Microdemographics on Facebook

Patrick Ruffini turns up some fascinating self-reported stats on Facebook, then asks:

Could Facebook be the greatest microtargeting engine ever built?

techPresident – Radiohead Republicans

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Article on CWRL accessibility efforts in College English

College English now has a series called "Texts of our Institutional Lives" focusing on administrative texts that we encounter and use as academics. (The editor didn't realize that the acronym was TOIL until I pointed that out, but it fits pretty well.) In any case, I authored the TOIL in College English 70.2 (November 2007), which is all about our web accessibility efforts at the Computer Writing and Research Lab. Take a look and see what you think.

Google Presentations

Well. I was high on Google Docs' presentations module, but at SIGDOC I had trouble making changes stick. I would change font weight and color, save and close the presentation, and open it again to find that some of the changes didn't stick. For me, this means that GDocs is fine for uploading and sharing presentations, but limited in terms of authoring highly designed presentations. Using the existing templates, however, is a breeze and causes very few complications.

Back from SIGDOC

I just flew back from SIGDOC 2007 in El Paso, and despite the fact that I was program chair (and therefore was on call all the time), I had a really great time. I can't say enough about how refreshing SIGDOC is -- it involves people from industry and academics, from five continents, and from fields ranging from tech comm to computer science to usability to information systems.

SIGDOC 2008 is going to be in Lisbon, Portugal, and promises to be a blast. Carlos Costa and his team at the Instituto Superior de Ciências do Trabalho e da Empresa are eager and energetic, just as I was when we started SIGDOC 2007 planning 18 months ago.

In contrast, I am now quite exhausted -- but very proud of the work we were able to do. It wasn't until I got home and leafed through the conference proceedings that I realized how big the task was and how proud I was to be able to participate in it.

Special thanks to Conference Chair David Novick (UT-El Paso), who did an outstanding job running the conference, and the SIGDOC 2007 program committee.

Google Docs now viewable via mobile

I had heard that this feature was coming, but now it's available. Viewing works fine, but I have not been able to explore editing yet.

Google Docs

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SIGDOC 2007 - photos of the UTEP campus

See my Flickr account.

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