Law, Privacy and Security

Here are the slides for the material: Law, Privacy and Security.

Naked Conversations: Chapters 1 - 4

will be covered today (monday) in class: NC 1 - 4.

Organizations Online

here are the slides for Organizations Online.

Consumers Online

Here are the slides that accompany this text: Consumers online: Who are they and What are they doing?

Wikipedia: Barbaro

I have just spent a little time updating the Barbaro entry, you can see my updates in the history section.

Search: Chapters 1 - 4

Here are the notes.

Slides for topic 2: How the Web Works

are here. The accompany the following materials: How the Web Works.

Class is on today: 2/14

University is open to class is on. Among a couple of other things we will look at this:

Blogs Will Change Your Business

A Diva Welcome

Diva Marketing, one of required blogs, welcomes us!

Slides for topic 1: Background and History

Here are the slides: Background and History. These slides accompany the text: Background and History.

Blogs, News Readers and Wikipedia ... Why ?

Why are we blogging?

As I am sure you can see, this class relies pretty heavily on the successful use of blogging, reading blogs via a news reader, and contributing to wikipedia.

We are using blogs for this class for three important reasons. Firstly, we are using blogs to introduce you to one of the more recent ‘innovations’ of the web. Blogging has become very popular. Many recent articles on blogging do suggest that it is becoming a powerful marketing tool. Many of these articles are linked to our course blog (under the header ‘Articles on Blogging’). Articles include ‘Chief Humanising Officer’, which highlights Scobleizer blogging for Microsoft and ‘Blogs will Change Your Business’, the title being relatively self explanatory. It is clear this is a new medium that is changing the way we communicate with our customers and the way customers are able to communicate with each other. The book ‘Cluetrain Manifesto’ was the first book to explore this phenomena (pre-blogging) and blogging is now showing how true the cluetrain really can be! The recently published, Naked Conversations, an extension of the Cluetrain Manifesto, is required reading for this course.

We are also using blogs to intruduce you to HTML and CSS in a 'safe' environment.

Finally we are blogging to increase the communications among students within the class.


Why a news aggregator, why bloglines and why make it public?

It is true you can read blogs and other sites by simply visiting those sites. We do this everyday as we browse the web. The advantage of using a news aggregator, such as bloglines, only manifests when you have multiple web-sites that you want to keep up with, sites that update their content regularly. Without a news aggregator it will be up to you to visit each site, individually, and determine if there is new content there for you to read. Many such visits may be simply a waste of your valuable time if the site has not been updated since your last visit. Subscribing to these sites, via your news aggregator, such as bloglines, allows you to easily determine when a site has been updated with new content, and thus you only need to make the visit when you determine it is appropriate. The content from the sites is 'pushed' to your aggregator via their respective RSS feeds.

Bloglines itself is the most popular web-based news aggregator, a site you can use from any PC as long as you have an internet connection (useful if traveling and using cybercafes for example). Other features of bloglines that are useful include the ability to mark an entry as ‘new’, it thus remains to be viewed at a later time. This is great for sites that update rapidly (think of Slashdot.org), a site you may want to check quickly, yet have little time to read important entries. You can return at a more convenient time to read the entry, continue to save it, or trash it at that point.

Bloglines also allows you to make your subscriptions public, for others to view. This is an important part of your class project (that I can see which resources you are subscribed) and thus required.

Why Wikipedia?
Wikipedia is becoming one of the most important resources on the web. It is an open source-type project, in as much as it has been built with the help of its more than 800,000 registered users. By participating in Wikipedia you will learn how to work within a community, online and benefit the online community with your insights.

Be confident!

The hardest aspect of the projects is getting started and the presumption of complexity. I assure you this project is wonderful for those new to web-site development (i.e. no HTML knowledge) so don’t be intimidated by the tasks, embrace the idea that this will be a great way to get your feet wet in developing your first web project and learning web 2.0 technologies by using the technologies!

Adding Blogs to your Bloglines Account and making it Public

Adding blogs to your account
Once you have set up your account on bloglines:

1. click on the 'my feeds' tab.
   
2. click on 'Add'
   
3. key in the URL of the blog to which you are subscribing, click subscribe
   
4. click ... again, you are now subscribed
   

You are required to subscribe to your teammates' blogs. You are required to subscribe to each of the blogs listed on this site under the heading 'required blogs'. You are required to subscribe to a Google Blog Search result. You are also required to subscribe to this blog.

You will subscribe to the RSS feed of each blog. Blogger blogs automatically have such a feed. You only need to copy and paste the URL of the blog in the appropriate dialog box in bloglines.

Make your subscriptions public
To make your subscriptions public (required for this project and allows me, and others, to see your subscriptions):

1. click the 'share' tab
   
2. click the hyperlinked 'profile' (second sentence)
   
3. click 'blog settings' (horizontal nav.)
   
4. key in a username (note if this does not work, try a different username)
   
5. click 'yes' for show my blog
   
6. save changes
   

your url for your public subscriptions will be:

http://www.bloglines.com/public/username

Creating a Link w/ HTML

Your blog entries should include relevant links. Your blog template also needs to include links.

How do you hyperlink to another web resource ?

Easy!

To include a link to this Site from your blog, simply change this blog reference from:

Information Technology Applications in Marketing (My favourite Class)


to

<A HREF="http://infotechspring06.blogspot.com">Information Technology Applications in Marketing (My favourite Class)</A>


Note: It is not important to know what <A HREF means, nor do you need to remember, whenever you need to create a hyperlink, you can simply view source on a document that contains a hyperlink ... and that is why writing html is not complex!

Note: when creating a 'post' for your blog select: edit HTML option (just above / right of the text box window).

Any questions ? Use the comments area.

How to edit the template

What is the 'template'
Your 'template' is essentially the code used to display your blog. While a blog is pretty simple to set up and add entries, to actually add links to the left column (for more permanence etc.) does require you to know a little bit about html and the code used in the template. To get you started a couple of quick tips that will make editing your template pretty straight forward.

1. Log into http://www.blogger.com
   
2. Access your class blog
   
3. Click on the 'Template' Link.
   
4. Scroll down (or use the search function) until you find the 'code'
   
   <h2 class="sidebar-title">Previous Posts</h2>
   
   
5. Copy and paste this line directly above the line so you now have:
   <h2 class="sidebar-title">Previous Posts</h2>
   
   <h2 class="sidebar-title">Previous Posts</h2>
   
   
6. Edit out 'Previous Posts' from the new instance, and replace it with 'Required Blogs'
   
   thus you now have:
   
   <h2 class="sidebar-title">Required Blogs</h2>
   
   <h2 class="sidebar-title">Previous Posts</h2>
   
   
7. On the next line below this new heading add in the appropriate link for each of the class'required blogs.
   
   For example:
   
   <A HREF="http://www.clickz.com/">ClickZ Stats</A>
   
   
8. Note you can come back and do this multiple times (thus you can add the required blogs in one session, and return to add a title for your team mates' blogs and add their blogs). You can also repeat this process and create another header (i.e. 'Wikipedia Articles' to list the wikipedia articles you are editing.

How to create your blog

Setting up the Blog

You are required to use http://www.blogger.com as your blog platform as it is free, easy and hosted. You are also required to select 'dots dark', a template designed by Douglas Bowman, for your blog.

How to set up your blog?


1. Sign up for an account on http://www.blogger.com
2. Create the URL and name for your blog (you can change the name later, the URL is permanent)
3. Select the template 'dots dark'. You need to scroll down the page to find the template
4. Start posting (i.e. it really was that simple to create the blog).

Welcome

this serves as the first post to Information Technology Applications in Marketing, Spring 07.