Blog with Integrity FTC Webinar

November 21, 2009 by

Blog With Integrity hosted a free webinar on Nov. 10, 2009, featuring Federal Trade Commission (FTC) Associate Commissioner for Consumer Protection Mary Engle. The webinar discussed the new FTC guidance on disclosure and endorsements, which is critical information for bloggers who write about products and services plus the public relations and marketing people who hock them. You can view the Vimeo video below.

I have signed Blog with Integrity’s online pledge. I support clear disclosure of interests, treating others with respect, and taking responsibility for our words and actions. Right now, I am not taking any money for my blog posts and haven’t put any ads on my blog. If this changes in the future, the Blog with Integrity pledge will serve as my guidepost.

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Video Clip of the Month: Google Wave

November 9, 2009 by

Naomi Williams of www.DigitalFanGirl.com and fellow DC Web Women member was kind enough to give me a Google Wave invite.

Google Wave is “a personal communication and collaboration tool” announced by Google at the Google I/O conference on May 27, 2009. It is a web-based service, computing platform, and communications protocol designed to merge e-mail, instant messaging, wikis, and social networking.

I’ll keep you posted on how my eventuring with Google Wave goes. Here’s the YouTube video you get when you accept the invite and sign up.

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White House Website Shifts to Free Drupal

October 25, 2009 by

whitehouseThe www.whitehouse.gov website shifted over to the free open source Drupal content management system (CMS) yesterday, according to an article in the San Francisco Chronicle. A CMS is a software package that lets you build a website that non-technical people can quickly and easily (and therefore affordably) change and update.

“We now have a technology platform to get more and more voices on the site,” White House new media director Macon Phillips was quoted in the article. “This is state-of-the-art technology and the government is a participant in it.”


While the article focuses largely on the counterintuitive security benefits of free open source software (due to thousands of people around the world collaborating on picking apart and improving the code), Drupal will offer the White House other advantages.  Drupal has a huge library of user-contributed modules that the White House can use to expand its social media capabilities, including such options as super-scalable live chats and multilingual support. The Drupal community will keep expanding this library as technology changes, enabling the White House to benefit from those new features without having to pay to develop them.

The White House website’s shift is obviously a big win for free open source software packages. The White House endorsement will almost certainly inspire more government entities to follow suit, ultimately saving federal, state, and local government entities a lot of software development money.

As a side benefit, as the San Francisco Chronicle article notes, widespread government adoption of open source software packages would help President Obama keep his pledge to make government more open and transparent. After all, what could be more transparent than sharing your computer code with the world.

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A Great Resource: DC Web Women

October 21, 2009 by

I am a member of DC Web Women (DCWW), a 501(c)(6) professional organization of about 3000 members located in the Washington, D.C., area. Our members are professional women, students, and enthusiasts who specialize in the fields of web design, web development, computer science, Information Technology (IT), graphic design, web content, blogging, multimedia, marketing, e-marketing, Search Engine Optimization (SEO), web analytics, and social media.

A former boss of mine originally recommended I join the group. I am glad I did. DCWW is such a great resource. It reaches out and partners with local technology, web, and new media communities/groups that advocate for women in technology. More importantly, the group’s listserve is a goldmine of technical information. Here’s a link to the DCWW website.

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What’s Hot: Free Content Management Systems

October 17, 2009 by

eVentures in Cyberland: Through the Web 2.0 Looking Glass, and What Communicators Found There was created using WordPress, a free open source content management system (CMS). A CMS is a software package that lets you build a website that non-technical people can quickly and easily (and therefore affordably) change and update. You could, for example, design a templates-based website like this one for as little as $1,000 (all in design, not writing, labor and assuming few rounds of design changes).

There are several reasons why I picked WordPress as my main publishing platform. WordPress has also been chosen as the publishing platform for many well known websites, such as People Magazine’s StyleWatch, Time Live Blogs, Reuters US Blogs, Larry King Live, The Ford Story, MTV Newsroom, ZDNet Technology, TV Tonight, and the Wall Street Journal magazine. These are all websites with a large number of pages, articles, images, and videos and obviously they have huge traffic demands with thousands of visitors per day. WordPress is not only able to satisfy these demands, but also do it in a usable and elegant way.

Joomla!, Drupal, and Plone are three other free open source CMSs that are very popular. Here’s a link to a PDF report providing a detailed comparison of WordPress, Joomla!, Drupal, and Plone.

Filed Under: Miscellaneous, Technology Tagged With: , , , ,