Linkedin recently sent out emails this week letting users know if you were in the top 1%, 5%, or 10% of the most viewed profiles for 2012. Its smart as many people are now tweeting or sharing the fact that they were chosen. So how do the numbers break down? Well there are 200 million users so you can do the math:
1% – 2 million
5% – 10 million
10% – 20 million
I was in the top 5%:)
Link to mashable article about it
There is a cool free service called facewash that does just that. It cleans up your facebook page so that it is ‘interview’ ready. It can also search for keywords and delete posts containing them. This might be easier than going through years of posts to determine what is professional or not. This free service is a must for all college students applying to jobs.
My students are currently working on proposals for their final projects in my program and one of the things they need to do is use APA formatting. There are great tools out there like Endnote, however, Endnote carries a $250 price tag if not offered by your university. So there are free tools out there and one that I personally like is called the citation machine. It’s very simple to use and you just enter in your information and it create the bibliography for you. Here is the link While not nearly as sophisticated as Endnote is does do the job.
So you have a website and want to set up a place where people can chat with each other. One of the best ways to do this is with a web forum as can be seen on my surfing website here. These forums can be very easy to set up but can become very difficult depending on how many modifications you want done to them. In order to run a web forum on your website you need a few things.
Those include your web domain of course, a database (usually provided by wordpress hosting providers), and the information from your database like the master username and password. Once you have all of that information you need to pick your forum. There are two forums that I recommend, one is vBulletin and is the best paid forum software. It costs $250 and does quite a bit. It requires very little technical skill to set up or to use the advanced features. The second I recommend and use myself is called phpBB. This is opensource so it is 100% free. Just like vBulletin it is very easy to use and set up. phpBB get complicated when you start doing advanced things. But it does do everything that vBulletin does it just requires more technical skill to do all of it. But setting each up and getting them up and running is no different. Those are the main differences between these two software packages (very high level differences).
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Once you have decided which forum you want, you install it on your database. Once installed you will log in as an administrator and set up your forums and take special time to set up security measures like a captcha and such. Now that you are there your community is ready to communicate. You may notice that no one jumps the gun and begins to use it. Many forums go unused. People like to talk on a forum that is active because usually they lurk at first and just read posts before feeling comfortable enough to speak. So a little trick that is not fun but IS necessary – talk to yourself for a while on the forum using several different usernames to make the community seem alive. Even better if a few people can do this to get it going. It really helps and is needed even if it feels like you are scamming people. Trust me no one will post if there are zero posts unless you have a huge community or something.
Well I hope that helps you get started!
My blog has been a little empty this month due to two things: Class prep and my reappointment binder.
For those that do not know, when a professor goes up for tenure, promotion, or reappointment they need to put together a huge binder that contains all of their publications, course materials, conference presentations, etc. Needless to say it takes a long time to find, print, and organize. Fortunately beginning tomorrow or thursday i will return to my regular posts:)
Search engine optimizers (SEOs) are people who optimize websites to help them rank higher on SERPs and gain more organic traffic. In essence, an SEO is a highly specialized content strategist that helps a business discover opportunities to answer questions people have about their respective industries.
Very cool article on mashable about the ways SEO is changing. Here are some of the new things to do be SEO friendly. And I am not sure all of these are new, maybe just the one about sub domains which is interesting:
An SEO strategy (also referred to as “SEO approach”) is the process of planning and implementing steps designed to improve organic search engine rankings. In other words: an SEO strategy is the process that you follow when you want to get more organic traffic. I recommend typing a few different keywords into Google until you have a list of about 10 keywords. If you want to check out the search volume and competition levels for those terms, you can use a keyword tool like Semrush or Ubersuggest.
Instead, opt to create an SEO strategy that helps you address your individual business needs, like increasing customer acquisition, for greater marketing success. If you then want to diversify your marketing strategies, consider getting the help from Craftsmen Industries.
To learn more about SEO, check out Func Media for an Ultimate Guide to SEO and marketing. Ranking in search pages can be difficult. While it may seem enticing to create content that is centered around high-traffic keywords, that strategy may not help you meet your business goals.
Final week of classes and I am grading like crazy. I will try to update blog but more than likely there will not be many posts this week:)
This video walks you through creating a blog with blogger
I created this for my students who have their prezi assignments due this thursday:
I get asked quite often by students how to I develop a storyboard or can I have a sample. Well the real issue is that each type of environment is going to demand a slightly different variation, thus they will not be formatted alike. Additionally, if you are a design and developer, your storyboards may not be as detailed if you are handing them off to a developer. So here is one sample storyboard template I give my computer based instruction students. This is simply a generic storyboard for CBI. Obviously in my courses I give them this example then show it to them filled in.