Free e-book on photography

Scott Bourne’s Essays On Inspiration, Creativity & Vision In Photography

From Essay #4 Storytelling Part 2 (page 21):

You see ALL communications and ALL media - whether they be centered around radio, television, motion pictures, blogs, podcasts or photography - revolve around story. Story is everything. If you get that, you'll be a better photographer.

If you need help getting to the point where you are a storyteller, you can use a vision exercise that I often talk about called SAS - which stands for Subject, Attention, Simplify.

How to create word clouds

“Word cloud websites are great ways to create colorful interesting graphics that have lots of impact but are not much work to create. Though many programs are available to do this, this video gives you a brief overview of Tagxedo, a program that not only creates colorful Word Cloud, but makes it easy to save them and use them in other programs, something many of the other programs don’t do.” (From Yvon Prehn) Tagxedo turns words -- famous speeches, news articles, slogans and themes, even your love letters -- into a visually stunning word cloud, words individually sized appropriately to highlight the frequencies of occurrence within the body of text.

With Tagxedo, you can:

• make word clouds in real-time, and respin, and respin to your liking
• save the word cloud as images for printing and sharing
• look at all variants of the clouds in a gallery (see screenshot above), and pick the one you want for further tweaking or saving
• choose from many different fonts
• use local fonts (e.g. downloaded from Font Squirrel, DaFont, FontSpace, or your own hand-drawn fonts)
• quickly switch between different colors and themes
• constrain the cloud to selected shapes (heart, star, cloud, oval, etc)
• use images as custom shapes (e.g. Reddit Alien) [premium feature]
• use words as custom shapes (e.g. "USA", "Love", "Joy", "I LOVE YOU") [premium feature]

The Power of Words: Change your words, change your world

Free PDF about online journalism

“Journalism 2.0: How to Survive and Thrive, A digital literacy guide for the information age”, by Mark Briggs (Assistant Managing Editor for Interactive News, The News Tribune)

PDF English version now available for download; also available in Spanish or Portuguese. You can also order hard copies.

Topics include: Chapter 1: FTP, MB, RSS, Oh My

Chapter 2: Web 2.0

Chapter 3: Tools and Toys

Chapter 4: New Reporting Methods

Chapter 5: How to Blog

Chapter 6: How to Report News for the Web

Chapter 7: Digital Audio and Podcasting

Chapter 8: Shooting and Managing Digital Photos

Chapter 9: Shooting Video for News and Feature Stories

Chapter 10: Basic Video Editing

Chapter 11: Writing Scripts, Doing Voice-overs

For continuing discussion of new technology for journalists, check out Mark Briggs’ Journalism 2.0 site.

Free e-book on website design and usability from U.S. Department of Health and Human Services

Throughout your Web design or redesign project, you should take advantage of what is already known about best practices for each step of the process. The Research-Based Web Design & Usability Guidelines (PDF, 20.64MB) brings you these best practices compiled through an extensive process of research and review. (From usability.gov)

You can also download specific sections of the book:

• design process and evaluation (PDF - 1.9MB)
• optimizing the user experience (PDF - 9.1MB)
• accessibility (PDF - 2.4MB)
• hardware and software (PDF - 2.8MB)
• the homepage (PDF - 12.1MB)
• page layout (PDF - 21.9MB)
• navigation (PDF - 13.1MB)
• scrolling and paging (PDF - 4.5MB)
• headings, titles, and labels (PDF - 7.8MB)
• links (PDF - 17.1MB)
• text appearance (PDF - 11.2MB)
• lists (PDF - 6.6MB)
• screen-based controls (widgets) (PDF - 15.1MB)
• graphics, images, and multimedia (PDF - 16.8MB)
• writing Web content (PDF - 11.0MB)
• content organization (PDF - 10.1MB)
• search (PDF - 9.1MB)
• usability testing (PDF - 1MB)

How To Use Plain Language on a Government Website on Howcast

Call to Cairo: The night has a thousand eyes

Call to Cairo from Oliver Wilkins on Vimeo.

Francis William Bourdillon (22 March 1852 – 13 January 1921) was a British poet and translator best known for his poem “The Night Has A Thousand Eyes.” While the poem speaks about the power of love, the first line “The night has a thousand eyes” fits so nicely with this time lapse view of Cairo, Egypt by night. Anyway, Bourdillon’s poem goes like this:

The night has a thousand eyes,
And the day but one;
Yet the light of the bright world dies
With the dying of the sun.

The mind has a thousand eyes,
And the heart but one;
Yet the light of a whole life dies
When love is done.

Writing for the Web (tips and techniques)

Great, useful research by Internet guru Jakob Nielsen from “Alertbox: Current Issues in Web Usability” on how users read on the Web and how authors should write their Web pages. Numerous topics include:

1. How users read on the Web
2. How little do users read? - users spend 4.4 seconds for every extra 100 words on a page
3. F-shaped pattern for reading web content, as seen in eyetracking studies
4. American English vs. British English
5. Twitter Postings: Iterative Design
6. Writing style for print vs. Web
7. Write inverted pyramids in cyberspace
8. Eyetracking of people reading email newsletters
9. Low-literacy users exhibit different behaviors
10. PR and press releases on corporate websites (103 design guidelines based on usability studies of how journalists visit company sites)
11. Blah-blah text: Keep, cut, or kill?
12. Email newsletters (165 design guidelines: scannability even more important than for websites)
13. Writing transactional email and confirmation messages
14. Long vs. short articles as content strategy
15. Microcontent: writing headlines, page titles, and email subject lines
16. Teenagers on the Web: poor reading skills and low patience levels mean that text has to be ultra-concise for teens and that more information must be communicated in images
17. Tagline blues: what’s the site about?
18. Passive voice is redeemed for Web headings
19. World's Best Headlines: BBC News
20. Use old keywords when writing to be found by search users
21. Show numbers as numerals when writing for online readers
22. Nanocontent: the first two words of links and titles
23. Company name first in microcontent? Sometimes!
24. Kindle Content Design (writing for Amazon.com’s e-book reader)
25. iPad and Kindle Reading Speeds
26. Information pollution
27. Distributing Content Through Social Networks and RSS (Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, LinkedIn, and RSS)
28. Corporate Blogs: Front Page Structure
29. Intranet usability, including guidelines for intranet content, news on intranets, HR manuals, and how to present information about projects, teams, and individuals on intranets
30. Full paper documenting the original research from 1997 (long): Concise, SCANNABLE, and Objective: How to Write for the Web (unfortunately this paper was written for print and not online)
31. Case study: Applying Writing Guidelines to Web Pages improved usability by 159% when rewriting sample pages from a popular website
32. How to write “About Us” pages for a company's or organization’s website