Hyperarts.com has a fascinating post on the correct and incorrect ways to create those tempting (and possibly gorgeous) cover photos for the new Facebook timelines. Personally, I love my son’s choice (a simple photo he took of a book and an empty glass of wine on a dock somewhere in New England.
But as hyperarts points out, Facebook has some pretty strict guidelines on the use of these 851 x 315 pixel cover photos.
For example, you’re dissuaded from using the space for promotions, coupons and advertisements. And for Facebook, a photo is a photo. So don’t design something that is primarily text-based.
To read more about Facebook’s guidelines and to see examples that both break the rules and follow them, visit the hyperarts post.
Posts tagged facebook
Be Aware of Facebook’s Rules in Creating Your Cover Photos
Social Media and the PTA
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Just like educators and school public relations folks, Parent Teacher Associations around the country are currently struggling with administering social media sites, especially Facebook fan pages.
Cognizant of the need to reach out to members, raise funds and build support for their schools, PTAs from California to New York are beginning to create fan pages, monitor comments, and generally learn more about building fan bases on the world’s most popular social media sites.
So the audience last week, when I presented at the New York State PTA’s annual conference, was about as lively as you can expect. And once again, the learning curve was all over the map and included one audience member who noted that she had no experience on Facebook along with others who corrected me on a couple of social media fine points I probably should know by now.
Like any presenter, I’m sure, a lively audience is the best scenario. I love a lively, talkative audience with their hands in the air. It’s so much more rewarding than a group that looks comatose while you’re up there talking.
Here’s my presentation. Enjoy. And by all means, raise your hand!
New York State PTA Presentation
View more presentations from Evelyn McCormack
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A First Look at Facebook Timeline
If you’re anything like geeky moi, you’re probably itching to see how the new Facebook Timeline will look and you’re not willing to wait until Thursday, Sept. 29, to find out. Never fear: Mashable has a very good slide show with instructions on how to get the Timeline now.
I followed their instructions and behold a screenshot of my timeline. Enjoy doing the same, and then figuring out how the whole thing works. 
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Calendar Sanity
I’ve barely survived some pretty hairy school calendar planning sessions in my client districts, and have nearly lost my sanity sorting through hundreds of pieces of paper (including handwritten notes) containing competing events and dates that just have to be included in the bulging school calendar.
So in my social media travels, I have come across some pretty neat problem-solvers out there on the web, including Tandem for Schools, a central web-based calendar service. Using Tandem, school administrators can contribute to and update a central calendar, thereby sidestepping competing events, eliminating all that paper, and permitting the person who compiles your calendar to retain his or her grip on reality.
Tandem connects school districts with parents in multiple ways, centered around a sophisticated system. The web-based calendar set up by a school district (or individual schools, PTAs, education foundations, sports booster organizations, etc.) syncs with Outlook, iCal, Google Calendar, Windows Live, Yahoo Calendar, Cozi, and other popular calendar systems.
The service also provides iPhone and smartphone integration so that Tandem can send email and text message alerts to parents. Messages can be filtered by parents along the lines of their interests — for example, sports events, or school concerts.
Want your calendar to integrate with your district website? Tandem does that, by allowing you to re-direct the calendar button or the link you use to your district or school Tandem URL, and users will land right on the calendar. The calendar also can be customized to your school or district colors and logo.
Because Tandem is web hosted, there isn’t any hardware to purchase or software to download. And it automatically includes directions to every event you post on the district calendar, with the help of Google Maps. You can also post individual events from the Tandem calendar directly onto Twitter and Facebook, and the calendar itself can be embedded onto your District’s Facebook page.
Districts that use Tandem can set two different privacy levels on their calendars — one for the public and another level just for parents. There’s no restriction on the number of events, photos, or news stories a school or district can publish on its Tandem calendar, and there’s no cap on the volume of updates sent to users and no limit on the number of users.
This is not a sponsored post, and I have no reason to endorse the service other than having checked it out online myself. The best way to understand how Tandem works is to watch the company video.
Although Tandem hasn’t published any rates that I can find, you can see what the company offers in three different pricing levels — Basic, Standard and Plus — here. You might also want to sign up for a demo or participate in a Tandem webinar before deciding your next course of action.
Curious about Twitter?
I meet more people in my line of work who have finally created Facebook or LinkedIn accounts, but consider Twitter the final frontier in their online/digital life. I hear: “Who’s got the time?” Or: “What do you use Twitter for?” Or: “I already suffer from Information Overload!” Nevertheless, Twitter has presented us with grounbreaking implications for our everyday lives and for the way we communicate. There’s probably no better way to explain this than to show you a video from a TED conference, in which Twitter co-founder Evan Williams explains its many uses. By the way, during 2008 alone, Twitter exploded in size by 10 times.
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Adults: All Aboard for the Web 2.0 Train
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According to the Pew Internet and American Life Project, social networking has become more mainstream among adults. That includes me, at least the last time I checked the crow’s feet in my 10x magnification mirror.
According to the folks at Pew, the number of adult internet users who have a profile on an online social network site has more than quadrupled in the past four years — from 8% four years ago, to 35% now. That’s amazing, and encouraging. I have conducted a number of workshops on the subject of social media, and I still get attendees who look like deer in the headlights when I talk about Facebook, LinkedIn, and the whole sphere of social networking and social bookmarking.
On the other hand, I get plenty of people — of all ages — who are eager to dive right in.
Although those of us over the age of 18 stumbling through the social networks should be proud of ourselves for trying, don’t get cocky. We’re still light-years behind those lucky kids between the ages of 12 to 17. A whopping 65 percent of those crazy kids have an online profile on one of the big social networks — Facebook and MySpace, primarily.
It seems that the older we get, the less use we seem to have for social networks.
According to the Pew study, 75% of adults ages 18-24 use these networks, compared to just 7% of adults 65 and older. “At its core, use of online social networks is still a phenomenon of the young,” the study says.
Other age groups and their use of social networking sites:
– 57 percent of those aged 25 to 34
– 30 percent of those ages 35 to 44
– 19 percent of those aged 45 to 54
– 10 percent of those aged 55 to 64
Another interesting finding: We adults use social networks for professional and personal reasons, and we often maintain multiple profiles, generally on different sites.
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More on Social Media, Colleges and Universities
Many thanks to Heather Mansfield of Diosa Communications for promoting my post, “Why Schools Need to Get on the Social Media Bandwagon,” on her website. You can find my post here and at PROpenMic, one of my favorite Ning social networking sites. Speaking of Ms. Mansfield, she’s a web 2.0 consultant and expert with a great site that, among other things, lists good reads on the topic of using Web 2.0 tools in education. On her higher education page, she lists Web 2.0 Articles, Blogs, and Resources for Higher Education.
She also highly recommends the use of MySpace by colleges and universities, since they’re listed there on MySpaceSchools anyway. Here are two great links she sent along:
Her MySpace Portal
Her FaceBook page
Let’s see if her hard work pays off and if colleges and universities eventually get on the Web 2.0 bandwagon.
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Librarians are Cool
Image via Wikipedia I know I’m dating myself here, but I don’t remember ever having a cool librarian as a kid. Instead, the librarians I knew had pursed lips, shushed people for a living, and slept with the Dewey Decimal System.
Not today. Librarians are Twittering, Facebooking, blogging, wiki-ing, and definitely not sleeping with the Dewey Decimal System.
If you want proof, take a look at the Library page of the Online Education Database, which currently contains reviews of 1,081 programs from 86 accredited online colleges. There, you’ll find tons of references written by and for librarians about using social media in libraries around the country.
Here’s what the Library page says about Twitter, for example:
Twitter is a free communication and social networking tool which allows you to convey short messages of up to 140 characters to your circle of friends via the Twitter website, SMS, email, IM, or other Twitter client. Messages appear not only within your profile on Twitter, but are sent to your community of followers who have signed up to receive your updates. Often referred to as microblogging, this new phenomenon has caught on with over 300,000 users on Twitter alone including Barack Obama and John Edwards. Twitter recently made the cut as one of Time’s Best 50 Websites of 2007. Librarians are using it to communicate at conferences and events and to keep up with developments in the field, and libraries have begun using it to promote their services.
Among their listings are librarian-only applications and networks like:
Shakespeare High Cafeteria: This online tribute to Shakespeare features active discussions about Shakespeare news, book clubs, a creative writing center, “staff lounge,” study help and teaching ideas.
Readers Read: Browse forum topics like publishing industry, general fiction, mystery/thriller, children’s books and nonfiction.
TeacherLibrarianNing: Educators and librarians get together on this network, where you can join groups, post photos, upload videos and more.
The Shifted Librarian: Librarians connect through this blog about library news, trends and of course, books.
Librarian Facebook Application: This Facebook app connects you to other librarians who can answer your search questions.
They also list a number of social media sites for librarians and book-lovers, including:
Shelfari: This blog about books and book collecting has a MySpace page and a Facebook application.
GoodReads: Keep track of what you and your friends are reading through this online networking site.
BookJetty: BookJetty lets users organize, rate and review books and even look up books in the site’s database of over 300 libraries around the world. Users also get a blog that lets them show off a “bookshelf” to friends.
MySpace Books: This ultimate social networking site has a page just for books, connecting readers, authors and those in the book industry.
Books iRead: Another Facebook app that lets you rate, review, and share books you’ve read.
You can also catch a number of 21st century posts on the site, including these:
50 Ways to Use the Wii In Your Library
100 Essential Firefox Add-Ons for Librarians
e-Learning Reloaded: Top 50 Web 2.0 Tools for Info Junkies, Researchers & Students
100 Ways to Use Your iPod to Learn and Study Better
Need any more proof that librarians are cool? I don’t think so. Now shush!
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Ambient Intimacy? Guilty as Charged
Image by gniliep via Flickr I was fascinated by Sunday’s New York Times article, “Brave New World of Digital Intimacy,” in which writer Clive Thompson examines the increasing use of social media like Facebook and Twitter. Guilty as charged — it seems the more I use them, the more I rely on them.
The piece looks back at Facebook’s decision to introduce the “News Feed” tool, which initially created a firestorm from users who felt that constant updates about their activities on Facebook was an intrusion. But then, just as suddenly, the tide turned.
In essence, Facebook users didn’t think they wanted constant, up-to-the-minute updates on what other people are doing. Yet when they experienced this sort of omnipresent knowledge, they found it intriguing and addictive. Why?
Thompson’s piece notes that scientists have a name for this kind of nonstop online contact: “ambient awareness.”
It is, they say, very much like being physically near someone and picking up on his mood through the little things he does — body language, sighs, stray comments — out of the corner of your eye. Facebook is no longer alone in offering this sort of interaction online. In the last year, there has been a boom in tools for “microblogging”: posting frequent tiny updates on what you’re doing.
Twitter, of course, is the premiere site for microblogging, where more than 2 million users provide brief updates about themselves, their work, their daily lives, sometimes on a minute-by-minute basis.
The Times article also notes that in 1998, the anthropologist Robin Dunbar argued that every human being has a limit on the number of people he or she can personally know at any one time. Dunbar estimated that our maximum number of connections would average 150, which is now known as the “Dunbar number.”
So, Thompson asks, are people who use Facebook and Twitter increasing their Dunbar number, because they can keep track of more people? Try adding the number of contacts you have on Facebook and Twitter, as Thompson did for his article. He had 301 contacts on both sites, more than double the Dunbar number.
Check out the Times piece and think about your expanding world for a few minutes.
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Textbooks and iPods and Facebook — Oh My!
This Special Report in Businessweek this week takes a fascinating look at how technology — from iPods to professors’ Facebook pages — is changing the face of your average campus.
I especially like this quote from a researcher in the story:
Cara Lane, a researcher who studies learning and scholarly technologies at the University of Washington in Seattle, says all that time spent searching for Hannah Montana videos on YouTube can help make teens better at searching the databases, including Lexis-Nexis and J-Stor, they’ll need for academic research—those IMs, texts, and status updates are a primer for participation in online forums related to classwork. “Students usually arrive not knowing how to use education-oriented technology tools,” Lane says. “But they quickly surpass their instructors in their ability to use them effectively.”
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