From Janel Laban | January 25, 2010 | Apartment Therapy.

Easily, one of the greatest takeaways from the weekend was discovering (usually rediscovering!) the speaker’s own blogs. I pulled together this list featuring the blogger panelists along with their links – enjoy and be sure to bookmark your (new) favorites!

Nicole Balch of Making It Lovely
Allison Czarnecki of Petit Elefant
Jaime Derringer of Design Milk
Karey Mackin of Mackin Ink
Kelly Beall of Design Crush
Joy Deangdeelert Cho of Oh Joy!
Rachel Jones of Black Eiffel
Emily Goligoski of The SanFranista
Victoria Smith of SFGirlbyBay
Gayla Trail of You Grow Girl
Sarah Jane Wright of Sarah Jane Designs
Erin Loechner of Design for Mankind
Megan Reardon of NotMartha
Kathryn Storke of Snippet & Ink
Joslyn Taylor of Simple Lovely
Stephanie Brubaker of Stephmodo
Sheila Bernus Dowd of Lookiloos
Chelsea Fuss of Frolic
Maggie Mason of Mighty Girl

More info on Alt: Altitude Design Summit

Indexhibit
Indexhibit is a web application used to build and maintain an archetypal, invisible website format that combines text, image, movie and sound.

Coroflot
The fast, easy way to get your creative projects online and in front of the right people. Create your portfolio in minutes – no coding needed. With no upload limit, you can share as much work as you want for free.

Tumblr
Post anything. Tumblr makes it effortless to share text, photos, quotes, links, music, and videos, from your browser, phone, desktop, email, or wherever you happen to be.

Carbonmade
The easiest way to display and manage your portfolio online. A clean canvas to show off your work. Instant updating with no HTML experience necessary. A set of easy to use management tools.

Flickr
The best online photo management and sharing application in the world. We want to help people make their content available to the people who matter to them. Enables new ways of organizing photos and video.

BLOGS
WordPress
Blogger

From colleagues and alums on who they host with.
Also see earlier posts here: Your first website | Your site domain

http://totalchoicehosting.com. Mike McVicar writes, “Their site doesn’t have all the razzle dazzle of some of the other sites, but I think it is by far the cheapest on the web. They offer the $4-$8 a month hosting that other sites do, but they don’t require you to pay for 2 years up front to get that rate! So I pay $15 every three months or so and there is absolutely no hassle and I’ve never had any technical problems.”

Cameron Thomas uses mediatemple.net. “…love them… the plan, the service, the control panel, the support… they are good. Now, they are also not cheap. I’m on a $50/month plan because of the leapCM.com software. The $20/month plan is just fine for anyone… and you can host as many domains as you like.

See also
bluehost.com
dreamhost.com — also used by Maria Rogal, Stephanie Davlantes, Janay Waller, Robbie Carroll, UFDesigners
PowWeb at $4.88/month Selin Ozguzer
Site5 offers three hosting plans. Ligia Carvallo

Jon Huang writes: I’m currently using MediaCatch. I have been with them for about 5 years. Their customer support is fantastic. Their hosting plans have changed since I first started using them, and though they aren’t the cheapest, I’d say you’d definitely get what you pay for.

Now here’s some more advice from an alum:
I’d avoid hosts that offer “unlimited” space and bandwidth. Most companies will give you pretty much the same features so that’s usually not an issue. Fantastico is a good since it can automatically install popular scripts for you (blogs, shopping carts, etc.). Make sure it has cPanel. Generally you should go with a Linux server for better performance and stability than a Windows server (unless you need to use a specific technology such as ASP.) Try to register a domain name with the same company you use as your web host at the same time — it makes things much easier to manage.

Also, this is extremely important: never use Go Daddy for anything. Ever. No matter how good their deals seem. They have built up a foundation to be different from everyone else, but in a bad way. Navigating their website and proprietary control panel is like swimming in a septic tank. I would gladly cut off my own ear than do business with them. They suck.

With guest appearances by Thurston Moore, The Coup, Mike G. of the Jungle Brothers, Rob Swift of the X-Ecutioners, Mike Ladd, Vijay Iyer, and many others, The Secret Song is a manifesto about our overloaded digital culture.

> Read it on Wired News.

Paul D. Miller, also known as DJ Spooky, That Subliminal Kid, has been producing beat-heavy electronic music for more than a decade. From his early solo trip-hop efforts to his more recent collaborations with jazz giants, Spooky has always approached music from multiple angles at once. He has the chops of a musician, the genre-blending ear of a disc jockey and the conceptual vision of a performance artist.

It was therefore no surprise when Trojan Records, a reggae label entering its 40th year, asked DJ Spooky to put together a mix showcasing tracks from its massive archives. When assembling >In Fine Style: DJ Spooky Presents 50,000 Volts of Trojan Records, one of several mixes commissioned to mark the Trojan birthday, Miller found countless parallels between the Jamaican reggae scene of the 1960s and ’70s and the digital mashup ecosystem of today. (See Upgrading Jamaica’s Cultural Shareware: Trojan Records at 40.)

In his liner notes, DJ Spooky writes, “you can think of the whole culture as a shareware update, a software source for the rest of the world to upload.”

Wired News asked DJ Spooky to elaborate.

Wired News: Jamaican culture as “shareware update”? Brilliant. Please tell us more.

DJ Spooky: The whole idea of people like King Tubby or Prince Jammy (reggae producers who pioneered the “dub” remix) was to use technology to show their community how to make music for the world. Jamaica is the loudest island in the world! Dub used tech of the day — analog tape loops, old-school mixing boards, you name it — to create a radical departure from music made in the main areas of 1960s pop music.

Forget Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Band or Hendrix’s Electric Ladyland as studio masterpieces, I’m talking about rare dub tracks that cut across the whole idea of what a song was meant to be. It changed the way people listen to music and the way that music was produced. Trojan was at the heart of all these changes, and I wanted to go through their archive to show the hidden connections between dub, techno, hip-hop, drum and bass, dubstep and more. I guess you could say I wanted to show how to connect the dots.

WN: Many of the songs on your reissue, and I imagine the others in the series, are covers of American standards (“Summertime”) or pop classics (“Come Together”). Was reggae way ahead of today’s culture mash?

DJ Spooky: Reggae is all about the mashup! The Caribbean is a place where so many cultures were in collision: Spanish, Portuguese, Indian, British, Chinese. People tend to forget that one of Bob Marley’s producers (Leslie Kong) was Chinese-Jamaican, or that Lee Gopthal who was one of the co-owners of Trojan Records was Indian. Even the term “Ganjah” is pronounced Hindi style; it’s the Ganges river! And don’t even get me started about dreadlocks. Any holy man on the Ganges could tell you that they’re Indian too. ?

Everyone borrows from everyone. That’s what digital culture is all about. Information, the cliché goes, wants to be free. I guess Jamaican culture got there a little before everyone else.

One of the funniest things I noticed when I was going through Trojan’s archives is how many cover versions of American pop culture were in play. Jamaica was tuned into all the pop music coming in over the coast from Florida, and the songs people heard really left an impression. I mean, c’mon, a whole box set of Jamaican covers of The Beatles? Every possible James Brown song you can imagine has a Jamaican cover version; ditto for Curtis Mayfield. Trojan put out a lot of that kind of thing, which is very, very cool.

WN: How has the technology used by the music business changed since these songs were made?

DJ Spooky: When you think about it, so much music is mediated by software these days, and that’s a mixed bag, at best. One of the things that made early dub so unique is that even though everyone had access to the same rhythms, they really made different “versions” of the songs by using special effects as a new kind of instrument. .

The problem with today’s music is that so many people are using the same software. I can hear it when someone uses the ProTools edit, or when someone like Paris Hilton has so many pitch corrections on her last album, she might as well as have had the computer sing everything and just stand back, kind of like Warhol or something.

The U.S. government has the Library of Congress, Jamaica has dub. That’s one of the best things the 21st century can offer: Wikipedia, Youtube, MySpace, Facebook: All these say “Do it your own way, but there’s a formula.” King Tubby and Scientist, and all these producers, singers and MCs were saying the same thing.

It’s all about pattern recognition. Call it Wikinomics: Mass collaboration changes everything, and that’s a dub plate special y’all!

What does FREE do? Chris Anderson — wired.com videos.

Wave users can add richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps and more to their conversations. It’s as simple as copying-and-pasting a link or dragging-and-dropping a file. It’s also possible to edit any part of a wave at any time, bring new participants into an existing wave, and playback the wave to see what’s already been said. > Read More

This guest post was written by Ravit Lichtenberg, founder and chief strategist at Ustrategy.com – a boutique consultancy focusing on helping companies succeed. Ravit authors a blog at www.ravitlichtenberg.com.

Today, it is impossible to separate social media from the online world. Facebook reached 350 million users last month — 70% of whom are outside the US — and it accounts for 25% of the Web’s traffic, according to Pew nearly one in five people on the web use Twitter or some other service to check status messages, and 94% of enterprises plan to maintain or increase their investment in enterprise social media tools. The social media conversation is no longer considered a Web 2.0 fad — it is taking place in homes, small businesses and corporate boardrooms, and extending its reach into the nonprofit, education and health sectors. From feeling excitement, novelty, bewilderment, and overwhelmed, a growing number of people now speak of social media as simply another channel or tactic.

> Read the article on readwriteweb.com

There’s very little to stop anyone becoming a freelancer. In a highly competitive and, in most places, saturated market, you need to make sure your reputation as a freelancer is well-managed and continues to grow. It’s very possible to get a good reputation without being the best in the world, and it’s even easier to lose that reputation. In this article, we’ll explore 15 habits that are essential in helping freelancers effectively safeguard and grow their reputation, and we’ll also discuss how to make freelancing work for you. The habits are split into 3 sections: Marketing, Business and time, and Specific business areas.

Read the article at Smashing Magazine.

Everyone knows it, so it must be true, right? Wrong! Craig Grannell talks to industry figures to uncover some major misconceptions in web design and development

The moment you start working as a web designer or web developer, you’re told ‘do this’ and ‘don’t do that’. Official and unofficial rules abound. You soon internalise them and start passing them on to others, either consciously or subconsciously.

But here’s the bad news: not all of this advice is correct. Some of these firmly held ‘truths’ are based on outdated assumptions, and some were just wrong to start with.

READ THE ARTICLE at .net

Technorati Tags: webdesign teaching

Eye blog » Teach them to network or be damned Deborah Littlejohn’s Agenda from Eye 70 focuses on design education.

In ‘I have nothing to declare but my networking skills’ (Eye no.70 vol. 18), Deborah Littlejohn argues that ‘creative genius’ is so last millennium. What design students want – and need – is skill in collaborative online technology.

A growing number of topics that Wikiversity thinks provides a good foundation for any web designer.

from wikipedia

Web design is the skill of creating presentations of content (usually hypertext or hypermedia) that is delivered to an end-user through the World Wide Web, by way of a Web browser or other Web-enabled software like Internet television clients, microblogging clients and RSS readers.

Capture moments using photos, location, and updates. Share live via iPhone, Facebook, and Twitter. See friends’ stories on a map and never miss out again.