Business
Oftentimes you’ll need to create a form letter to send to multiple clients (such as an address change or a promotional letter). If you’d like to personalize these letters, Apple Pages makes it easy to insert data you’ve defined for contacts in Address Book. This can save you time because you can reuse a letter, envelope, or other document for multiple people. This feature is generally called a mail merge.
I don’t live in the world of website creation every day... but I’ve been putting up sites since the launch of Mosaic back with PageMill 1.0. I may be a little slow.. but here’s fourteen questions I recommend getting answers to before you build a site (feel free to comment and I’ll expand the list).
1) What main points do you wish to make with your website? (No more than five)
2) Who is the audience? (Please be specific)
3) What is the market’s current attitude toward your company?
4) What objections to potential customers have to your company?
5) What do you want the consumer to think after they see your website?
6) What do you want the consumer to feel after they see your website?
7) What do you want want the consumer to do after they see your website?
8) What Five adjectives describe the look and feel of your future website?
9) Are there any special features or design ideas you have about your website?
10) Who will be involved with creating the content of the website?
11) Who has final website approval?
12) What are your deadlines?
13) Is your domain registered? If so, what is the URL and where is it registered?
14) Have you selected a web hosting company?
NOTE: Please send any relevant documents or promotional material that will affect the content of your website
A new bill has been introduced into congress that would target accessibility of web video. The "21st Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act of 2008" (H.R. 6320) covers about a dozen areas. The proposed law has Internet video captioning requirements.
Eighteen months after its enactment, the Federal Communications Commission must set up regulations and deadlines for "an appropriate schedule of deadlines for the provision of closed captioning of video programming distributed to the public over the Internet."
Three kinds of video would be affected:
It is point three that is sticky. A whole lot of podcasts fall into this category. Closed captioning and transcriptions cost.... many podcasters see little if any profit from their shows. Always nice when congress sticks its nose in the Internet.
How about instead of sending money to worthless causes... they actualy fund this requirement.
A great article about podcasters and advertisers....
I’ve often scratched my head how I can gather 2 million people each month... but advertisrs still go with magazines that deliver less than 25% of that. This article from Investor’s Business Daily is an important read. It also features a colleague of mine... Scott Bourne.
Lend Me Your Ears: Advertisers Begin To Target Podcasts
Podcast audiences have branched out far beyond just geeks. And advertisers are starting to like them, too.
After having placed ads with Web sites and search engines, more advertisers are starting to spread their ad dollars to audio and video podcasts in an attempt to reach certain consumers.
Read the rest.
Deeje Cooley from Adobe shares some interesting thoughts about episodic viewing of podcasts. Don't miss this great post on what's possible with the new Adobe Media Player.
“There is a better way. More and more, TV shows are being (re)distributed as RSS feeds, which allows for a completely "on-demand" experience. What's more, the coolest feature of Adobe Media Player, called "Storyline Subscriptions", takes advantage of the reverse chronological order inherent in RSS to deliver every episode of a show, in order, from the beginning, at a pace determined by each individual viewer.
Most video RSS aggregators will pull the most recent episodes of a show, which is great for news and magazine-style shows. But for story-based shows, viewers really want to start from the beginning, in order to follow the story arcs and character developments. When you subscribe to a show in Adobe Media Player, you can choose to either pull the N most recent episodes, or choose to pull N episodes starting with a specific episode, usually the first one. And of course you can change these settings, on a per-show basis, at any time.”
Be sure to check it out.
The fine folks over at Layers Magazine have also published the article: Does the World Need Another Media Player? This time its had the benefit of being scrubbed by an editor (not just spell-checker). You can read it here: http://www.layersmagazine.com/column_adobe_mediaplayer1.html.
A few folks have commented on the length of the article... here’s the Spark Notes version:
I taught an Adobe E-Seminar yesterday called "Creating a Graphic Identity for your Web Video and Dynamic Media." The class itself will be posted next week. Here are a few resources I identified during the class.
1. Two motion graphics projects.
2. Advice on rendering in After Effects.
3. Resource Slides
4. Photoshop for Video Podcast (free)
5. Producing Video Podcasts show (free)
The two books mentioned are Producing Video Podcasts and Photoshop for Video.
Following up on my "Really Cool Adobe Announcements" post...
Adobe has actually posted their "secret" presentation from NAB. Hart Shafer talks about four cool things Adobe has up their sleeve.
You SO need to watch this... trust me. BTW (for those of you waiting... they did show OnLocation for Mac in this demo).
The Association for Downloadable Media just unveiled Advertisement Unit Standards and Download Measurement Guidelines. They'd like public comments on both. They encourage public comments in order to refine and enhance the documentation. The public comment period will end on May 16, 2008. You can download and comment on the draft standards for advertising and measurement here. The open comment period will conclude May 16, 2008.
Apple has launched a road tour in support of Final Cut Server. I got a chance to look at this at NAB and I must say it is impressive.
The tour is going to hit several cities:
Hollywood – May 13 | New York – May 22 | Chicago – May 28
Korea – May 28 | Washington, D.C. – June 3 | Beijing – June 3
Mumbai – June 11 | Seattle – June 17 | Sydney – June 18
Singapore – June 18 | Hong Kong – June 24 | San Francisco – June 26
Taiwan – June 27 | Atlanta – July 2 | Dallas – July 8
“Beginning in May, Apple takes Final Cut Studio 2 and Final Cut Server — Apple’s new media asset management and workflow automation software — on tour around the world. Attend a free, in-depth seminar that features workflows used by some of the industry’s leading film and video production companies. Apple experts will give step-by-step demonstrations that reveal how each of these customers used Final Cut Studio 2 and Final Cut Server to achieve exceptional results.”
Find out more or register here.