Travel Pictures on Google Maps

Take time this summer to publish travel pictures on Google Maps.  It will set up an initial class discussion for the Fall on Google Maps, Analytics, Photos, Design.  You may need a few tries to get one to be successful.  KEEP IT GOING!

I took a second and was demonstrating how much a picture makes a difference, and how easy it is to take a good picture that connects one with a business in the tone that a customer sees.  I improved the pictures of an absolutely great coffee place, Noble Coffee Roasting, in one of my Favorite cities: Ashland, OR.  In the end, the metrics demonstrate that it resonates with folks and shares what I feel about the location.

Put yours up and see if you can capture what it is you like about a spot and others will click on to see from a thumbnail.

Your photos reached a new record on Google

Your photos reached a new record on Google (1)

Mozilla Webmaker And The Hour of Code

As part of the effort for the Hour of Code, we’ve compiled some great Webmaker resources that only take about an hour to complete — and can help get you started on a path towards becoming a maker and innovator on the web.

Young Rewired State NYC

More than 3.5 million people have already signed up to participate. Below are a few great Webmaker projects to get you started. Select an activity, and then spend an hour or so learning some HTML, CSS and Javascript. And be sure to share your final makes using the#hourofcode and #webmaker hashtags.

  1. Make an Animated Poem — by the National Writing Project. Write your own poem or remix someone else’s. Then make it come to life with Javascript animations.
  2. Hack a Holiday Card — by Kim Wilkens. Remix a holiday postcard online, then build an interactive, magic snow predictor using new Javascript skills. Educators can also use this helpful teaching kit.
  3. Rainy Day — by Cynthia Ng. Thunderstorm or sunshower? Customize your own drizzly scene.
  4. Make a To-Do List Web App — by Pomax. Book flight. Ship presents. Bake a pie. Make an HTML5 To-Do List Web App!
  5. Make a Map App — by David Humphrey. Where in the world is Webmaker? Make an interactive web map app using the Leaflet.js JavaScript library.
  6. Cory Doctorow’s Mood Room — by Alan Levine. Use Photoshop and a jQuery plugin to create your own web-based mood ring. Read more about this project.
  7. Create a simple game – by William Duyck. Build a web version of TicTacToe using HTML, CSS and Javascript. Your move!

Visit webmaker.org for more starter makes or find more Hour of Code tutorials.
MakerParty @ Bhopal

Starter resources that teach the web!

These quick and easy activities can be remixed on your own, at events and in teaching kits and other materials.

The world’s largest photo service just made its pictures free to use

Getty Images is betting its business on embeddable photos

Article from The Verge

If you go to the Getty Images website, you’ll see millions of images, all watermarked. There are more than a hundred years of photography here, from FDR on the campaign trail to last Sunday’s Oscars, all stamped with the same transparent square placard reminding you that you don’t own the rights. If you want Getty to take off the watermark, you’ll have to pay for it.

"OUR CONTENT WAS EVERYWHERE ALREADY."

Starting now, that’s going to change. Getty Images is dropping the watermark for the bulk of its collection, in exchange for an open-embed program that will let users drop in any image they want, as long as the service gets to append a footer at the bottom of the picture with a credit and link to the licensing page. For a small-scale WordPress blog with no photo budget, this looks an awful lot like free stock imagery.

It’s a real risk for the company, since it’s easy to screenshot the new versions if you want to snag an unlicensed version. But according to Craig Peters, a business development exec at Getty Images, that ship sailed long ago. "Look, if you want to get a Getty image today, you can find it without a watermark very simply," he says. "The way you do that is you go to one of our customer sites and you right-click. Or you go to Google Image search or Bing Image Search and you get it there. And that’s what’s happening… Our content was everywhere already."

Gettyembed

THE NEW EMBEDS STRIKE DIRECTLY AT SOCIAL SHARING

Looking at the pictures on Twitter, it’s hard to disagree. Wildly popular accounts like @historyinpics can amass hundreds of thousands of followers with nothing but uncredited, unlicensed images, and since there’s no direct revenue, there’s little point in asking them to pay. At that scale, anything more expensive than free is a prohibitive cost. The new embeds strike directly at that kind of social sharing, with native code for sharing in Twitter and Tumblr alongside the traditional WordPress-friendly embed code. Peters’ bet is that if web publishers have a legal, free path to use the images, they’ll take it, opening up a new revenue stream for Getty and photographers.

The new money comes because, once the images are embedded, Getty has much more control over the images. The new embeds are built on the same iframe code that lets you embed a tweet or a YouTube video, which means the company can use embeds to plant ads or collect user information. "We’ve certainly thought about it, whether it’s data or it’s advertising," Peters says, even if those features aren’t part of the initial rollout.

THE DIGITAL SHIFT HAS BEEN HARD ON PHOTOGRAPHERS

The clear comparison is the music industry, which was hit hard by piracy in the ’90s and took decades to respond. "Before there was iTunes, before there was Spotify, people were put in that situation where they were basically forced to do the wrong thing, sharing files," Peters says. Now, if an aspiring producer wants to leak a song to the web but keep control of it, they can drop it on Soundcloud. Any blog can embed the player, and the artist can disable it whenever they want. And as Google has proved with YouTube, it’s easy to drop ads or "buy here" links into that embed. "We’ve seen what YouTube’s done with monetizing their embed capabilities," Peters says. "I don’t know if that’s going to be appropriate for us or not." But as long as the images are being taken as embeds rather than free-floating files, the company will have options.

EMBEDS HAVE ENABLED A NEW KIND OF LINK ROT

Getty Images’ profits haven’t cratered like music conglomerates: its profits actually increased nearly $100 million from 2007 to 2011, thanks in part to digital licensing. Still, the digital shift has been hard on photographers, with professional stipends increasingly replaced by smaller payments to amateur or freelance photographers. Part of Peters’ promise is that the new embeds will open up larger flows of money down the road.

The biggest effect might be on the nature of the web itself. Embeds from Twitter and YouTube are already a crucial part of the modern web, but they’ve also enabled a more advanced kind of link rot, as deleted tweets and videos leave holes in old blog posts. If the new embeds take off, becoming a standard for low-rent WordPress blogs, they’ll extend that webby decay to the images themselves. On an embed-powered web, a change in contracts could leave millions of posts with no lead image, or completely erase a post like this one.

Still, such long-term effects are years away, if they happen at all. In the meantime, Getty Images is focused on the more immediate problem of infringement. "The principle is to turn what’s infringing use with good intentions, turning that into something that’s valid licensed use with some benefits going back to the photographer," says Peters, "and that starts really with attribution and a link back."

Web Designer: Formal Degree or Self Taught

I think the current efforts and direction are doomed to fail to serve the learner.  This article crossed Feedly an hour ago at lunch and I am using it in my Advanced Web Design class in 5 minutes.  Without curating current material and integrating it “Just In Time” into teaching practices, will engagement flourish, will students watch us learn, will they read?

If you glance at the infographic below, won’t they. 

This is not the school of today.  What learning target does this meet?  Was that learning target scheduled for today?  Do I have an assessment scheduled for this target?  Is it appropriate?  Am I providing it to the student?  Have I entered the learning target and the assessment into a grade book?  Will it impact the grade, and if so how? 

Which benefits the learner, which will get them to dream, to chase, to persevere?  Of course I do both.  But in today’s environment, a teacher cannot do this.  I have a different background and an edge.

Bells went off, time to publish and walk over and use this.

education-for-web-designers1

The Evolution of Web Design Affects Course Sequencing


From Kissmetrics come the infographic on the left.  Think about your course sequencing people, the last College I visited was still teaching Introduction courses that didn’t include Mobile Browsing, Content Management Systems, or even introduce CSS3, let alone seriously use CSS from Day 1.  Move on!

Can you believe that the first published website is already 20 years old? Web design has come a long way since the first website was published by Tim Berners-Lee in 1991. This infographic is a peek at the evolutionary tale of web design, which is ironically still in its infant stages. Enjoy the infographic below and let your imagination wander. You might find yourself asking, “Where will web design be in the next 20 years?”

Read more: http://blog.kissmetrics.com/evolution-of-web-design/#ixzz1S2uSqbEa