Directly Creative

Google’s event today was supposed to be about one device, the Nexus One. Instead, we heard a lot of: “more devices,” more manufacturers,” “more carriers,” “this is just the beginning.” Today was not about one device, it was about Google’s first step in helping to reshape the mobile landscape in the U.S. And thanks to the groundwork laid by Apple, it just might work.

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For those following Chrome OS, Google unveiled The Chromium OS open source project and some more details about the upcoming Chrome OS (scheduled to launch next year). A great and not so subtle article on Mashable titled “With Chrome OS, Google Intends to Destroy the Desktop and Microsoft” speculates the thinking behind the upcoming Chrome OS and it’s hard to argue the logic. The Google Chrome Blog offers info on Chromium and a demo from the Chrome OS announcement event.

Below is a great video from Epipheo that explains Chrome OS:

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div class=”separator” style=”clear: both; text-align: center;”a href=”http://www.directlycreative.com/blog/uploaded_images/2-763922.jpg” imageanchor=”1″ style=”clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;”img border=”0″ height=”279″ src=”http://www.directlycreative.com/blog/uploaded_images/2-763918.jpg” width=”420″ //abr //diva href=”http://www.webdesignerdepot.com/2009/09/the-difference-between-art-and-design/”Web Designer Depot has a great post about art vs. design/a that is intended to be a conversation springboard into what separates art and design. The images used as part of the post can also be downloaded as wallpaper.br /br /From the article:br /br /blockquoteArtists and designers both create visual compositions using a shared knowledge base, but their reasons for doing so are entirely different.br /br /Some designers consider themselves artists, but few artists consider themselves designers.br /br /So what exactly is the difference between art and design? In this post, we’ll examine and compare some of the core principles of each craft.br //blockquote

a href=”http://mashable.com/2009/09/28/sociability/”Great and quick read on Mashable today/a about social usability and personas. Here’s the meat of the article:br /br /blockquoteIn social media, many individual users, each different from the next, combine to form a social experience. Those users will have all manner of motives and interests that don’t necessarily overlap. The degree to which your social media efforts capitalize on these user habits results in sociability, and this starts with taking a user-centric perspective. In fact, you need to take imultiple/i perspectives.br /br /For the purpose of developing these different user perspectives, it is helpful to create user personas to describe the different types of social behavior. I like to group users into self-oriented, other-oriented, and relationally-oriented types.br /br /ullibSelf-oriented/b users are those who extend their presence online, building audiences and posting content. Experts, pundits, and those sometimes called “creators” are self-oriented users./lilibOther-oriented/b users are those who start with the conversations and contributions of others. Where the self-oriented user talks about him or herself (expresses him or herself), the other-oriented user responds, replies, or comments. What he or she reads and finds interesting provides a springboard for conversation./lilibRelationally-oriented/b users gets involved in social activities. They see what’s going on between other users, and may be drawn to these more social interactions. Involvement puts these users in relation to other users, with all the dramatic and nuanced activity this can result in./li/ulThese are extremely oversimplified descriptions, of course, but they’re not meant to describe real individuals. Rather, they’re a heuristic model intended to expand your thinking about your users.br //blockquote

div style=”text-align: left;”Mashable is a href=”http://mashable.com/2009/08/17/enterprise-twitter-tools/”featuring a great article on top corporate Twitter tools/a to manage your social media engagement with your customers. From the article:/divbr /blockquoteTwitter is a great listening post for companies to monitor conversations related to their brand and engage with customers; and there are a variety of tools available to help groups and corporations tweet, collaborate, and generally manage their Twitter (Twitter) workflows… Finding the right Twitter applications is a challenge for social media managers, though, because new apps seem to spring up each day and they often have overlapping feature sets./blockquotebr /The article covers the market leaders in each category, like Hootsuite…br /br /div class=”separator” style=”clear: both; text-align: left;”a href=”http://www.directlycreative.com/blog/uploaded_images/hootsuite-706236.jpg” imageanchor=”1″ style=”margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;”img border=”0″ height=”345″ src=”http://www.directlycreative.com/blog/uploaded_images/hootsuite-706233.jpg” width=”420″ //a/divbr /blockquoteChristine Jean Chambers, Interactive Producer and Online Media Planner for a href=”http://www.bet.com/” target=”_blank” BET/a, uses Hootsuite to track which content is resonating with their audience. “For example, during the BET Awards ’09 in June, we took over the entire top 10 trending topics on Twitter, which is pretty extraordinary,” she said. “We monitored this flux of activity using Hootsuite and were able to gauge the success of the delivery of our content on Twitter precisely because of trackable links Hootsuite provides.”/blockquotebr /Enjoy a href=”http://mashable.com/2009/08/17/enterprise-twitter-tools/”the entire article/a…

div style=”float: right; margin: 0px 0px 5px 10px;”a href=”http://www.directlycreative.com/blog/uploaded_images/writeweb-729013.jpg” imageanchor=”1″img align=”right” border=”0″ src=”http://www.directlycreative.com/blog/uploaded_images/writeweb-729011.jpg” //abr //diva href=”http://www.webdesignerdepot.com/”Web Designer Depot/a has a ba href=”http://www.webdesignerdepot.com/2009/08/20-tips-on-how-to-write-for-the-web/”great list of 20 mistakes writers on the web make today/a/b. I’ve been guilty of a few myself. br /br /From amateur bloggers to pro writers in leading publications and blogs, I’ve seen many of these mistakes littered across what I have read. My OCD (obscure acronym use is #16) never handles it well and encourages you to read this article.

div style=”float: right; margin: 0px 0px 5px 10px;”a href=”http://www.directlycreative.com/blog/uploaded_images/blog2-750439.jpg” imageanchor=”1″img align=”right” border=”0″ src=”http://www.directlycreative.com/blog/uploaded_images/blog2-750429.jpg” //abr //divOn a href=”http://mashable.com/”Mashable/a today, a href=”http://mashable.com/author/barb-dybwad/”Barb Dybwad/a runs through some a href=”http://mashable.com/2009/08/06/blogging-productivity-tools/”bgreat tools to make you a lean mean, blogging machine/b/a…

div style=”float: right; margin: 0px 0px 5px 10px;”img border=”0″ height=”200″ src=”http://www.directlycreative.com/blog/uploaded_images/google_wave_logo-786909.png” width=”200″ //divOn May 27, during the Google I/O keynote, Google’s VP of Engineering, Vic Gundotra, laid out a grand vision for the direction Google sees the web heading towards with the move to the HTML 5 standard. It’s called Google Wave.br /br /From Google:br /br /blockquotespan style=”font-size: small;”bAbout Google Wave/b/spanbr /Google Wave is a new model for communication and collaboration on the web, coming later this year.br /br /span style=”font-size: small;”bWhat is a wave?/b/spanbr /bA wave is equal parts conversation and document./b People can communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more. br /bA wave is shared./b Any participant can reply anywhere in the message, edit the content and add participants at any point in the process. Then playback lets anyone rewind the wave to see who said what and when.br /bA wave is live./b With live transmission as you type, participants on a wave can have faster conversations, see edits and interact with extensions in real-time/blockquotebr /div class=”separator” style=”clear: both; text-align: center;”a href=”http://www.directlycreative.com/blog/uploaded_images/google_wave_snapshots_inbox-740627.png” imageanchor=”1″ style=”margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;”img border=”0″ src=”http://www.directlycreative.com/blog/uploaded_images/google_wave_snapshots_inbox-740614.png” //a/divbr /div style=”border: 0px none; float: left; margin: 0px 20px 10px 0px;”a href=”http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/05/28/google-wave-drips-with-ambition-can-it-fulfill-googles-grand-web-vision/” rel=”bookmark” title=”Google Wave Drips With Ambition. A New Communication Platform For A New Web.”img border=”0″ src=”http://www.directlycreative.com/blog/uploaded_images/techcrunch2-769698.png” //a/divThere is also a great article about the announcement on a href=”http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/05/28/google-wave-drips-with-ambition-can-it-fulfill-googles-grand-web-vision/” rel=”bookmark” title=”Google Wave Drips With Ambition. A New Communication Platform For A New Web.”TechCrunch/a named “a href=”http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/05/28/google-wave-drips-with-ambition-can-it-fulfill-googles-grand-web-vision/” rel=”bookmark” title=”Google Wave Drips With Ambition. A New Communication Platform For A New Web.”Google Wave Drips With Ambition. A New Communication Platform For A New Web./a”

div style=”float: right; margin: 0px 0px 5px 10px;”a href=”http://mashable.com/2009/05/29/social-media-developer-resources/”img border=”0″ src=”http://www.directlycreative.com/blog/uploaded_images/developer-754009.jpg” //a/divFor those of us who are development savvy, or if you are are not a developer but the DIY type when it comes to building out web sites, Mashable once again wrangles up some great resources for the social cause. This time the focus is for a href=”http://mashable.com/2009/05/29/social-media-developer-resources/”resources developers can leverage for their social offerings/a.br /br /From the article:br /br /blockquoteThe stereotypical view of a coder is that of an anti-social hacker, sitting alone in a darkened room, banging away on a keyboard by the glow of a monitor (or six) until all hours of the night. But that’s not true to life – today’s programmers, developers, and code enthusiasts have fully embraced social media. Whether you have a simple code question or are embarking on a collaborative code project to build your company’s next big product, code is best done learning from and working with others./blockquote