Since these posts are coming in very slowly... I've decided to rename them as "Slacker Reviews". Very appropriate.
In any case, it seems that SXSW is following me even at the entrance of my workplace. I walked out this morning to get some late morning coffee and I see two girls handing out fliers for Animoto. I had seen their presentation at SXSW's Trade Show. I grabbed a few dozen fliers of theirs and decided to join the site. Here's my little experiment -
It's not a bad process. Takes about 15 minutes total and is much quicker if you have your photos hosted on Flickr or another hosting site. I may use it later in the future. If you make your own slideshow, let me know. Mine was kinda a starter :)
Just testing out Pictobrowser which I just discovered..
.. if you view the last page, you'll a photo of Avani, myself and Vickie Howell! I was so stoked to have met her in person. Not sure if she was creeped out that I nearly followed her for a minute to get a picture haha.
Happy New Year's one and all! A quick update to show ya what I've been up to lately (rather than writing a bit too much about the last month or so..)
In order: Christmas Eve, small dinner at my house where I finally used tips from Lifehacker's blog on how to fold napkins prettily, handmade Christmas gifts for friends - crochet peeling banana doll wearing the official "B.a.G." badge (spell it out), ninja plushie doll, 3 sets of jewelry for 3 lovely girls and my recently decorated room with several posters and postcards. I believe that brings us up to date?
Some notes from the Microbranding talk (I just transcribed them this week)
Long Tail Theory According to Wikipedia.org, "Businesses with distribution power can sell a greater volume of items at small volumes than f popular items at large volumes." The chart displays sales rank vs. inventory. From what I understood it to be, there are a small portion of companies that sell quite a lot and the 'long tail' is a good majority of the shops but they sell smaller quantities. In order to be a successful microbranded shop, you'd like to be somewhere in the corner of the green colored area so you are selling a nice amount of items and can still keep up with inventory.
New international market: Japan Why? Japanese youth likes American culture a lot and are big consumers of American products (although that's true for many countries, he only mentioned this one as an example).
Some ideas for a blogger - Run a "free gift" post to get more viewers (and bring out the lurkers). - Use Google Translate (done! I got this idea from the Bent Objects blog) - Create 3 Main Topics for you blog, then 3 subtopics for each. That way, you'll have 9 topics total which should be plenty to work with ( I really should narrow down the number of tags I have ).
So while researching "Beatles algorithm" in my failed attempt to find some programmatic algorithm to a Beatles song, I discovered this great blog entry: Great Blogging Tips from the Beatles
I found it so awesome - it's written as if the Beatles had had a blog, what would it be like, what kind of thought would go behind it, what would their principles be?
The ones I found most appealing:
Strive for Continual Improvement
"I’m pretty sure if John Lennon was a blogger, his attitude would have been that if his post didn’t come up high in the search engines, then let Google fix their algorithm."
I've been meaning to write for some time now and of course I have a few ideas of what to write next but taking pictures of the things I'd like to show you has been hindering this process. So instead, I shall show you a photo someone else took!
I barely look at Blogger's list of featured blogs but today for some reason, I decided to give one blog on the list a try. Maybe with a name like "Bent Objects" my curiosity was piqued and I had an inkling that it'd be art inspired. And it is! I highly, highly recommend you visiting this blog ASAP. It's one persons adventures with wire and every day objects and put together to create sometimes hilarious, sometimes thought provoking pieces. This particular piece is just so funny and appropriate for a crafty blog :) There are some great posts there and I've already bookmarked it in my del.icio.us account.
(Geeky update: In one week, I have joined both digg.com and del.icio.us. Now all I need are Twitter and Flicker accounts and I will be fully integrated in the web 2.0 era. For now, I don't have much use for either site.. unless you have suggestions, dear readers?)
A pretty picture of some inspirational flowers (also note that they're used in the backdrop for the notecards picture). Just a short update, tis all. Will be writing more soon!
