Archive for May 2008

Are you thinking about a website redesign using a content management system such as Drupal or Joomla? If so, you’ll want to stop by Web Distortion where they have reviewed 13 Free CMS Options for Web Design Professionals. Each comprehensive review details the features, setup time, supported OS and other technology, as well as urls and an analysis. These are the applications they cover:

• Typo 3
• Cushy CMS
• Made by Frog
• Radiant CMS
• Modx CMS
• SilverStripe
• Alfresco
• Typolight
• DotCMS
• Umbraco
• CMS Made Simple
• Drupal
• Mambo

If you have a blog which uses the Blogger platform, you will want to check out these listings from Mashable of 70 Fresh And Modern Blogger Templates, 50 More Beautiful Blogger Templates, and 30+ Templates & Tools for Blogger.

You might also want to check out these 50 Free Icon Sets available at The Web Squeeze.

ReadWriteWeb has an excellent post covering the “digital natives” that comprise Generation Y. Sarah Perez lets us know how this Web generation differs from previous ones, what they want from the Web, and provides a list of resources and a short slideshow titled “The Gen-Y Guide to Web 2.0 @ Work”.

“Since Gen Y grew up on the web, they’re going to be the driving force behind the way the web of the future is shaped. What Gen Y wants from the web will be the web.”

Anne Blecksmith at CR&L News compiles a listing of seventeen digital image collections available on the Web from universities, public libraries, historical societies, archives, and Library of Congress, including the New York Public Library Digital Gallery with over 600,000 digital images.

To those, I’ll add a couple of places that I visit to find hi-res images:

ARS - Agricultural Research Service image gallery with over 2,000 hi-resolution photos available for download free of charge in subjects such as crops, animals, and insects.

GRIN – Great Images in NASA is a resource with over 1,000 hi-resolution photographic images available free of charge in subjects including space, aeronautics, and Soviet Spacecraft.

NOAA – National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration’s collection of over 30,000 hi-resolution images in albums such as the Coral Kingdom with underwater images of plants and creatures and the National Sever Storms Lab with tornado and other storm photos.

NPS Digital Image Archives – The National Park Service offers this image resource with hi-resolution photos available free of charge. The archive is searchable by park.

U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service National Image Library – Thousands of free, hi-resolution photographs of wildlife and plants.

NARA Online Exhibit Hall – The US National Archives & Records Administration offers some great photos from American history.

DefenseLINK Multimedia Library – Hundreds of military photos available for download in hi-resolution.

For more, the Digital Librarian provides a descriptive list of hundreds of images archives available online. And you may want to check out these helpful blog posts:
Find free images online!
Where can you find good images?

Please list your favorites in the comments!

Carol Tenopir, Gayle Baker, & Jill E. Grogg write about vendors who are incorporating 2.0 features to enhance their products and services in the May 15th issue of Library Journal. The article explores new Web offerings from publishers and service providers from OCLC to JSTOR who are rolling out everything from search widgets, Ebooks, RSS feeds, and social networking initiatives to multiple language support and mobile access.

“Although information companies continue to worry about competition from free search engines and user-generated services, many are adapting or fighting back by expanding content and features to make their products stand above the competition. In a year when Newsweek highlighted “The Revenge of the Experts” (www.newsweek.com/id/119091/output/print), authoritative high-quality information enhanced with multimedia content, mobile access, social collaboration, and prepackaged searches all made this year’s information industry party on.”

BusinessWeek takes a look at how businesses are making use of the microblogging platform for marketing and promotion as well as how it’s being used to deliver up-to-the-minute news on events such as the recent earthquake in China. The article discusses the future of the application, its large development community, and its potential viability.

For other recent coverage, check out: What Twitter brings to the party.
For a well-rounded beginner’s guide to Twitter, look for: The Twitter Disconnect.

The News in Print compiles a listing of 40 word processing applications for Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, and Online use, with reviews for each. And while you’re there, you might check out 30 Alternatives To Adobe Acrobat.

The Association of Virtual Worlds has published The Blue Book: A Consumer Guide to Virtual Worlds. This free, downloadable book provides a guide, with links, to over 250 virtual worlds along with a glossary. Included are virtual environments for every age group ranging from Disney Fairies Pixie Hollow, Creebies, and Frenzoo, to one of my faves – Neopets, Planet Cazmo, and Scions of Fate. Coming soon: The Green Book: A Business Guide to Virtual Worlds.

Todd Zeigler at the Bivings Report comes up with 9 Ways to Improve the Quality of Comments on your Website. If you have a blog or website on which you allow public commenting, you may want to check out some of these useful suggestions:

1. Have moderators (or other staff) maintain an active presence in the comments
2. Force users to have one pre-approved comment before they can post freely
3. Filter out the profanity
4. Report Comment feature
5. Bury/Promote Comments
6. Require users to register before posting comments
7. Enable threaded comments
8. Give users ability to ignore other commenters
9. Implement a comment policy

Ann Smarty at Search Engine Journal has come up with a guide to analyzing your website using the social bookmarking tool del.icio.us. By following her suggestions, web authors will benefit in the following ways:

• get an idea what people liked most of all in your post (to brainstorm for future posts);
• analyze why one post was successful while another one was buried;
• see how people describe your post (i.e. how they ’see’ it) – that will enable you to look at your site “from outside“;
• explore your competitor’s social media success and learn a lot from that;
• perform advanced keyword research (how people tend to tag shows how they are most likely to search).

An interesting tool mentioned in this article is called similicio.us which is a quick search interface that locates similar web sites based on people’s tags/bookmarks on del.icio.us, using a home-brewed association engine.

Imagine making a change to your profile on MySpace and having it automagically update on the other social website communities to which you belong. According to an announcement made by MySpace yesterday, this functionality will be available in a matter of weeks. The initiative called Data Availability will enable social networkers to share not only profile data between websites, but content such as photos and videos as well. So far Twitter, eBay, PhotoBucket, and Yahoo! have all signed up to participate and partner in the project.

Not to be outdone, Facebook announced today that it will be releasing a similar functionality called Facebook Connect which will also enable members to share their data, friends lists, and content with other websites. Although no partnering websites have been announced, it is rumored that the social news site Digg may be an inaugural partner.

MySpace, Facebook, and Yahoo! all joined the Data Portability Workgroup (DPW) earlier this year whose mission it is to facilitate just this type interoperability between social networks enabling members to access friends and media between all of the social communities to which they belong. For a quick (2 minute) tutorial on what data portability is, check out this video.

Illustration by Max Scratchmann

Anastasia Goodstein offers some pretty sound advice for attracting today’s tech-savvy, multi-tasking teens to the library in her article What Would Madison Avenue Do? Marketing to Teens: To attract today’s teens, think like a marketing pro in the May 1st issue of School Library Journal. From her experience studying young people’s online habits Goodstein shares the following lessons for dealing with the Millenial generation:

• Teens are multitaskers.
• Teens prefer byte-sized entertainment.
• Teens expect content on demand.
• Teens want to participate.
• Enlist teens to manage your social media.
• Don’t try too hard to be cool.
• Know your audience.
• Don’t sweat the design.
• Support causes that kids care about.
• Use text messaging and IM appropriately.
• Teens love making mixtapes… online.
• Tweens like to break virtual worlds’ rules.
• It’s not just about MySpace and Facebook.
• Beware of anonymous gossip sites and applications.
• Dance videos are all the rage.
• Miley’s YouTube channel.

Marketing Vox has come up with a how-to guide for podcasters including 10 Tips for Launching a Solid Podcast. They note that podcasts are projected to reach an audience of 65 million users by the year 2012 and offer these suggestions for launching an engaging podcast:

1. Plan your podcast schedule.
2. Make it RSS-accessible.
3. Keep it short.
4. Don’t waste time hard-selling.
5. Segment your podcasts.
6. Simplify podcast management.
7. Submit your podcast to popular directories.
8. Build a compelling podcast website.
9. Let website visitors commune with one another.
10. Measure and analyze.

via Micro Persuasion

Looking to go beyond Google for Web search? If so, you’ll want to check out these eight search engines listed by Web Worker Daily as viable alternatives to the search heavyweight including interfaces which allow you to search web forums, video, images, and people. Here are their suggestions:

• Addict-o-matic
• Redzee
• Omgili
• Dogpile
• Truveo
• Blinkx
• QnA search
• ZabaSearch

Shaheen E. Lakhan and Kavita Jhunjhunwala write about open source software in online learning for the April-June 2008 issue of Educause Quarterly. They discuss the history of open source, its implementations in the educational sector including virtual universities and education portals, and its impact on learning. The authors offer a comparison matrix featuring some of the most widely used open source learning management tools including Moodle, .LRN, and Dokeos.

“Open source and digital education and learning, separately and together, aim to reach everyone. Although both movements have gained considerable maturity, a need for greater coordination exists. A cohesive plan must bring together open source principles and technologies, educational institutions, and economic factors so that each component’s role is clearly defined. Both open source and digital education projects are taking their first tentative steps into the consumer world. They have a long way to go before they enter the mainstream, but together they have great potential to change forever the face of education.”