Another topic of discussion in class this week was the value of meta tags. I promised to dig out this piece by Danny Sullivan. In Death Of A Meta Tag Danny Sullivan argues that after years of abuse by spammers keyword meta tags are no longer useful. Instead he advises that good title tags are important.
To quote the article :
“For those running large web sites or short on time, don’t worry about it. The stress and time involved in trying to craft a tag was not worth it, in terms of the minor benefit it might bring. It is far more important for site owners to instead concentrate on creating good title tags for their pages, a key page element that has consistently shown it can help with ranking across all major crawlers.”
I have been meaning to draw attention to an interesting project by J D Lasica and Marc Canter who are two instigators of the project.
It is now obvious to state that one of the impacts of the internet is that individuals with access to a computer can produce and quickly publish material for a global audience online. In the past people who wanted to self publish media faced technical and financial limitations. For instance to self publish in print an individual needed access to a print house and a means of distributing the published product. On a practical level for the vast majority of people, this was costly and time consuming process. Not only that once something was printed it had to be distributed also a time consuming and complex process. However self publishing online changed this leading to a phenomenal bubble of home grown creative projects. Many reject self published personal sites as mere vanity, as publications they are dismissed as the domestic trivia of the web cluttering server space with family photos and home movies. However Our media see these digital creations differently. They are endeavouring to enable people to place online their projects (including multimedia), in a repository which is free, easy to use and access.
Their mission statement describes the project as:
“Ourmedia is a global community and learning center where you can gain visibility for your works of personal media. We’ll host your media forever — for free.
Video blogs, photo albums, home movies, podcasting, digital art, documentary journalism, home-brew political ads, music videos, audio interviews, digital storytelling, children’s tales, Flash animations, student films, mash-ups — all kinds of digital works have begun to flourish as the Internet rises up alongside big media as a place where we’ll gather to inform, entertain and astound each other. “
The implications of this project for students and emerging artists are wonderful and really something we can only guess at. The big thing is that a site like this does provide a space for a community of people online who create online media to share their work and form informal networks. In sharing media productions that people use in their everyday life I am sure a grassroots movements and networks will shape themselves into clusters which in turn will influence the sort of digital artefacts that are produced and used by people.
Two neuroscientists Fernette Eide and Brock Eide, have suggested that blogs are good for the neural paths in our brain because they provoke thinking on a number of levels and mental activity shapes changes in the structure the brain.
In Brain of a Blogger Eide and Eide suggest that Blogs promote critical and analytical thinking. The process of blogging can promote of creative, and intuitive thinking because “blogs must be updated frequently. This constant demand for output promotes a kind of spontaneity and raw thinking”.
For readers, blogs promote analogical thinking as the exchange between experts is seen as a “unique opportunity for young thinkers to witness and evaluate arguments from analogy on an ongoing basis, and to develop their own abilities to think analogically.” Blogs increase “access and exposure to quality information. Because blogs link many facts and arguments in branching ‘threads’ and webs, and append primary source materials and reference works, they foster deeper understanding and exposure to quality information.”
Finally for blog authors blogging combines reflection and brainstorming with others which means that “the best of ‘working by yourself’ and ‘working with other people’ is combined.”
MoCo Loco is a blog that focuses on contemporary design and architecture. Harry Wakefield covers topic areas such as interior design, textiles, jewellery, furniture, accessories, lighting, and websites.
Edited by Peter Clayton Mediastudies.com lists links to mainstream media news sites and resources for both students and teachers in media studies.
A List of Tutorials published on the Ades Design site. It includes Photoshop, Dreamweaver, CSS Tutorials. There are also a couple of Flash, PHP tutorials.
After much fiddling about and fooling around far too late into the night I have resurrected this blog. After a break I will be returning to teaching. The class is currently titled ‘Work the Web’. The description at the moment is still in draft form but reads like this
This course covers Web Design and Network Literacy for visual artists. In addition to web design and mastering the tools required to publish to the web, a key area of this course is developing skills and understanding network literacy. In other words how to represent, think, write, engage with others, and work in a responsible manner online. Students develop an understanding of the social, creative, ideological, legal, and ethical implications of publication in the context of a online network. Apart from the technical skills of developing a website the course covers developments such as social software, creative production online and its implications for visual artists.
Students plan, produce and publish a web site that may assist them in their professional life as designers and visual artists. Content is created using Adobe Photoshop and Dreamweaver. Apart from website design and construction students engage with Web2.0 technologies, RSS, blogging software and its use, as well as web design issues such as accessibility, usability, statistics collection, legal issues associated with copyright, and search engine optimisation. The course introduces ecommerce for artists and as such it is expected that students will host their own site and register their own domain name.
I have been developing course notes and materials but have decided it would be far easier to have much of that development appear here as I am at the stage of compiling reading lists and online resources for this course.
So here we go again another active blog!
30 days to a more accessible web site by Mark Pilgrim of Dive Into Accessibility is a useful online course that presents 25 tips that although written with an emphasis on blogging can be applied to websites to make them more accessible.
Day 23 particularly caught my eye as I was talking in class about it earlier in the week. Using alt text is important mainly because of accessibility issues those being that “screen readers read it, text-only browsers display it, Google indexes it, and visual browsers can display it as a tooltip or on the status line”.
