week 7 – podcasts and the social media ecosystem

:: Guest Lecture: Eric Weaver, Edelman
- Blog usability and reader expectations
- Technologies: RSS, Blogs, Folksonomies

Housekeeping/decisions!

  • Invite Seattle Podcast Meetup folks to hear your pitches? (yes)
  • Move last class to 10 June? (yes – pitches here)
  • On 3 June – final draft cut of project podcast – feedback from EVERYONE is due by midnight; final draft cut and feedback of personal podcasts (opt-in, voluntary, in-lab)
  • Grade sheet updated
  • Blog QA check: there should be no “uncategorized posts!”
  • Blog “voice” check: use your headlines to “sell” your post to the person who sees it in the RSS reader. Like this one.

What do we mean by the “social media ecosystem”?
Eric Weaver – Edelman
At naymz, at FriendFeed, at Variety, at PRforPeople, on SlideShare, on LinkedIn, on Twitter

Kathy’s YouTube playlist for classes

Function of changing power relationships that are facilitated by digital technologies

:: break ::

Blog usability and reader expectations (with a little SEO for seasoning)

  • Link usability tips (color, style)
  • Link usability/SEO tips (no “click here” links!)
  • Type usability tips (sans serif rules – why?)
  • The need for contrast (dark on light rules – why?)
  • Why readers need categorized posts!
  • Test ride your headlines (stick the phrase into your favorite search engine)

Reminder: your blog will be evaluated at the end of the quarter on how well it matches genre as well as how usable/readable it is!

Tags & Folksonomies

Recap from last week — marketing “anomaly” reading/discussion

:: Featured Posts

:: Featured Blogs – all are characterized by personalized, custom header

:: Featured podcasts

A word about “album” or “cover” art …

Draft Proposal Comments
- Project: MSN
- Project: Lake Union
- Project: Mariners
- Project: COM

Two lab assignments, one group, one solo:

  1. In your groups — Discuss what you learned from the other teams as a result of reviewing their proposals. How are you going to change/refine your proposal, based on that insight? BLOG this as a comment on your “page” on the course blog; due Tuesday before class ENDS. Come prepared next week to provide feedback to the class at large on how you are planning to incorporate the feedback into your final proposal.
  2. Solo — Pick one blog that you are reading this quarter and one podcast that you are listening to/watching. Create one blog post (categorize it “assignment” or “PIB Assignment”) that analyzes the blog — design, readability, genre allegiance, etc. Create another blog post that analyzes the podcast and the blog that is its home. Use the criteria we used to analyze proposals — reverse engineer (deduce) the answers to things like “who is the audience” and provide evidence for your deductions. Due Tuesday before class.

Resources:

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 13th, 2008 at 5:49 pm and is filed under Class Notes. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

One Response to “week 7 – podcasts and the social media ecosystem”

  1. Terry Short Says:
    15 May 2008 at 4:36 pm | Reply

    What we learned from the other proposals: (primarily from the MS proposal)

    There are two places we can turn up the volume to make the case to Vulcan (the client) on why they should commission us to produce this podcast:

    1) The viability of podcasts as a good medium for reaching their audience. This could include stats about the increasing popularity of podcasts in general, and the practicality of podcasts for this particular walking-tour application.

    2) The general business case for doing the podcast walking tour – primarily to get more people to “experience” the neighborhood. This is a compelling argument because Vulcan has the challenge of selling condos and filling retail space in the current soft real estate market

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