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Home/ CMN450 (03) Participatory Media/ Contents contributed and discussions participated by Sohyun Kim

Contents contributed and discussions participated by Sohyun Kim

Sohyun Kim

Website design aesthetics - 0 views

  • The Internet can be a cruel place, where the laws of evolution apply. You have to adapt, be adept and adopt a new attitude about your site's aesthetics - and the look and feel and the impression these design aspects have on visitors.
  • Even if you're working on your own, with free website templates, you still have to consider that first impression on your site visitors. If the website looks cheap, it won't instil visitor confidence. In fact, most of them will click off before your dancing bear Flash animation fully downloads (and you thought it was so cute).
  • Product selection, tone of screen text, motifs, marketing strategies, links - virtually everything about an online business must be targeted with laser precision on a known demographic.
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  • If you aren't a writer, outsource the writing to capture the right tone, the appropriate slant and the most cogent organisation of content. You may be working on a shoestring budget, but this is one area of ecommerce where it pays to get professional help if you don't know much about effective written communication and visual appeal.
  • Do some market research. Visit other sites - successful sites - to see how they're doing it so well. It's unethical to rip off an existing site, no doubt, but you can't copyright an idea and ideas - the right ideas - are what you're after.
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    This article deals with website design and what to make note of when designing, as most first-time visitors will give you less than five seconds to "wow" them, making the aesthetics a vital part of reeling in customers. The website must be both visually appealing to your targeted demographic as well as communicate important things to know.
Sohyun Kim

Twitter as a Powerful Educational Tool - 1 views

  • Eventually, the people on the street, armed with nothing more than a cell phone and a free social media site, changed the course of history. If you are a middle or high school social studies teacher, and you wanted to provide your students with a close-up view of the events unfolding in Egypt, you could turn to a traditional news service. Or, you could follow the hashtag #Egypt on Twitter and tap into the real-time pulse of unfolding events by people on the streets of Cairo.
  • examples of classrooms using Twitter as a way to share learning opportunities with others outside of the classroom. For example, supplementary photo and video tools provide the ability to share learning from anywhere someone can access an Internet connection
  • Teachers should have the skill set to build their own personal learning networks to be global. Teachers should be able to leverage their PLN to bring the challenge of authentic conversation to their students. Teachers should be able to use social media to connect their students to real-world problems. Like Mrs. Caviness, we believe that educators should be powerful role models and provide examples of how to use the most powerful social media tools to expand the boundaries of learning.
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    This article puts Twitter and education together and demonstrates that both can be connected to create a much more valuable and rich educational experience. The teacher in this article used Twitter to strengthen students' current knowledge as well as build a growing library of material for future lessons.
Sohyun Kim

The Power Of Tumblr - 0 views

  • Within the first few weeks of using the blogging network, my perception of online communities completely changed. The concise nature of Tumblr allowed to me convey so much with so little.
  • Tumblr has connected the world into a single platform of creative genius.
  • I don’t write this to brag; I say this because Tumblr is influential and powerful. As Tumblr approaches a bright future, the company needs to continue pushing the envelope to maintain dominance in the industry. More importantly, Tumblr needs to remain competitive so they can continue to attract the creators that make the community what it is. Now the question is, what’s next?
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  • Tumblr doesn’t require users to write long posts to convey messages—gifs can do that. It doesn’t require users to write long posts to convey ideas—videos can do that. It doesn’t require users to recite their favorite sayings—quotes can do that. Tumblr has taken the traditional notion of blogging and has successfully thrown it out the window. They’ve continued to challenge the notion that blogging isn’t only about words.
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    This article is in the perspective of a blogger who decided to switch from Wordpress to Tumblr and his experience with it. The main point of this article is how Tumblr can connect the world with one single social media platform. It emphasizes how little can say much more. It first starts out with Tumblr's current good aspects, and later details the future of Tumblr.
Sohyun Kim

The Good, the Bad, and the Downright Ugly of Parallax Web Design - 0 views

  • Parallax is the web design technique of using CSS to make different layers on the web page move at different rates. So, when scrolling down the page, instead of having all the text, photos, videos, and other elements move screen altogether, it feels more like a visual page turn, with a new layer of beautiful imagery or video or a pull quote gliding up to replace the just read "page."
  • Take last month's Fast Company story about Baratunde Thurston quitting the Internet for 25 days. Toward the bottom of the page, the designers used parallax to make leaves and flowers bloom onto the page. Unless your browser window is extremely wide, the details ended up covering the text, however, making it difficult to read the story: 
  • "It's getting a little overused everywhere," Trei Brundrett, the chief product officer for Vox Media, which owns SB Nation, The Verge, and Polygon, told us. The makers of "Snow Fall" and the other parallax pioneers who have used it made it the defining feature of thoughtful web design. "It's a signifier of quality. It has become a trope,"
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  • Unfortunately, that means it has gotten very tired, very fast. The Pitchfork team sees the whole trend winding down in the next year or two. "I think people will start to use it a lot more and possibly tire of it," said Renaud.
  • The low barrier to entry means, a lot of the times the effect doesn't add much to the story. "I think it's cool if used appropriately or in moderation," said Brundrett. A good use, he says, would be to "cleverly position" photography next to supporting copy
  • "Designers are excited that there is a lot of energy and curiosity around more thoughtful design and breaking out of our optimized content world," added Brundrett. 
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    This article talks about a new trend in Web design- Parallax- and how it became popular. It shows examples of what websites effectively used this trend, and others that have done the opposite. It ends off with how this trend effects designers and readers alike. 
Sohyun Kim

New tools for new movements: Using social media for civil good - 0 views

  • social media had an enormous impact on the fate of the bill. Demonstrations were held all over Europe, Twitter and other social media were used to contact, support and encourage the MEPs to vote against ACTA.
  • Thus, this is just one side of the story: through new and social media, activists and NGOs can directly reach their audience, supporting and sometimes even replacing traditional media as information source.
  • “Take the ‘occupy movements’, for example: they used Twitter as a main means to spread the word and report real-time what is happening in the field, they used livestream channels to broadcast from the protests and tell a different perspective from TVs and newspapers. Occupy folks used blogs to tell in-depth stories from the field, photos to document and illustrate the stories, and podcasting to make the voice of the protesters heard and to amplify the message.”
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  • Smartphones, the Internet, the new media and the social networks are excellent means to help every citizen to run stories from the field, documenting cases and share them widely with audience through blogs and social networks.
  • An important exception to this has been, in recent years, the rise of the Italian Five Star Movement. In origin a simple association of different groups of local activists coalesced around beppegrillo.it, a blog founded by former comedian Beppe Grillo, the movement quickly grew into becoming one of the main forces of the Italian political arena. Its disruptive political agenda, together with the charisma of Beppe Grillo, explains this quick rise to prominence.
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    This compilation of articles show how social media can be used to create awareness on current events and in turn can push for a change for the world to improve. The various articles are based in Europe and how movements were successful or on the way to reach their goal(s).
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