of course Khan Academy are capturing the imagination of learners around the world, of all ages. Can these sites give traditional education the “Wikipedia vs. the encyclopedia” treatment? Why are these new websites aimed at teaching new skills so hot right now? A discussion of those questions leaves me feeling very optimistic, for the future of humanity even.
Sponsor
Human Capital Management is Hot
The phrase human capital might seem cold and unappealing, but when you think of capital as something with the capacity to create economic value, then having some becomes important for anyone who can get it. The future may be characterized by the big gap between the quality of life of a relatively small population of highly skilled workers and a much larger population of unskilled workers. There certainly can be dignity and value in unskilled or semi-skilled labor, but I’m guessing that most readers here are people interested in the world of skilled or highly skilled work.
I remember first reading about Human Capital Management years ago when people were writing about the huge waves of baby boomers about to retire. What could be done to retain the incredible body of business knowledge they had amassed after they leave the workforce?
I’m not sure how well that human capital was maintained, but the paradigm seems to have become even hotter in recent years. Looking at the economic outcomes of some recent companies in this sector should make anyone sit up and pay attention: SAP acquired talent management service SuccessFactors for $3.4 billion in cash this month. Jason Corsello, of talent management company Cornerstone OnDemand, once called SuccessFactors “not only the hottest vendor in the HCM (Human Capital Management) space but in the entire enterprise software sector.”
Then last week HR and performance management feedback loop web app Rypple got acquired by Salesforce. Now business services provider in the cloud WorkDay is reportedly planning a very big IPO.
As computing gets faster, lighter, more mobile and more powerful, optimization of precious human resources to leverage it is becoming an increasingly imperative and potent opportunity for software and services to focus on.
“The total US training market is massive, it’s a $125 billion market and it’s moving online fast,” says Tom Turnbull of training marketplace OpenSesame. His startup aggregates training content from more than 100 providers with 10,000 different courses. “We’re creating Amazon.com for courses,” Turnbull says. “And many of the content creators are individuals who didn’t previously have access to the corporate market. It’s also a chance to make education more affordable and broadly available.”
Enter the DIY Web Apps
How does the individual relate to this? As Napoleon Dynamite said 7 years ago, “Nunchaku skills… bowhunting skills… computer hacking skills… Girls only want boyfriends who have great skills!”
Where are you going to get those great skills?
“The future of education is DIY and built through collective intelligence.”
“People (not just kids) aren’t able to get the tech education they need through traditional channels like face-to-face formal education or even face-to-face mentoring,” says Janet Clarey, Senior Analyst at talent managent analyst firm Bersin & Associates, “so they turn to sites like Codeacademy and Treehouse to learn with others. No one can wait for a broken, cumbersome educational system to react. The future of education is DIY and built through collective intelligence.”
Treehouse is a subscription site where you can view videos about and acquire skills in web and mobile application design and development. Founder Ryan Carson says a number of factors have contributed to his startup’s rapid early growth:
“Huge numbers of people are switching careers because they got laid off or their business failed. Professionals in other industries are realizing they need to learn how to design/build web sites or iOS apps. There is a massive global swell in the desire to learn Web Design, Dev and iOS. Movies like the Social Network have popularized the idea of creating tech startups.
“We take people from knowing nothing to being able to launch a site or app. There really isn’t any other service that holds your hand and guides you through that entire process.
“We’re hoping to help people land jobs after they finish a certain number of Badges. We’ve partnered with Facebook, Living Social, WordPress and more to help them start recruiting Treehouse Members.”
Self-Actualization as a Service
It’s not just about amassing human capital to maximize your employability or workplace effectiveness. Another set of startups is emerging that is focused on skill building and life change outside of work. Startups like DailyPath, MightyBell and Obvious Corp-backed Lift could be described as instrumenting self-actualization through social software.
Whether at work or in life, there is a continuum of skill levels that we all can be understood within; you could say it goes from “low task,” in which people must be told what to do and how to do it, to “high task” circumstances in which people are capable of being given a general direction and then figuring it out on their own. We probably all sit in different places in that continuum in different circumstances in our lives. (I got to thinking about this after listening to this brain-exploding podcast interview from SuccessFactors with Marc Demerest, CEO and Principal of Noumenal Inc., titled Leading knowledge intensive organizations under duress.)
These kinds of web applications could be understood as helping people move up that continuum towards higher level functioning in life and work. The independence, confidence, power and freedom that come from that represent some of the best things the web could possibly offer us.
With so much business and personal potential, learning services like this are only going to grow in number and sophistication. When there’s a crowded market looking to serve a world hungry for these kinds of technologies, then all the startups will have to continually improve in order to compete with each other.
That sounds like reason enough to feel very optimistic about the future, for the growing number of people with the access and time needed to take advantage of these rapidly expanding opportunities.
Illustration titled “Blogging Au Plein Air, Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot” by Flickr user Mike Licht
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
Daily Wrap: Path is Awesome and More
Nov 30th
Jon says the version 2 do-over of the life-streaming app, Path, is like a slicker, more elegant Facebook Timeline. Is that a good or bad thing? Either way, Path is live and ready to play with, and Timeline’s launch continues to slip. This and more in today’s Daily Wrap.
Sometimes it’s difficult to catch every story that hits tech media in a day, so we wrap up some of the most talked about stories. We give you a daily recap of what you missed in the ReadWriteWeb Community, including a link to some of the most popular discussions in our offsite communities on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Google+ as well. This is a new feature at ReadWriteWeb so we covet your feedback. If you have suggestions, please leave them in the comments below or reach out to me directly at robyn at readwriteweb.com.
Sponsor
Path, Timeline & Worship of The Self
ReadWriteWeb writer Jon Mitchell has mixed feelings about the Timeline-esque app, Path. He explains that while the app’s design is amazing, it still has some issues, including mainstream user adoption and extreme similarities to Facebook’s Timeline. Of course, Timeline only wishes it was this elegantly done.
From Matt Albert, ReadWriteWeb commenter:
For me as a father and a son and a brother to technophobes with iphones and no facebook accounts this is exactly what I want out of a social network. Oh hell yea there is an awful lot of this “ego streaming” but isn’t that part of the fun. As a designer myself its refreshing to see something so elegant and new come onto the “scene”.
Here are a few more must read posts, chosen by your fellow community members.
Marc Benioff Live from Cloudforce Winter 2011 Keynote
Google: Tablets Are For Fun, Laptops Are For Work [study]
Spotify Launches Music App Directory, Integrates With Last.fm and Rolling Stone
ReadWriteWeb reader, Baxter Tocher, wonders:
Any word from them about whether they intend to use any of this new-found energy towards bringing the user gapless playback, like every other music player on the planet has had for the last who-knows-how-many years?
Top 5 Online Music Trends in 2011
Au-to-do: Google Releases App Engine Ticket Tracker
Why Hasn’t Google Put ChromeOS Out to Pasture?
Browsers in 2011: Chrome & Mobile Safari on The Rise
Reader, Jonathan Bray, commented:
“So Safari on mobile is now almost the equivalent of IE on desktop.” Thanks to the same bundling tactics.
Blue vs. Pink: What Role Does Gender Play In Mobile Phone Usage?
Siri, You’re Never Going To Take Over Search If You Can’t Find Abortion Clinics
This was our Big Question for today, so to see reader reactions, check out Big Question (Answered): “Siri Can’t Find Abortion Clinics. Purposeful Policy or Search Oversight?”
ReadWriteWeb Community
You can find ReadWriteWeb in many places on the web, a few of which are below.
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
Shuffler.fm Launches an Awesome Music Discovery iPad App Fueled By Blogs
Nov 8th
Shuffler.fm, a music aggregation and curation site that got a ton of buzz over the summer, launched its iPad app today. The app is being touted by the company as a “Flipboard for music,” but we think that comparison has its limitations, and that’s okay.
Music blogs have become a huge component of how people discover and hear new music, especially in smaller scenes that may be overlooked by more mainstream channels. Shuffler.fm taps into this phenomenon by aggregating audio from countless music blogs and then using the Last.fm API to divvy them up by genre. What results is a new way to explore and discover music, and the experience feels like it was ready-made for the tablet form factor.
Sponsor
Making an Old School Approach Work: Music Curated By Humans
The phrase “Flipboard for music” should probably be taken with a grain of salt. While Shuffler.fm’s iPad UI and the way it loads content are somewhat reminiscent of the popular social reading app, the similarities end there.
Most notably, Shuffler.fm is not a personalized music discovery app, fueled by your preferences and listening history. In fact, it doesn’t even have a recommendation engine. Instead, the service adopts the very pre-Web notion of content being curated by editors and tastemakers, the crowd be damned. As counter-intuitive as that may sound for a buzz-worthy new digital content discovery app, the model actually works quite well in this case.
Whereas services like Pandora and Last.fm have long offered streams of music based on things like one’s personal listening history and complex, algorithm-driven recommendation engines, Shuffler.fm takes its cues from the tastes of established music bloggers. The only way to personalize the content within the app is by saving a track as a favorite, which effectively builds out a playlist.
Shoegaze? Chillwave? An Endless Selection of Genres
Instead, users can browse music by genre, the list of which is actually quite extensive and granular. Broad categories like Rock, Indie and Electronic are there, but the app is populated with more specific ones like Shoegaze, Post-Punk, Chillwave, Psychobilly and Melodic Hardcore. The list goes on. And on. In fact, as you swipe to the right, the app slides through a seemingly endless array of music genres to choose from. You can also stream music from a given country or time period.
When a track loads in Shuffler.fm what it’s actually doing is loading a recent post from any number of music blogs, reformatting the title and summary Flipboard-style, and then extracting the audio from the page, whether it’s from a YouTube video, SoundCloud embed or BandCamp track. Even in cases when the audio is displayed using Flash, the app grabs the original audio and streams it regardless.
The result is a kind of genre-based, blog-fueled radio station. At the bottom of the app lies standard audio controls. Tapping the skip button loads a new blog post and a new song. You can share each one on Facebook or Twitter, email it or just copy the link.
If you want to find out more about a song or artist, simply swipe down to view the original blog post. As it turns out, this is also a great way to discover and start following individual music blogs themselves.
In testing the app out, I found a number of new artists that I hadn’t heard before. I then did a search for them in Spotify and grabbed entire albums to listen to later. Smaller, unsigned artists may not be so easy to find via a streaming service like Spotify and Rdio, but if you really like them, you can often purchase tracks directly from the artist, via Bandcamp or another service.
By aggregating music from blogs, Shuffler.fm effectively lets lesser-known, more obscure artists bubble to the surface and exposes people to a world of new music. This includes everything from experimental rock bands from Germany in the 1970s to brand new, DIY artists who are self-distributed their homemade music.
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
5 Tools for Creating Awesome SEO Reports – Search Engine Journal
Oct 17th
|
5 Tools for Creating Awesome SEO Reports
Search Engine Journal Do you spend hours hacking around Microsoft Excel every month to create a compelling SEO report for your clients, knowing that they are probably not going to get read or even opened? In my post below I have provided five tools that can help improve … |
View full post on SEO – Google News
Link Bait Sucks…Except When It’s Awesome!
Oct 4th
Words get misused all the time for all sorts of reasons. In some cases overuse of a word results in the dilution of its meaning, like the word “awesome.” In our society the adjective “awesome” can be used to describe both t…
View full post on Search Engine Watch – Latest
6 Tactics for Awesome ROI on LinkedIn Ads
Sep 30th
When it comes to targeting strategies for LinkedIn, you need to know the various demographics, locations, and vocations of LinkedIn users. Once you’ve done that, you need to take this information and determine an advertising strategy that wi…
View full post on Search Engine Watch – Latest
3 Things Wrong With Quora’s Potentially Awesome New iPhone App
Sep 30th
Uber-hyped question and answer site Quora has finally released its long-awaited iPhone app today and it’s ok. I wish it was better but I’ll probably use it more than the website. As expected, location is a big part of it, though I wish location was more granular and involved automated categorization.
That’s not really the biggest let-down though. There are a number of other issues with it. TechCrunch’s MG Siegler says he’s been testing the app for days, yet he didn’t offer any critique of it in his write-up. So I thought I’d focus on three things I’ve noticed this morning that I wish were better.
Sponsor
This should be an iPad app, not an iPhone app. Quora is all about in-depth discussion. As Siegler says, “You visit the site just to see what’s going on, 30 minutes later you’re still there.” That’s true – and who wants to spend 30 minutes navigating around inside lengthy posts and comments on a phone? I don’t – I want this Quora app on my iPad. Unfortunately, that’s not supported at launch.
It really needs a “mark as read” function. I almost never complain about info overload, but when you’re following a lot of different topics – you get a lot of notifications on your home page. If my brain has to see and skip a question about “why shrimp turns grey when you cook it” one more time, I’m going to scream. Especially on a mobile interface – there needs to be an easy and well executed mark as read function. Personally, I’d like everything I scroll past on the app’s home page to be marked as read, with a “view all” button at the top of the page if I want to see all the day’s notifications again.
Navigation is funky. Click on a message in your Quora inbox and you land at the bottom of the page and have to scroll up to read the message. Reading comments on posts takes like 3 clicks to get into browser mode. I’ve got a notification of new content in the Nearby tab and I can neither figure out what the new content is nor make the notification go away.
I love Quora, I love what the site is trying to do and I want to love its mobile app. I can’t yet, though.
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
