What’s the deal with…Augmented Reality?

September 1, 2009

In the tech community, some folks have been talking about “augmented reality” for years. But only recently has it started to really catch the attention of a more mainstream crowd. What is this seemingly sci-fi catchphrase, and why should you be paying attention?

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What’s the deal with “Crowdsourcing”?

April 9, 2009

So far this year I’ve spoken at two conferences with my co-worker Tonya Peters, and we conduct a “social media terms quiz” to assess the level of knowledge of the audience. The one term that consistently throws people off is “crowdsourcing”.
Crowdsourcing is basically what it sounds like: outsourcing to a group. Or according to John [...]

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What’s the deal with Twittad – does it work? who knows?

September 8, 2008

Today I came across a blog post about Twittad, a way to make money off your twitter profile. The jist of the service seems to be that you sell the background of your profile to an advertiser.
I’m pretty interested in this idea for a few reasons (and no, not interested because I think it’s [...]

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what’s the deal with… Web Accessibility and the ADA?

July 16, 2008

Until only a few years ago, I would have stated that the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) had nothing to do with web accessibility. However, the landmark case against Target has altered the landscape.

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what’s the deal with… Web Accessibility and WCAG?

July 16, 2008

WCAG (Wu-CAHG) stands for the “Web Content Authoring Guidelines”, put forth by the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium). WCAG 1.0 was released as a Recommendation in 1999, and WCAG 2.0 is now in Candidate Recommendation status.
The Section 508 Standards were actually based on WCAG 1.0; Jim Thatcher has a side-by-side comparison of the two on [...]

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what’s the deal with… Web Accessibility and Section 508?

July 16, 2008

Anyone who has heard me speak about web accessibility knows that I typically call out two motivating factors behind accessibility: usability and regulatory compliance.
Let’s face it, usability can be a hard sell. But if an organization is being tasked with meeting certain standards/guidelines/laws, there may be no choice. The trick, therefore, is knowing if [...]

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what’s the deal with… RSS and Feedburner

July 10, 2008

I like to hang out in the LinkedIn Q&A section, and recently someone asked about the relationship between RSS and Feedburner. This is a slightly lengthened version of my response:
RSS refers to the format (more or less standard). Many, many services out there offer an RSS feed. That way you can syndicate your content: people [...]

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what’s the deal with… personalization

July 10, 2008

Personalization is the idea of tailoring an experience to a specific individual. This is particularly prevalent in e-Commerce. There are a few ways to achieve this.
The ATG e-Commerce platform uses ‘a scenario engine’ to provide personalized content. The engine uses a rules-based system, either based on user attributes or user behaviour. These can be simple [...]

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what’s the deal with… #hashtags on twitter?

June 25, 2008

I am starting a new section on my blog, called “what’s the deal with…”. Recently I’ve found a need to preface most of my discussions by setting expectations about semantics. Moving forward, I will be sharing some of my thoughts/opinions/insights on various buzzwords, trends or topics.
Twitter is steadily gaining in popularity, despite its lack of [...]

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what’s the deal with…Agile Software Development

June 20, 2008

I am starting a new section on my blog, called “what’s the deal with…”. Recently I’ve found a need to preface most of my discussions by setting expectations about semantics. Moving forward, I will be sharing some of my thoughts/opinions/insights on various buzzwords, trends or topics.
When I worked at LexisNexis, I had the opportunity [...]

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