Attentionscan is a collection of interesting and assorted ideas collected by the staff of idfive for your reading pleasure.
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From the computer to the post office
My dad has been working for the US Postal Service for maybe 20 years now? Perhaps longer. Since everything has been slowly turning digital, I love any chance I can get to send mail. Seeing an article about a man supporting the mail system, as well, delights me!
Giles Turnbill bought many stamps and postcards and literally tweeted across the UK and some other parts of the world. For public tweets, he would copy the same tweet at least 15 times to send to 15 people (some reaching the US and as far as Australia!). The @reply or DM tweets only needed to be written once and delivered, and then he would receive “tweets” back through the postal service.
Conversations between Twitterers were basically the same as today, only longer, making the conversations more appreciated. The great thing about Twitter is the speed of news, but every day conversations can get lost in the bustle of things. Don’t get me wrong, I embrace Twitter and all social media platforms! Social media is a great way to get your voice out to the public for free.
This project wasn’t necessarily a rebellion from the Internet. Turnbill says, “Replicating Twitter via the postal system wasn’t an attempt to reject the internet—it was a way of celebrating it.” So definitely continue sharing, tweeting, +1ing, or whatever, but don’t forget an occasional letter or two!
Please feel free to read Turnbill’s entire article, as well as enjoy all his “tweets” posted on The Morning News.
An Intern’s Reflection: The Value of Intangibles
As students, we’re told that internships are a great way to gain hands-on experience in our chosen fields and build professional networks to advance us in our careers.
As interns, we’re able to assist in the day-to-day functions of the places we intern at. This helps us hone our skills and figure out what we want to do within our field. It’s usually all about portfolio-building pieces, tangible contributions, and making connections.
One thing that isn’t brought up too often though, in my opinion, are the insights us interns are able to learn by observing the intangibles things of an internship – workplace dynamics, culture, and communication methods. These are things that we’re not necessarily told to look for, but should look for.
As my awesome internship experience at idfive comes to a close, I just wanted to share some of my observations that I hope to be helpful for any other future interns out there:
- Communication Is Key – The importance is obvious, especially in terms of project management, but after having the opportunity to sit-in on meetings, I learned that it’s even more important when it comes to client/agency relationships or collaborations with other vendors. Impressive professionalism and a happy client are the result of successful methods of communication.
- The Importance of Design with a capital “D” – The philosophy on how idfive runs their business. Design with a capital “D” emphasizes how good Design (note the capital D) should be relative to produce a beautiful solution. In observing the way idfive applied this philosophy to how they did their work, I found that not only is the end result of a project visually appealing and clean on the back-end (for a site), but the user experience is pretty darn good as well.
- Corporate Culture Is Everything – An amiable work environment fuels productivity. I’ve heard of the concept, seen jovial tweets between co-workers on Twitter exemplifying it, but have never truly experienced it until this semester. From chili cook-offs to “guac-offs,” every single person is as hard working as they are the first to share a funny story or their latest experience from a GroupOn at the lunch table. It definitely gave me insight into what kind of environment I’d like to be in in the future.
- The Value of GroupOn – From the stories I’ve heard about the restaurant deals, I don’t know why I didn’t jump on this bandwagon sooner. I’m a foodie and a college student, so the deals are pretty awesome!
Overall, my experience at idfive was an extremely enjoyable and beneficial one that not only taught me a lot about digital marketing, social media and design, but also gave me valuable insight that I know will help me later on in my career – all from observing the intangibles
The Social CEO (of the Future) [Infographic]
Current CEOs probably aren’t thinking about what their young, media driven, acronym using successors are doing right now or what they might do as the future CEO of their precious companies.
In the past few years I’ve seen a growing number CEOs and high level execs begin using social media more often. Whether it’s contributing to a company blog, maintaining their own Twitter accounts or driving a new ad campaign on Facebook, social media is becoming part of a CEOs daily routine. But pretty soon, many of the CEOs we know will begin to retire and a whole new breed of “Social CEO”s will enter, changing the game substantially.
This new “Social CEO” will be at the helm, making decisions that drive the company forward. Increasing transparency, engagement, and focusing on what matters most to any company – the consumer.
Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn And The Social CEO [INFOGRAPHIC] on AllTwitter
Can Being Social & Networking Get You a New Job? [Inforgraphic]
Can Facebook Get You A Job? via Mashable
Eye Candy
On behalf of my attention deficit disorder, I’d like to thank the folks at Flipboard for their new iPhone app. If you need me, I’ll be hunched over my phone gawking at the screen. I haven’t dug into it too much, but I’ll be back with more impressions next week.
In related news, Twitter just released a new mobile client for their service, and the reviews have been mixed. Some people seem to like it, and some people not so much. I don’t use Twitter, so this doesn’t affect me all that much, but I’m curious to know what power users think?
NY Times R&D Develops Digitally Enhanced Mirror [Video]
Reveal Project – Personal Data Mirror from NYT R&D on Vimeo.
This looks pretty cool if you ask me. I love the heads-up display and gestures used to display a multitude of data. Although the possibilities may be a little limited right now this is the first place I’d expect to see “natural use interfaces” becoming an everyday part of our life.
Read more on Mashable.com – Augmented Mirror of the Future Reflects You and Your World
Learning on Demand
One thing I can say about myself is that I love learning new things. So today, I’ve put together a small list of resources of where you can learn just about anything. MOST of them are free, which is a good thing and some of the information comes from the top schools in America which is another good thing.
Websites
- http://www.udemy.com/
- http://academicearth.org/
- http://www.monkeysee.com/
- iTunes U
- YouTube (Use wisely)
The New Flavors.me: From Splash Page To Social Network
Last Monday, Flavors.me released an overhauled version of their site, incorporating a new “social” feature that’s creating quite a stir in the industry.
Formally classified as a splash page, hub page, or a personal profile, the completely free Flavors.me essentially enables you to aggregate all your social media profiles, choosing from 30 of the most popular ones (like LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, tumbler, etc.) to display them onto one fully customizable profile.
If you choose to pay the $20-a-year fee, your design and layout options more than double and you’re offered awesome real-time analytics that enable you to see what sources your profile’s driving traffic from. You’re also able to view the most recent content from each service you attach inline, so you can see all your updates without ever leaving your Flavors.me page!
Pretty convenient, right?
But that’s the old version of Flavors.me. The newer version not only has all of the aforementioned capabilities, but also has even more design options and extends your profile’s browsing experience to mobile, allowing you the customization of your profile’s mobile design.
The overhaul’s newest feature is its “social” feature, which lends itself to making the Flavors.me site an actual social networking site in the making.
Within the new “social” feature, users are now able to “follow” each other and view their followers and following, very much so like Twitter. Aside from that, the coolest element is its “social stream.”
The social stream aggregates not only your content, but content from your friends’ Flavors.me profiles too! The key hook here is its customizable inputs, allowing you to control how much content you view from any number of the attached services you want from whoever you want.
Personally, I absolutely love this site. I jumped on board with the premium version last year, and I’ve never looked back.
The beauty about Flavors.me is its design-heavy orientation, giving you many options on which content to display and how. All of the layouts display formats that are visually appealing, and the ability to browse and view each services’ content without leaving the site is just plain awesome.
In terms of whether or not the social stream = social network, that remains to be seen. It’s still primarily used as a landing page in bringing together peoples’ social media profiles, as the user is ushered directly to their content/profile upon login and not the social stream.
For now, it’s definitely a big feat for Flavors.me, so it’ll be interesting to see what developments spurn from there.
PHP errors for designers (the appendix)
One of the hardest things for me to learn is to read error messages and translate them into something meaningful that leads me to a solution. I was excited to read Rachel Andrew’s “A Guide to PHP Error Messages for Designers,” but was a little surprised that some of the most basic ones were left out. So here I’m going to present to you those most common of errors:
1. “Parse error: syntax error, unexpected ‘=’ in errors.php on line 1
Generally this means you used a single “=” to compare two values. E.g. if(1=1){ echo “that”; } In my head when I’m typing out a comparison I say “is equal to” in my head and the “to” reminds me to put down two equals signs. Corny, I know.
2. Parse error: syntax error, unexpected $end in errors.php on line 1
This means you missed closing something before you closed your PHP tag “?>” E.g. <?php if(1==1){ echo “that”; ?> In this case I need to close the if statement before I close php.
3. Notice: Use of undefined constant this – assumed ‘this’ in errors.php on line 1
My code: <?php if(this==’this’){ echo “this equals this”; } ?> Here I forgot the “$” before my variable so PHP is letting me know it interpreted it as a string instead. You’ll actually get the output in this instance because PHP interprets the first value as a string and compares it against an identical string. This can get confusing if–like me–you name variables after the values you expect them to hold.
4. Parse error: syntax error, unexpected T_STRING, expecting ‘,’ or ‘;’ in errors.php on line 1
Generally this means you’ve nested double/single quotes within the same string. In this case, my code looks like: <?php echo “this is a “line” with “multiple” quotes”; ?> To fix this, I can either escape the quotes with a backslash (\”) or change the first and last quotes to single quotes. There is a difference between starting a string with a single or double quote, you can read all about that here.
Along that last line, my new favorite trick is the “heredoc” type string. Often if we have a big chunk of HTML we need to output from PHP we’ll do several lines of something like:
$return = "<p>this is some HTML</p>";
$return .= "<p>my next line of html</p>";
$return .= "<p>another line with a $variable in it</p>";
echo $return;Obviously you can accomplish the same thing from a single line, but when you start to mix in some variables it gets hard to read. You could do the same thing much more simply with heredoc:
$return =<<<EOE
<p>this is some HTML</p>
<p>my next line of html</p>
<p>another line with a $variable in it</p>
EOE;
echo $return;
There are some strict limitations about how to open and close a heredoc so take a good look at the documentation.
I hope this helps anyone struggling to get started with PHP! If you run into an error you can’t explain feel free to post it in the comments.