SB Virtual

70+ uses for Google Wave

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As many people are still trying to understand what all the hype on Google Wave is about, Wave users made their own list of possible uses for it. If you have a wave account, you can check the original list on Google Wave.

Documented uses of Google Wave

• Brainstorming Uses For Wave
• Email Replacement
• IM Replacement
• Live Forums
• Private Notes
• Role Playing Games (Text-Only or with Gadgets)
• Collaborative Book Writing (several authors writing different characters/sections in a novel/book)
• Collaborative Songwriting, Lyric Writing, Screenplays, (rhyme, thesaurus dictionary bot needed)
• Crowd-Sourced Language Proof Editing and Expert Fact Check for Fiction and Manuals
• Microblogging (Tweety and Regular Wave) (Rich microblogging as you can include files, rich formatting & have comments?)
• Blogging (With live comments and collaboration)
• Content/UI Aggregation (All your content and interfaces in one place)
• Live Meeting/Lecture Notes
• Customer Support/Relations (via Robot or live support), with collaborative FAQ as main content.
• Social Networking
• Bug Tracking
• Running and managing learning activities (Teachers)
• Auctions (listing and bidding maybe paying)
• Classifieds (listings and discussion)
• Personal Information Management (To Do Lists, Calendars, Contact Cards, etc)
• Robot Conversations
• Media Sharing (Photo galeries, YouTube, etc.)
• Live Private Or Public Wikis
• Collaborative Whiteboard
• Ticketing System (For Debuging And Tech Support)
• Coding/Pair Programming/Code Reviews (with ksyntaxy robot or gadgets)
• Live Commenting Systems (for YouTube and such)
• Live Suggestion Boxes
• Flame Wars (Steph wasn’t excited about this one in the google i/o video)
• All forms of Debates
• Sports/Event Commentary
• Planning Events, Live Invitations/Meeting Requests
• Distance Learning/Meetings (Without the telepresence)
• Agenda Management
• Online Card Games like Poker (with a gadget)
• Session Discussions During Conventions - better than Tweets with hash tags
• Interactive glossary/encyclopedia
• School team projects (Writing report together, etc)
• Dynamic Newsletters (Could use Google Groups for this)
• Brainstorming
• Project planning/management
• Gaming logs for multiplayer and single player games (will need some sort of bot to post to a wave)
• Research Notes
• Board game implementations (will need dice bots, card bots and some way of representing the board)
• Wargame implementation (very similar to the one above, but further complicated by the fact that wargames would need more complex movement and line of sight implementations)
• On-the fly newsroom TELEPROMPTER (closed captioning) editing during live news broadcasts
• College/Graduate/Law School: Collaborative study group
• Last minute updates for emergency services
• Community Update Services (Non-Emergency)
• A way to discuss and create recipes
• A wave for designing GUIs (would need some sort of widget for fast prototyping)
• Artists interacting with their fans.
• Agencies introducing a product.
• Journalists constructing an article, while interacting with readers.
• Online Quiz games
• Collaborative graphic design (with client or partner)
• Spam (it’s going to happen…unfortunately)
• Collaborative analysis of chess games (archived games or real-time)
• Genealogy collaboration
• Tax Audit Collaboration
• Remote team management (business, managing employees, sales people)
• Online Town Squares to talk about current events
• Interactive Wish Lists (With Links and Pictures)
• Police manhunt
• Shopping/Grocery List
• Interactive Greeting Cards
• Education: real time feedback of student work from teacher or bot
• Travel Itinerary
• VOIP-based voice conferencing tied to a wave so you can talk real-time as you collaborate. Recording or adding audio to a wave is a different concept.
• Supervising PhD Thesis and dissertations
• Publishing and monitoring best prices
• Online press conferences
• Writing mathematics documents - requires native support for MathML and LaTeX-like dialects for inline/displayed equations and symbols [This is relatively simple to add on the server-side but would be a total game-changer for academic users. Also, requires a well thought out UI to allow code and WYSIWYG and/or handwriting of symbols]
• Lifestreaming (Special robots could be used for this)
• Intra-office memos (Vacation Requests,etc)
• Data collection for sociology and psychology using quantitative and qualitative research methods (example: Q methodology)
• Handling exceptions to structured business processes (for example Purchase to pay)
• Identifying and following up actions from balanced scoredcards/performance management solutions

Have you used Google Wave for something else not included on the list?

How to tweet with Google Buzz

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10+ Sites for webdesign inspiration

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To work with webdesign is to work connected, so there is nothing better than use the Web to find inspiration for new jobs. Find inspiration can serve a designer in two ways:

• Follow Trends: Watching how the world is designing is a must for benchmarking and to keep your clients design-updatd.
• Define Trends: There is also the argument of those who prefer to watch trends in order to avoid them and create a unique image on the market.

Choose your style and let’s go to the list:

Logo Inspiration

Logospire

Logospire has a nice design focused on what it proposes: to be a logo gallery. Big images and a simple navigation menu. You can also send your own logos to the gallery.

URL: www.logospire.com

Creattica

Creattica has many categories for you to see, since business cards to CSS Layouts, but you can also find excelent logos there.

URL: www.creattica.com

Layout Inspiration

Minimal Sites

Minimal Sites is a gallery of websites with a minimalistic design. You can send your own designs for the gallery through an email form or Twitter.

URL: www.minimalsites.com

CSS3 Gallery

A gallery of websites built using CSS3. The site also features links for CSS3 and HTML5 tutorials.

URL: www.css3gallery.net

Wordpress Inspiration

We Love WP

We love WP as well, therefore we couldn’t let this one out of this list. In We Love WP we find a lot of different sites with different designs, all done in Wordpress.

URL: www.welovewp.com

Wordpress Showcase

Wordpress Showcase is the Wordpress official gallery hosted at wordpress.org.

URL: www.wordpress.org/showcase/

Image Inspiration

Inspire me, now!

This is the inspiration log of the designer Szymon Błaszczyk . Full of unusual images, it is a visit worthy of spent hours on it.

URL: http://szymon.tumblr.com/

FFF Found

A web service where users can share their favorite images found on the web.

URL: www.ffffound.com

Abduzeedo

A collective blog focused on inspiration and graphic design tutorials. It has a series called Daily Inspiration, which due to its popularity already has dedicated page.

URL: www.abduzeedo.com

General Inspiration

Smashing Magazine

A digital magazine of webdesign and graphic design. Articles on inspiration, downloads and tutorials are part of this great site.

URL: www.smashingmagazine.com

DesignMag

Another community-based digital magazine for webdesigners and developers. The sute is composed of a blog, a user-submitted news section, a design gallery and a job board.

URL: http://designm.ag/

Twitter

Yes, Twitter can be an excelent source for inspiration. How? Following other designers and, so, closely following their work. Mashable has prepared a list of designers present on Twitter

85+ Designers on Twitter for you to follow

What other site could be included on this list? Leave your Comment…

Twitter Dictionary

%A %B %e%q, %Y // 2 Comentários » // Articles, Twitter

Many new users take some time to fully understand the already stablished language codes on Twitter. In order to help, we prepared a micro-dictionary for better comprehension:

API:

Application Programming Interface, a series of functions Twitter sets available for anyone to access the system resources. There are limitations to this access for security reasons.

Avatar:

The picture exibited in each profile that uses to be square shaped and supports JPG, GIF and PNG files.

bit.ly:

A URL shortener service thar integrates with the Twitter API to filter the amount of clicks your links have and from which location were they accessed.

Block:

Blocking someone on Twitter will exclude you from list of followers of that person, exclude your weets from the person’s home and forbid the blocked one from following you.

DM:

Direct Messages are messages sent directly to a certain person in a private way. You can only send DMs to those who follow you.

Favorite:

Favorites are the tweets you mark with a star on the oficial site and are stored in a Favorites Page so you can find content moe easily.

Follow:

Following a person on Twitter is like a subscription service. You’ll receive the person’s updates on your Home.

Follow Friday:

A Twitter meme in which, at Fridays, people indicate other interesting people to their readers so they can also follow those. The meme is identified by the tags #ff or #followfriday and variations.

Followers:

Followers are the people who read your content.

migre.me:

Brazillian URL shorttener service which also integrates with the Twitter API to count the number of cliks and Retweets of the links.

Unfollow:

It is the action of not following a specific user any longer. It is like cancelling a subscription.

Profile:

It is your personal page on Twitter, where all your Tweets are shown.

Reply:

Replies are identified by the sign of @, are those teets preceded by @nameofuser. The content of replies is public, every one with access to Twitter can see it.

Retweet:

It is the act of citing the autor of a certain Tweet, it is normally identified by the abbreviation RT. Ex.: RT @sbvirtual (SB Virtual’s message).

Trending Topics:

Most spoken topics on Twitter recently.

Tweet:

Name given to each 140 character post published on Twitter.

Twitter:

The name of the service refers to the way birds sing with a tremulous sound.

What other terms should be added to this micro-dictionary?

Super list of Magazine Themes for Wordpress

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Hearing the community requests, we prepared a Super List of magazine-like themes that we recommend. Before we get to the themes, though, we’d like to point a few things based on an article from Smashing Magazine:

What is a magazine theme?

• Are theme theme use only headlines on the home page. Normal São temas que usam apenas chamthemes show entire posts or excerpts.
• Content is more well organized by presenting a large options of posts in the front page.
• They focus on featured posts, not only recent posts.

Benefits from a Magazine Theme

• More content on the home page;
• More control over featured posts;
• Better navigation;
• More professional look;
• Excelent for sites with many content;
• Nice use of categories for navigation;

Cons of a Magazine Theme

• Can be more work for the blogger;
• Blogs with few content can show up weird;
• Require more clicks from the visitors;

Itens to consider when choosing the theme

• Impact on visitors;
• Size of the layout;
• Post frequency;
• Diversity of Content
• Niches

The Super List of Themes

The Original Premium News

Info | Demo

Mainstream

Info | Demo

Meta-Morphosis

Info | Demo

Magazeen

Info | Demo

Modularity

Info | Demo

ModSlider

Info | Demo

f8

Info | Demo

Mimbo Magazine

Info | Demo

Morning After

Info | Demo

Brandford Magazine

Info | Demo

Arthemia

Info | Demo

Hybrid News

Info | Demo

No Way Out

Info | Demo

Magatheme

Info | Demo

When to use Flash in Webdesign

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Many specialists and designers don’t recommend very much the use of Flash in webdesign.

It is recommended a analysis of the company’s profile according to its needs in showing its products or services online. Flash animations should never heavily feature on the logo or contact information witout considering the aesthetics and proposed design. If this happens, the company could suffer the consequences:

• Be devalued on online market;
• A visual pollution could occur as the visitor won’t know where to focus his eyes if there are three or more animations on the main page;
• The company is in risk of not having its content indexed by search engines, making it difficult for possible clients to find the site;
• The site can get heavy and slow, sending visitores away even before the site finishes loading.

The blog of the magazine Pequenas Empresas Grandes Negócios (Small companies, Great business) published a list of Flash sites not very pleasants.

When to use Flash

Flash is a powerful tool and can be very useful to add new features in the design. The best example we can pick of the usage of Flash tecnology is in YouTube. In the most famous video site on the web, Flash is always used in a discret way only for the videos. Without Flash, YouTube wouldn’t be possible.

If you plan to build a site whose content is focused on videos, such as cinema news, or that has many image galleries, Flash could be an interesting sollution. However, remember to know what kind of public you pretend to reach by filtering since from which media they will use to get to your site to the connection speed they have.

In The Good Flash Site you can find articles about good and bad usages of Flash in Webdesign

Say what you think about sites in Flash. Indicate the best and worst ones you know.

Best free feedback tools

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Every designer should worry about how users will feel when facing their works. On the web, we are designing mainly for the visitors, not just the client. Therefore, it is necessary for us to have a quick feedback on our projects directly from those who will benefit from it. So here is a list of good services for feedback testing. All of them are free.

Concept Feedback

By far the best. It is a social network built upon giving and receiving reviews about your designs. Its a very well organized network since you can only post your designs to receive feedbacks if you give at least 5 feedbacks on other’s designs. Feedbacks are based on comments and the voting on the criteria: Design, Porpose, Originality, and Engagement. Visit Concept Feedback.

Five Second Test

See an image submited by a designer, then you’ll have 5 seconds to list five words you can remember to associate with the image. That is the process of the random tests on this site. After users listed their impressions on your design, you’ll get a list of every keyword submited. Visit Five Second Test.

Get Satisfaction

Its a tool to get feedback directly from your users. Either by adding a feedback button on the side of your page or by creating a single feedback page. It is robust and can also be used as a support channel. It has both Free and Paid plans to different kinds of organizations.

Do you know any other great tool for feedback solutions? Please, share with us.

Twitter Best Practices

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Since January of this year, we’ve noticed an exponencial growth of Twitter in our region, that was one if the reasons which made us develop the project Belém-Te-Vi, a place to filter real-time tweets written by Belém residents. However, aside this high rates of Twitter usage we noticed a certain misunderstanding on how to use it and so we prepared a few orientations.

twitter.com/sbvirtual

How to use Twitter:

• Twitter is above all, a tool for communications, therefore what you write is being read by other people;
• Twitter must not be used for mass marketing, people will only read your texts if it is interesting for them;
• Titter is not a chat, if intend to talk a private subject with someone via Twitter instead of instant messengers like MSN Messenger, then use Direct Messages, nobody is obliged to read your private conversations;
• “What are you doing” is not an  order, few people want to know what you had for breakfast, but many would love that you indicated the link of the site you’re currently reading;
• Networking: answer to your collegues question and make new contacts, all of this is possible through Twitter;

Twitter Best Practices:

• Use URL shorteners to suggest links like the brazilian migre.me or bit.ly;
• Use RT to Retweet other users Ex.: RT @sbvirtual etc
• Make use of hashtags for a better classification of your texts. Hashtags are like keywords we can create and indicate trough the symbol #. A hashtag about SB Virtual would be #sbvirtual;
• If your Twitter account is for corporative usage, then listen to what your followers say about you, answer and engage with them;
• Avoid using scripts to adding more followers. This is a practice not very well seen by the community;
• Describe yourself through the Bio and the avatar too;
• Twitter is not limited to its own website, explore other softwares like TweetDeck, Twhirl, TwitterFox or other sites like Twitzap, Belém-te-vi, Blablabra.

Chris Brogan also wrote a etiquette guide for Twitter that is worhty checking.

And you, how do you use Twitter? What other practices do you suggest or disagree?

Plugin Review: qTranslate

%A %B %e%q, %Y // 6 Comentários » // Articles, Plugins, Wordpress

How to set up a bilingual site with Wordpress

After lots of searching and testing many different plugins to set up a bilingual wordpress instalation, We have finally chosen qTranslate plugin. We are now going to take a look on how this plugin works and the benefits you can extract from it.

qTranslate is already on version 2.4.1, which is compatible up to Wordpress 2.8.2 but if you are interested in version compatible to other wordpress plugins, you can find the list on the qTranslate Download Page

What can qTranslate do?

• It can translate posts and pages via the tinyMCE editor.  It creates tabs for each language so you can write your posts.
• It also tranlates the Wordpress admin area to the available languages.
• It can work with permalinks. That’s how our site gets tranlated to english by adding /en to the address.
• The plugin also detects the visitor’s browser language to determine the visible language.
• Yes, it can translate Categories and Tags just via the admin Area, as you can see on the screenshots below.
• It can hide content not available at the visitor’s language. Useful, but we prefer to write somehing like “post under translation, please check back soon” when we haven’t got the time to fully translate it.
• It has template tags for translation!
• And the most important: it has an active community to develop, question and help other users through the Forum.

What paths it still has to walk?

• It has to improve translation of text widgets. This should be easily done trough the admin interface rather than sidebar.php
• On our opinion, it should let users define wheter to use flags or some other images to link with languages. The using of flags can be troublesome to users, as Nielsen points it in this article. The use of standard language codes could be a solution.

Screenshots - Everyone longs for them…

This is how we acctually see the plugin working on our site:

Admin Menu to choose the admin language

Insert Post Title

Switch post content language

Translating Categories

Translating Tags

Configuration Page

Adding a Language

Managing Languages.

Now it is your turn

You have seen how to set up a multilingual wordpress blog with the help of the qTranslate Plugin. Go ahead and try it out. Engage in the community or leave us a comment bellow or at twitter.

Until next review!

Twitter will have a new home

%A %B %e%q, %Y // 8 Comentários » // Articles, Twitter

After launching a guide for business should use the service, Twitter also anounced that on the next days it will have a new home. The features to be added intend to let more clear to new users what twitter is for through tutorials and a demonstration of real time tweets around the world.

However, it would be interesting if Twitter would listen better to its users and added other functionalities. Those are a few:

• Built-in URL shortener;
• Mark tweets as seen;
• Group Tweets /Followers;
• Dinamic reload of homepage;
• Notify of new Tweets

Can we only wait for what Twitter is about to deliver us? Comment: what other nice feature you think twitter should add?