Intro Interactive – ICM501a

There seems to be some confusion as to the final pitch assignment. I’ll have more details as we get closer, but I want to emphasize that I am *not* asking you to launch a site for this–I’m asking for a compelling and well thought-out and explained pitch for the creation of a site. To give you a feel, here are a few from the “DC” course (7-week) that recently finished:

Obviously, you don’t have to make a video, since we’ll be presenting in person. That is an advantage and a disadvantage, actually. I expect your in-person presentation to be at least as polished as a video presentation. And I’ll be recording it on video as well.

User-centered cities and websites.Full lecture: mp3

First, note that this assignment–like the video assignment–has been bumped by a week. It is due this coming Monday.

Actually, this is a bit mis-named. Really, what I’m asking you to do is something akin to competitive analysis or market analysis, though nothing that formal. When people talk about doing competitive analysis, they are usually referring to providing the best search engine placement or driving traffic. This is important (depending on the nature of the site), but here I am more interested in where you think you are likely to find the community who will be interested in your site, and what makes you think they will be able to find it and stay there once they do. In other words, while there are tools that will allow you to get a better handle on a potential competitor’s traffic, and the amount they are receiving from advertising, that is far less of interest to me than some clear idea of how your site fits into a larger ecosystem of content.

More specifically, I want you to:

Identify 3-4 sites

These should be sites that are either competitors or that otherwise draw traffic from a group of similar potential users. Describe the sites and link to them. What makes you think they attract the users you are most interested in? How do they do it?

Describe the users

What are the characteristics of the people who use this site? Is there a loyal following, or do people just find it through a web search and visit once? How old are they? Where do they access the site from? What are their interests?

You might think, at least in very preliminary terms, about what search terms you would expect people to use to find your site–what do they find when they use those now?

Organization

How is it organized? How is it structured? What’s the first thing you see when you arrive? Is there a “members section” or a way to log in? Do they have a subscription for a newsletter or another way to draw you back?

Again, this isn’t an SEO effort, but what have they done to make their site more findable–if you can tell? Who links to them and why?

Credibility

What elements of the site convince you (or fail to convince you) that they are a serious enterprise? How do you know this isn’t something some teenager has cooked up in his basement? What are the markers of credibility?

Design

Describe the design and how it makes you feel. What emotions does it evoke? What themes are they drawing on? What sort of associations are they evoking? This can be a fairly lightweight description at this point. (In 502, you are likely to do this in more depth.)

What they are doing well?

What have they done that you hope to emulate, or that you will have to strive to counter? Is there something that seems to be particularly appropriate or attractive?

What could they be doing better?

Every site can be improved. What do you think each of these sites needs to do in order to improve? Is there something in that which will give you a competitive advantage.

A few notes on this. First of all, even if you are not designing a site with a significant commerce element, every site has competition. As we have seen, there is a limited amount of attention available out on the web, and your aim is to claim some of it. It is important for you to understand that there are others who want to attract users’ attention away from your site and toward their own. So, by understanding who you are vying against, you have a better idea of how to pitch your own site so that it will draw traffic and a supportive community.

You may find this guide helpful.

This is a DARPA funded project for a military robot that can squeeze through cracks and ooze into your living room, from our friends at iRobot.

Just a quick note on your self-evaluations. I got hit with triple deadlines with my three classes. Hope to be back to you all by Friday. Sorry for the slow return of the grades.

Sorry for the delay. Had some unexpected speedbumps.

As I mentioned, I liked the Emmy-winning design of the L-Word’s orientation island for Second Life. As noted here, it’s the way an SL orientation was meant to be. Unfortunately, it appears that it is now dead. So instead, if you are not already in Second Life, you can join up via the NMC’s orientation. I haven’t tried it yet, but have heard it’s good. Let me know how it goes. (If you’ve already been in-world, you still can go to the NMC orientation by following this link.)

On Wednesday at 6:30 EST we will be meeting in a space that is owned by a graduate of the ICM program, and he will meet us in world if he has the chance. Some of you have asked if we will be in the classroom. While you can try to get on from the classroom, it’s best to use a very quick connection, if possible; ideally a direct wired connection for most of you. I’ll be accessing from a hotel in Milwaukee.

There are two ways to get to our meeting spot. The easy way is to follow this link, and that should bring you to the spot in-world. Unfortunately, I’ve found that some people have trouble with this method (SLURLs) and so you’ll have to find it the “hard way.”

Once you are in world:

1. Open up your map
2. Type in Quietly Tuesday as the land
3. Hit “Search”
4. In location, enter 208, 100, 22
5. Hit “Teleport”
6. And then get out of the way to avoid incoming avatars rezzing on top of you .

I’ll try to be in-world a little bit early, though I’m coming from a meeting, so probably not too early.

I really like to eat Spam.

Sorry for the epic fail in class. Congratulations to those of you who have already posted, in spite of this.

What you need

You’ll need some hardware and software to do this. If you have a recent laptop, you probably already have a built-in mic. This may work–some built-in mics are better than others–but the single most important thing you can do to improve the audio quality is to improve your mic. The lectures are recorded using a good headset mic, but still are not great quality. I recently have a Snowflake that I’m fairly happy with, but it’s not cheap. (Or, rather, it is cheap as microphones go–if you plan on doing some podcasting or other computer-based recording, it’s not bad at all–but it’s more expensive than most decent headsets.) For the purposes of this assignment alone, you can probably make use of your built-in mic, if you have one, but try to get close, without speaking (blowing) directly into it. Also, try to maintain the same distance from the mic throughout.

You will also need software. If you have a recent Mac, you are likely to have Garage Band already installed. Go ahead and use it, it’s a great product, and tutorials abound.

If not, I’m assuming you don’t have a recording program. You may–if you’ve done video before, you may have a copy of Protools already on your system. Or, if you’ve purchased the Production Premium suite from Adobe, you have a copy of Soundbooth, which is really overkill for what we are doing. I don’t have experience with Soundbooth, but you are welcome to give it a run.

Most podcasters use a piece of free, open source software called Audacity. Audacity is great–relatively easy to work with and powerful. And it’s free. There is a small hiccup. Because the MP3 format is not an open format, you have to actually install an MP3 encoder in addition to the Audacity software. Actually, if you want to publish in the free alternative to MP3, called OGG (ogg vorbis), that’s great with me. Otherwise, you’ll need to download the LAME encoder to create the MP3. This is the whole tortured AR-15 full auto thing I was talking about.

Mic: check. Software: check. On to recording.

Wait, you didn’t say check? If you have no mic, and want to be a little adventurous/tame, you might give one of the podcast-by-phone options a try. You can literally “phone it in.” There are a number of providers: Gcast, Phonecasting, Slapcast, Talkshoe, Hipcast, Yodio, and Gabcast, among others. If you go this route, let me know how it works out–I haven’t had much experience with them (I’ve been interviewed via a phone for podcasts, but never actually did the podcast).

Produce

I would recommend that you use a script. If you make a mistake, just wait a few seconds (so you can easily find it) and start again, you can edit out the error.

You want to keep the audio file to a reasonable size. Let’s say less than 8 Mb. If yours is bigger than that, cut some of it out. (No, not really, you can follow directions here for decreasing the bitrate of your mp3.) The smaller the file the better–and the less time it will take to upload. WAVs are great, but take up substantially more space. You may have already touched on lossy and lossless compression in 502–the same goes here. MP3 is a lossy algorithm, and a good choice for the web.

If you want, you can edit the ID tags, either in Audacity or in Winamp (or whatever player you use that will allow you to do this, or even just in Windows properties for Vista).

Hosting / Uploading

This should be the easiest part, but unlike a good cooking show host, I didn’t try the recipe first before inflicting it on you. Basically, I failed to click the “File URL” button on the “Link to” line. If I do that, it works fine. I blame the lack of caffeine!

There are, again, other hosting options, from the Internet Archive to Odeo, but the easiest (if not most usable!) way is to just click on the media upload on Wordpress, but remember to click the “File URL” button.

Finally, I ended up scrapping this reading, but encourage you to pursue it on your own, if you are interested in the audio side of things. It is a short graphic-format (comic book!) tracing how Ira Glass puts together “This American Life,” called Radio: An illustrated guide.