Facebook | education | technology | ai & NOT A.I. | design

If you don’t consider “The Cutoff” you’ll hate yourself later

This is important if you are a blogger and you use Facebook to publish. After the Headline of your article, the next most important characters you write are the following 280. This is the “Facebook Cutoff”. Without getting people interested in your article in this amount of time they are not going to click on the link to see the rest of your article and hopefully peruse (read intensely) through your blog.

So, how do you do it?

Put the important information up front. Newspapers have been doing this for a long time, you can too. Look back at an article to see how they are doing it.

Don’t tell people something they already know. Why do they need to read the rest of the article if everything they are seeing is something they have already read before or is something they concluded about themselves.

Now, here is the interesting part: Test to see the sentence getting cut off at 280 characters is leaving someone yearning for more. Test the length in Facebook. Have you done so well that you have put ALL the important information in the first 280 characters that readers do not feel they need to read any further to gain insight? If so, rework the article.

Finally, do something I didn’t do in this articles headline, and ask a question. It might generate people commenting on the article, as they have thought about their response since they read the title.

1 Comment

Posted by Dr. Thomas Johnson | ict-design.org on May 7, 2011 in Design, Technology

Tags: Blogging, Facebook, Social Networking, Writing

Make Videos like a Pro

04 May

You want the easy way out, right? You want something that you made that makes it look like you are a pro? You want people to look at what you did and think to themselves, “That must have taken forever.” Now you can. You can make something like the video below in about 2 minutes from logging in until completion.

CLICK HERE

Sign up for free at Animoto.com

You can grant access to your Facebook pics as well. Neat and Easy! The drawbacks are that you have to pay at least $39.00 if you would like to have a video that is longer than 30 seconds and doesn’t have the advertising from Animoto on it. But it could be worth it.

Also, it seems to have educational licensing, which is good for teachers. Worth checking out.

7 Comments

Posted by Dr. Thomas Johnson | ict-design.org on May 4, 2011 in Design, Technology

Tags: Animoto, Facebook

How did you hear that Osama was killed?

02 May

I bet that you heard that Osama Bin Laden was killed from a different source that how you heard that Princess Diana or JFK was killed?

The reason I bet this is because you heard the other two were killed on the TV, whereas the latest story you read through the news on the web, through Twitter or because of a post on Facebook.

Gosh, how things are changing.

In the future, be it five years, ten, twenty or more, how will we be viewing, reading, hearing and sensing the news? Media will continue to be more self-directed.

We have seen the advent of Sony, Samsung and Apple internet-TV, NetVibes, and iGoogle. RSS feeders have been around for a while, and then of course there is Tweetdeck to help manage Twitter Tweets. We are no long er passive readers and watchers. We want what we want, when we want it, how we want it and how much we want of it.

We don’t like to stop for commercials, so they better be built right in somewhere and if we really like something you can bet we are going to share, tweet, like, or stumble it. Our groups of friends and contacts are going to get to hear, watch and read what we did.

But it is going to get better with time. Media itself, along with the ads that we see are learning from us and then cater to us. Trends are amalgamating about things that we are doing. What then, are you doing to help with trending for yourself? How are you making your life easier? Are you still watching the TV or reading an actual newspaper for your information?

Think about it now. Act on it soon.

The Royal Wedding exposed to me

29 Apr

I hate to admit it, but yes I am on Facebook too much and yes, I play Cityville. I don’t know why I play such a silly game as this, but I did just find out it is the biggest game on Facebook to date.

It gets me a little giddy knowing that Cityville is going to update their game depending upon what events are coming up. For example, when it is winter, you have snow in your city. You even have the option to buy and build a big Christmas Tree when it is nearing the season. At summer’s crest, the snow melts and you can buy surfboard shops.

But now, for a limited time only, you can also cash in your coins and get four items pertaining to the Royal Wedding: The British Flag, Waving Royal People, Royal Guard, and the Royal Palace Gate. Sadly, I only have the flag and gate.

What does this lead me to talk about on a tech, design and education blog? Beside the fact that the game is played on a computer, which is technology, it also reminds me of elementary school when many, if not most of the projects and themes revolved around events that were current. I assume the demographic the game is appealing to is one of younger children. However, I would presume to say they are tapping into the kids inside us who are also loving the retro-feel we are getting because we are being taken back to this theme idea.

In fact, if it wasn’t for Cityville I might not have been as excited as I was to workout and watch the live feed on my iPad via Youtube on the Royal Channel in T-minus 1hour and 30Mins.