Jeff Stevens: Dogooder

Best of 2011 by Jeff Stevens on Grooveshark

As we welcome in the new year, I’d like to take a moment to look back at 2011 and recognize my top ten favorite songs of the popular Top 40.

10. Written in the Stars – Tinie Tempah

The second lesser cousin to Stereo Hearts. But there’s something about that hook.

9. You and I – Lady Gaga

Lady Gaga is the female pop equivalent of Weird Al Yankovic. And I’m not just talking costumes.

Weird Al’s most amazing ability is how he can switch genres and create a song in any medium, from country to hip-hop to new wave. Gaga has this same ability, from 80′s pop to seventies disco to a ballad with Tony Bennett. In You and I she does it again, easily moving into the realm of modern country honkeytonk. I vote it the unofficial song of Nebraska.

8. Tonight, Tonight - Hot Chelle Rae

Yes, it’s ephemeral pop. Yes, it forever dates itself by making a reference to a current movie star. So did Puttin on the Ritz by Taco. The fact of the matter is it is fun to sing along to, and fit the need for a summer party song. And my kids LOVED it.

7. Someone Like You - Adele

I haven’t had a song move me to tears as quickly as this one since Dolly Parton first sang “I Will Always Love You“. Adele’s heart felt vocals send goosebumps through me every time.

6. E.T. - Katy Perry

Katy Perry gets mad props for using the word extraterrestrial in a song, let alone as the bridge. The relentless beat gets me every time. Also, an allusion to lucky star in the bridge that always makes me think of Ripley in the escape pod in Alien, which adds a level of dangerous creepiness to the song. I’m less enthused with the Kanye West intorduction version, so I pick the radio edit as the best version of the song.

5. Party Rock Anthem - LMFAO

Everyday I’m shufflin. Even if the somng had only had this line it would have been a dance classic. LMFAO brings it home with some great hooks and sudden switches to tempo to keep it from being too repetitive.

4. If I Die Young - The Band Perry

This years’ Nickel Creek. I go head over heels for quiet country songs, especially those tinged with folk. This one has a banjo, a mandolin, the brilliant phrase “sharp knife of a short life”, and melancholic references to the Lady of Shallott. Sold.

3. Stereo Hearts - Gym Class Heroes

I love metaphor as song, and Gym Class Heroes delivers in droves with this extended metaphor of love as music. Maroon 5′s frontman Adam Levine takes in over the top with his falsetto-tinged bridge, making this a song I have to blast at maximum volume and sing my lungs out to.

2. If I Was From Paris – Grace Potter and the Nocturnals

This song is mesmerizing. The incessant beat, the build-up, the slight improvisations in every verse, the smoldering vocals. It’s retro punk-rock nirvana.

1. Rolling in the Deep - Adele

Adele made my list of songs twice this year. This song stopped me dead in my tracks at the beginning of the year, cutting through the rest of the Top 40 like a laser. Such a strong vocal and classic Motown vibe.

Great Snakes!

Dare I say it?  Although it seems heretical, The Adventures of Tintin is the most Indiana Jones film Spielberg has made this decade.

Spielberg’s take on the popular Belgian comic strip hero captures a lot of the zeitgeist of the original Jones trilogy – it immerses you in the time period of the thirties and gives you a sense of wonder at the visuals of the locations; a rousing, energetic score by John Williams; intricate and involved action sequences that leaves you breathless; and a resourceful, determined hero who thinks quickly on his feet and always finds a way through.

Unlike the Jones trilogy, however, Tintin holds the violence to a a bloodless style that’s more suited for younger films. So if you’re a dad in his thirties with kids who’ve been clamoring to see an Indiana Jones movie, here’s a good, safe alternative while waiting them to mature enough for face-melting.

Although I usually find modern 3D to be too gimmicky, Tintin uses it mainly to highlight sense and to give it slight depth rather than to overpower.  Nevertheless, I still found the 3D to be distracting in some of the large action pieces. I always find that the foreground action in 3D dominates over elements in the back ground, which might have as much relevance as what is happening closer. The result is that your eye can’t take in the whole scene at once until your focus is deliberately switched to the other action, and I often find this jarring and detracting from the overall composition of the scene.

Also, I have to say that photo-realistic CGI renditions have come a long way from The Polar Express. I never had a creepy Uncanny Valley sensation in watching the film, probably through the conscious decision to exaggerate facial features in a way that made the characters closer to their original cartoon counterparts.

The Movie Pitch

It’s Raiders of the Lost Ark meets the Hardy Boys Mysteries meets Popeye.

What’s the Movie Pitch?

Rating

I’m your Huckleberry.

I’ve got a confession – I’ve never taken the time to watch Kevin Costner’s Wyatt Earp, and primarily because I love this film to pieces. This is essentially the western equivalent of a biblical epic from the 50′s and 60′s – anybody and everybody is in it. Kurt Russell, Val Kilmer, Bill Paxton, Powers Boothe, Michael Biehn, Charlton Heston, Jason Priestley, Stephen Lang, Thomas Haden Church, Michael Rooker, Billy Bob Thornton, Frank Stallone, John Corbett, Terry O’Quinn, the voice of Robert Mitchum, AND Billy Zane? Shut up and take my money.

Well filmed and exquisitely scored, Kurt Russell gives one of the best performances of his career as Wyatt Earp, only overshadowed by the laconic and electric performance of Val Kilmer – really, this is my favorite performance from the actor and he steals the film in any scene he’s in.

One of nice elements in the film is to let characters not be monolithic.  In a film retelling of the gun fight at the O.K Corral, it would have been easy to have fallen into a standard western trope of white hats and black hats, but Tombstone allows characters to be more nuanced than that. Wyatt Earp is not a steadfast pillar of moral decency, and Doc Holliday causes as many problems as he solves. Similarly, some of the villains have changes of heart and show moments of mercy. It’s what makes this film stand out from many others in the genre.

The Movie Pitch

It’s High Noon meets the Magnificent Seven meets The Greatest Story Ever Told.

What’s the Movie Pitch?

Rating

Put the Needle on the Record

The past few days I’ve been heavily using Turntable.fm. Well, obsessing is probably a better turn for it. For those of you who have not used it, Turntable.fm is essentially an online radio station where users volunteer to be a DJ in a room, usually dedicated to a type of music. Up to five DJs share turns playing songs from an online catalog of music or uploading songs from their own colelction, and the listening audience votes on their approval or disapproval of the music being played.

Of course, given the time of the year, I’ve been spending most of my time in the two different Christmas rooms that have been created. One is a traditional room, where the music is supposed to stay family-friendly (that is, if the moderator is paying attention). The other is a no-holds barred, anything goes kind of room. Jumping between them, I’ve heard the full spectrum of Christmas themed songs this year, from familiar traditional arrangements to the brand new, from the most solemn and religious to carol to some really raunchy and inappropriate pieces.

Last night, I had the opportunity to DJ in the Main Christmas room, and I picked a trio of unconventional pieces: Jingle Bells by the Gay Robots, a techno-dance track; There’s No Chimneys in the Projects, a delightful piece of funk inspired by the sounds of the seventies by Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings; and Snoopy’s Christmas by the Royal Guardsman, a classic rock piece inspired partly by Charlie Brown’s beagle and partly by the Christmas Truce of 1914 during World War I.

Jingle Bells (by Gay Robots) by syncdrifters. Unless you feel robots can’t be gay, there’s no reason to hate.

Each and every one of the selections was challenged by a member of the DJ crew for not being Christmas, accompanied by calls to leave the stage.

Now this was a unique exception to the warm wishes and feeling usually found in both rooms, but it got me to thinking: What makes a song Christmas? Where do I draw the line on what qualifies as holiday music and what does not?

Melody and Arrangement in Christmas Songs

To me, melody and arrangement need not be traditional. In fact, I relish the song that eschews the conventional for something different – most Christmas carols and standards are covered by artists nearly verbatim to the source, with little variation or risk. The song that dares to take a risk and succeeds immediately stands out from the rest of the pact and gets my notice.

Parodies of Traditional Christmas Songs

Parodies are a tricky thing. Done right, they can be a nice reprieve to the over-played traditional song. For instance, Bob River’s Twelve Pains of Christmas and Bob and Doug MacKenzie’s Twelve Days of Christmas are well done versions of the popular – and sometime tediously long – standard.

• Family friendly? Yes. Unless you’re kids are Canadian and know the meaning of hoser.
• In the Christmas Spirit: Yes.

Parody, however, tends to go wrong when the song is more sacred than secular. Bob River’s Foreigners, a take off of Angels We Have Heard on High, is a painful disservice to the original and, quite frankly, racist and xenophobic. It definitely takes you out the holiday mood.

• Family friendly? No.
• In the Christmas Spirit: No.

It’s hard to take a traditional song and change it up without coming off as sacreligeous. Still, I have to laugh when Cheekyboy mixes the phrase “Go shorty, it’s your birthday!” with Little Drummer Boy.

Cheekyboy – Give It To Me, Little Drummer Boy.mp3 by user8924268

• Family friendly? Maybe.
• In the Christmas Spirit: Yes.

Does a Christmas Song Have to be Happy?

Christmas Face

Case in Point: I played a perennial favorite of mine in a room, Christmas Face by Fisher. It’s a sad tune about a woman dealing with the losses in her life and her inability to get into the holiday season.

I got some flack for this play, not just for the slowness of the track, but for it being too much of a ‘downer’, bordering on ‘suicidal’. There was some defense for the beauty of the song and an uplifting undercurrent.

To me this is part and parcel of putting too much emphasis on the arrangement of a song rather than the lyrics. Depression and sadness are part of the holiday season, and many songs of the genre acknowledge this, albeit most to a snappier tune: Last Christmas by Wham, Blue Christmas by Elvis Presley, Snowbird by Anne Murray, River by Joni Mitchell, and Christmas Wrapping by the Waitresses, to name a few. I’ve not heard these songs called out in the same way, and I suspect that the beat has supplanted the meaning of the song for those listening.

Christmas Face fits well with this company, and I appreciate its somber, solemn tone which matches many traditional carols. Plus, Fisher has a voice that just won’t quit.

Fisher Christmas by Ron Wasserman. You should listen to the other tracks too. Beautiful.

• Family friendly? Yes.
• In the Christmas Spirit: Yes.

Profanity In Christmas Songs

Profanity and Christmas songs would seem to mix like oil and water. But, when used effectively and for a purpose, and not just to shock, it can be part of a Christmas song.

Fairytale of New York

Case in point: Fairytale of New York, which I identified at Awesome Christmas Songs as the best secular Christmas song of all time. The profanity in this song is tied directly to the call-and-response of the singers to one another and underscores the rocky nature of their relationship.It make the song richer and more effective.

• Family friendly? No.
• In the Christmas Spirit: Yes.

Insane Christmas Mashup

Case in point: Mbellomo’s Insane Christmas Mashup is an extremely inventive mash-up created by a DJ on Turntable that incorporates Frosty the Snowman by Burl Ives, Here comes Santa Claus by the Jackson Five, and F*ck You by Cee-lo Green. Yes, you read that right. Interspersed are quotes from various Christmas specials in which question whether Santa Claus exists (prompting the Cee-lo rejoinders) and an extended clip of A Christmas Story‘s Ralph Billingsley uttering ‘the mother’ of all curse words. I can’t help but admire the structure and composition of this song, and it’s underlying message against those that would besmirch the idea of Santa.

• Family friendly? No.
• In the Christmas Spirit: Yes.

Raunchiness In Christmas Songs

I have to set the line somewhere. Raunchiness has its place, but not in the holiday season. But if you are going to go there, have some sense of class about it. The Vandal’s It’s Christmastime for my Penis has more class in one bar than Aqua Teen Hunger Force’s innocuous titled (but similarly themed) I’ll Be Home For Christmas.

Hey, maybe that’s the line. No Aqua Teen Hunger Force.

• Family friendly? No.
• In the Christmas Spirit: No.

Tom Waits

No matter how many times you want to play it, Christmas Card from a Hooker in Minneapolis is not a Christmas song. Just no.

• Family friendly? No.
• In the Christmas Spirit: No.

So That’s My Stance

The bottom line is I’ll try almost anything once and decide it fit my purview of the season. Your mileage may vary. How do you decide what’s a Christmas standard for you and something you’ll turn to season after season? What makes you say “Bah, Humbug?” Let me know in the comments.

If prayer is an act of communion with a force greater than ourselves – be it God, or gods, or spirits, or the universe; if prayer is a ritual to share our hopes, dreams, fears, and worries; if prayer is a call to the which we hope will be answered by someone that hears us, acknowledges we are here, and offers relief, sympathy, or encouragement… can Twitter serve as a spiritual conduit?

The fewer the words, the better the prayer.
- Martin Luther

I’ve seen Twitter act as a lifeline for people. People ask for help and receive it, from friends and strangers alike. They ask for people to stand for a cause or a belief, or to speak out against an injustice, and they do. I’ve seen people use it as an outlet to vent their frustrations, to share their joys, or to proclaim their most fervent hopes and wishes.

Prayer is not an old woman’s idle amusement. Properly understood and applied, it is the most potent instrument of action.
- Mahatma Gandhi

Twitter requires us to be in the moment and ever aware of what others around us are communicating. It challenges our preconceptions and brings us into dialogue with strangers – the elusive ‘other’ – and to find common language and purpose. It helps us to transcend our geopolitical and social borders to find universal truths and meaning. It invites others to be a part of our lives, and for us to be a part of theirs, and in doing so find moments of transcendent joy by making a difference in others lives.

Of course, that’s Twitter at its best. Like any social medium, the quality and depth of the interaction depends greatly on who we choose to associate with and who is listening and who responds. It can be shallow and superficial at times; it can be petty and condescending, and it can be indifferent as well. And that’s to be expected – it’s part of being human. But the potential to dazzle and to shine – the power to find a moment of grace, and to reach something greater than ourselves – is always just 140 characters away.

Further Reading

Spirituality and Practice.com – 25 Reasons Why Twitter is Spiritual

Time and time again, I’m told by friends and family that they enjoy reading my Facebook and Twitter updates, but they have absolutely no idea what I’m talking about. So I’ve created this page to give some context whenever possible.

December 18

Don’t get me wrong – I adore this video. But I also love the comment on Youtube that said “Oh, Britta’s in this? Sigh.”

The lady in this adorable video bears a striking resemblance the actress that plays Britta on NBC’s Community. Earlier this week, Britta’s song and dance number killed Greendale Community College’s chances to reach Glee Club Regionals.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eVVXtknZVf0

This is straight up Highway to the Yuletide zone.

Hyperboleandahalf shares a story on how Kenny Loggins ruined one of his early Christmases. Kenny wrote Highway to the Danger Zone for the movie Top Gun, among many other hits.

December 19

Mainly it’s a love affair between myself, Santa, and my hot rod.

December 20

“I believe in the first season of Silk Stalkings”.

This single line in Shawn Spencer’s Bull-Durham monologue send up on Psych put me in stiches. Silk Stalkings was one of USA Network’s very first first-run shows. Mitzi Kapture and Rob Estes starred as homicide detectives in Palm Breach. It seemed to have a lot of potential that first season before the story line went o pot and USA decided the show needed more and more sex to sell it.

December 25

OMG what time is it I don’t even know kids what akk. COFFEE. #merrychristmas

That’s what morning across America on Christmas day feels like.

The Institute for Statistics and Mathematics at the Vienna University of Economics and Business is running an interesting mapping study within Facebook to measure how a person’s friends are tied together into social tribes and how those tribes interrelate with each other. Kristin and I both tried out the application and the results are pretty interesting and show telling differences in our social structures on Facebook.

Kristin’s 3-D Network

Running the program gave us the following results for Kristin. Friends in Facebook are identified by first name and last initial, and color coded by how interconnected they are with other friends – from red (least connected) to white (a primary intersecting account). Gray lines indicate connections from one friend to another:

Kristin’s shows some definite concrete social tribes. The following interpretation identifies those groups with spheres of influence:

Kristin’s online parenting group and extension of local parenting, homeschooling, and attachment parenting groups are quite prominent. The most dense cluster of interaction is via the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship’s Facebook group. Her high school friends, family, and Florida State friends also have distinguishing webs, but less defined. There’s also a pseudo-group of my own high school friends and family right above these.

Also, you can see that I act as a major interstitial Facebook account, with connections to many of her groups.

Jeff’s 3-D Network

My visualization, in contrast, is radically different:

My account is much less cohesive in consolidated social tribes.  This seems to well correlate with my usage of Twitter – Klout, the major metric tool trying to establish baselines for personality types in Twitter, long classified me as a Conversationalist, involved in many conversations but not being focused into one particular area of conversation. I’ve been just as broad with my selection of friends in Facebook, and consequentially have many friends not connected to other networks.

Nevertheless, we can still see some strong social tribes emerge from the data:

As you can see, The UU Fellowship also features in my graph, but not as prominently as in my wife’s. My high school connections seem stronger, but primarily as I used to friend almost everyone from my high school while trying to manage communications among alumni.  My Junior high school friends from North Carolina also appear as a small connected tribe.

Locally, my Gainesville and UF connections tend to blend very much, anchored by two or three primary accounts. Friends from the parenting groups in Kristin’s are absorbed into this larger super group.

By far the densest grouping in my network map are friends and colleagues from other higher education institutions, primarily met via the Higher Ed Web Association. This group is tied into the UF network but in very little other areas.

My wife, while still a primary intersection for a few of my tribes, is removed from many others.

My God, It’s Full of Stars

So what do these constellations of Facebook users tell us? I think mainly it shows how one approaches social media greatly influences how our networks spread.

Kristin’s use of social media grew organically from her connections in real life, as well as from message boards she was participated in as a new mother. Her circles have not grown exceptionally large from these beginnings, nut each new contact she adds are greatly tied to these groups, and consequentially have stronger bonds to a community at large.

My use of social media has been more haphazard in approach. From online groups to groups of local acquaintances to people I knew through email conversations, chat rooms, and from meetings and conventions, my social networks grew much more wildly and are more diffuse. Although some of the social tribes I am a part of strong, I connect to many people not tied to any of them – but potentially are connected to many other networks that are not as insular and therefore have greater reach.

I’ll be interested to see what Vienna University concludes from their study.  I hope that at some point they’ll allow us to explore this map in a true 3-d environment so we can get a closer look under the hood.

Sink me!

Few fictional characters have had such a lasting impact on popular culture – and on real world events – than Baroness Emmuska Orczy’s Scarlet Pimpernel. Pretending to the world to be a dainty fop, British master of disguise  Sir Percy Blakeney secretly leads a small group of agents rescuing French aristocracy from the guillotine.

The Pimpernel’s dual identity and escapades influenced the concept of Zorro – indeed, de la Vega is almost a carbon copy of Blakeney – as well as their most famous antecedent, Bruce Wayne and Batman.

The Pimpernel also influenced real world events. A remake of this film set in pre-war Europe called Pimpernel Smith is said to have inspired Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg in his efforts to save tens of thousands of Hungarian Jews from Nazi concentration camps.

In this most faithful adaptation of the original 1903 play, Leslie Howard provides an amazing performance , playing both dandy and arch-conspirator with equal aplomb. The dialogue during these scenes is my personal favorite and sets the bar for all the similar films to come. International superstar Merle Oberon (what a name) plays counterpoint as his unsuspecting wife Marguerite, caught between her web of responsibilities and personal ties to those in France and her husband in England.

For fans of period pieces and court intrigue this cannot be missed. My only minor complaint is that the films finale feels slightly anti-climatic given its build-up – the final obstacles of the third act seem to be mere trifles to the cunning of the Scarlet Pimpernel and there feels to be a real lack of tension cause you KNOW he has everything figured out. Still the performances more than balance their minor quibble.

The Movie Pitch

It’s The Mark of Zorro meets A Tale of Two Cities.

What’s the Movie Pitch?

Rating

A study in the December issue of the journal Pediatrics has found a link between the emotional and behavioral problems of children and whether the parents are suffering from depression, including new evidence as the father’s role in these issues.

Most importantly, the study showed new evidence of how a father’s depression can effect children. Many studies have looked at how a mother’s emotional state can impact children, but very few studies have been done to look at the father. The study showed that twenty percent of children with mothers who appeared depressed showed signs of depression themselves; the percentage was 16 percent for those whose fathers appeared depressed. If both parents exhibited depression, the number jumped to 25 percent.

“This opens the door to a vast array of answerable but currently unanswered questions about the health and development of children growing up in households with depressed fathers.”

The study indicates a link but not what causes the link – whether depressed parent make depressed parents, or vice versa. But in underscores the needs for fathers to be open and honest about their relationship with their families and to seek support from friends and family.

External Web Services – University of Florida Academic Health Center

Earlier this year I took a job as Web Content Optimizer for UF’s AHC, a job in which I help academic colleges and departments and hospital units with optimizing the content of their websites for search engines, analyze their sites for usability and accessibility issues, measure analytics and social media interaction, and assist with information architecture. Our office also maintains a blog for which all of us write – here’s what I wrote in 2011:

Union Design created a website for the model, built on the urban fantasy motif of twilight and dark elegant designs. The site showcases her modeling work, upcoming appearances, and her line of beauty lotions and creams based on the hit book and movie series.

Started by geography students doing research in Uganda, Books Open the World assists rural communities with building community libraries, and securing funding for training and employing librarians. In Europe and the United States, they run book drives to find the volumes to stock the shelves. They also fund scholarships for rural girls to continue into secondary education institutions.

Union Design & Photo works with Books Open the World by designing their web site and collateral materials. Their logo, seen here, builds of of patterns in native Ugandan art and embodies the promise of a brighter future through reading and education.

Union Design & Photo created an identity that built off the traditional wood cut art of the era. Based on the name and sign of an Irish pub that resonated with the owners, the design portrays a dove in mid-flight over a cornucopia, represented the wealth of surprises one would find in the client’s catalog of antiques.

In October I saddled up and ambled down Austin way to present and attend the Higher Education Web Professionals Association conference. Every year, the best and the brightest in web development, marketing, communications, and applications development come together to share their knowledge and insights, to present new ideas, and collaborate with one another in one of the most engaging and social groups I’ve experienced.

Over the next few days I’ll be live blogging for the HighEdWeb magazine, Link, as well as heavily tweeting about the sessions and writing my summaries here to share with the UF Academic Health Center.

What Robocop Can Teach Us About Alumni Engagement

I gave a presentation at the conference on using micro-donations as a tool for engaging the younger, less affluent alumni audiences that are typically ignored by Foundations in favor of alumni that can donate large sums of money. By exciting and involving these audiences, higher education institutions can create crowd-sourced campaigns that can do a lot of smaller scale social good in the local, targeted communities, meeting mst higher education institution’s mission of outreach.

Presentations Covered in Blog Posts

• Workshop: Creating and Maintaining Web Content
• Student Ambassador Programs (For Link: the Journal of the Higher Education Web Association)

My Top Five Professional Takeaways

1. Large-scale engagement doesn’t mean a lot of money. Seth Odell showed us the tremendous results that can be achieved with two people, a laptop, and a web cam. Why have a small event on campus that can invite a few dozen people when the potential exists for reaching hundreds of additional audience members online for very little extra effort?
2. Be sure, then go ahead. Karlyn Morissette exemplified Davy Crockett’s maxim in her presentation on the Insane Clown Posse. If you are sure of your target audience and what they want, and have a plan to reach them, execute that plan and stay true to it to the very end. Don’t let the naysayers derail the process – stay true and reap the rewards.
3. They aren’t prospective students. Doug Tschopp’s user analysis of incoming students showed that they don’t use the word prospective students – it’s not how they identify themselves. Find a better term for this: Become an Aggie, Join our School, Incoming Students, Come to UF – anything that actually resonates with your audience.
4. Personas aren’t an abstract concept. In the past, personas have always seemed to me to be a good concept but give limited time and resources it often had to be sacrificed to meet immediate needs. Now I realize they are a crucial benchmark we should all be using. Aaron Baker’s presentation on information architecture, user interaction and personas showed that creating well-rounded personas can keep your information architecture on track and focused and deflect institutional demands to add content and links that are not germane to the mission and target audience of the site.
5. Higher Education news and communications needs to be better – and there  is no excuse for not doing it. Georgy Cohen’s presentation on news in higher education talked about the traditional stumbling blocks in improving their presentation – time, money, resources – and how they are all hollow crutches. Newspapers have managed to make these changes in the last few years to remain competitive, and their budgets are not much better than those of higher education news units. By being smart and taking advantage of new and generally low cost options, every higher education news unit could present a robust online presence quickly and within their operational means.

My Top Five Social Takeaways

Another great advantage of the heweb convention is the tremendous social and networking opportunities it allows. heweb, capped at around 500 attendees, is still small enough to allow intimacy and the ability to meet a large number of people from various institutions.

1. The Tuesday Night Excursion. Where to begin? The evening began with performing in the Man in #000000 Johnny Cash tribute band with Aaron Rester, Tim Nekritz, Georgy Cohen, Lori Packer, Joel Goodman, Larry Falck, Kris Martin-Baker, and Mallory Wood. I sang I Surfed Everywhere and a rapping solo on Rebecca Black’s Friday. Followed by hours of karaoke – including the best Paradise by the Dashboard Light with Kerri Hicks – impromptu crowd-sourced singing of Friends in Low Places on the bus, and hours of singing at a piano bar. Finally, a rooftop performance by Guilty Pleasures. It was an epic night.
2. Practicing for the Man in #000000 on Monday night. Just a lot of friendly singing in a hotel room, followed by a hotel atrium performance of Seventy-Six Trombones. If you had already gone to dinner, you missed out.
3. Free form jazz and quiet conversation with Carl Lew on Thursday night, after dinner at Threadgill’s, viewing the bats, ice cream and beers and conversation with Dave Tyler, Mitsi McKee, and others.
4. Exploration of the Gypsy Food Truck Festival, followed by a Day of the Dead celebration and listening to Tish and the Mizzbehavin’ Band at the Chugging Monkey with many, many attendees.
5. Quiet moments stolen away to talk to Georgy and Rick Allen.

Conclusion

The Higher Ed Web Conference is a must for anyone involved in developing a web presence   – not just developers and designers, but content writers, strategists, and marketers.  2012 promises to be a big year for the Association, and I invite you all to check it out.

Project GRACE is a ten year project aimed to eliminate homelessness in Alachua County. The program includes four different programs: Project Grace, the core project offering resources to homeless; Grace Marketplace, a one-stop center providing job education and placement opportunities; Grace Housing Trust, which works with local builders and property owners to find temporary housing, and Faces of Grace, which brings the homeless in as speakers to local businesses and organizations.

Union Design designed a comprehensive identity system for all aspects of the Grace program, including a website for disseminating information about the program.

Visit the website

Crosstown’s principal, Georgy Cohen, wanted an identity that spoke on several levels. First, she wanted the design to convey the idea of connecting audiences to content, and the channel of communication between the two. Secondly, she wanted a design that built on the iconic signage of the Boston transit system.

One of the cardinal sins of web designers is developing a web interface that is too artistic or clever to be functional. It’s an easy trap to fall into – we get too obsessed with something new and shiny, and not how usable it is for the end audience.

A prime example of this is the Australasian Writers and Art Directors Association showcase website, which showcaes award winning advertising design for the year in the region. The design uses a navigation system which Vince Flanders defined as “Mystery Meat Navigation” – links with no contextual clues unless you mouse over them. In this case, each entry is represented by a slowly moving dot that expands to show the award winning entry if clicked on.

The site does have a more traditional menu, but this is only rendered if one clicks within the loose central circle, and then still appears as circular text, meaning some link titles are upside down.

Now Vince would tell us that this site falls into a realm of vanity site that is unaccountable for goals, such as a movie site which exists only to promote a film in theaters. But it should be more than that. Shouldn’t a show reel for the best that the advertising community has to offer be easily searchable by anyone with a rudimentary level of web skills? The easier and straightforward the navigation, the easier it is for the head of a company or marketing department to look through the examples and find a company that meets their immediate needs. A clever, unintuitive interface gums up the process of discovery and consequentially makes this site useless in bringing new clientele to the companies involved.

For about $4,000, Mallory built an online ambassador program at St. Michael’s that eventually connected with 9 out of 10 incoming students.

An online ambassador has to be passionate about your institution and in talking with others.  They have to be comfortable with technology – but not someone who is closeted away with a computer. They need to be INVOLVED and CONNECTED on campus – student leaders, student government representatives, and club presidents. Content needs to be aware – authentic, well-connected, and avant-garde.

For more, please read the write up on Mallory’s presentation I wrote for Link: the Journal for Higher Education Professionals.