Broadband Edutainment Ireland

Colours for advertisements

FACT: Weblogs Inc. witnessed a 10 to 20 percent jump in ad performance (and therefore revenues) when they matched AdSense ad colours to the sites.

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Steve Outing in Poynter's Eyetrack.

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How to make mobile phone ringtones

FUN FOR MOBILE has DIY ways to make mobile phone ringtones including:

• MP3, m4a/AAC, wav ringtones
• MMF ringtones
• QCP ringtone?
• Ringtones from CD
• Polyphonic (midi) ringtone

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Bonus Link: Wavepad

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Friday Fun Links

NOW AVAILABLE --  Year-round Christmas tree lights for stoners and selected Irishblogs. Each head 3 inches in diameter. Head strand is 10 feet in length and consists of 10 heads. This special offer usually ships to Ireland within five days and arrives within a fortnight. Yours for only €20 via Cheech and Chong.com and (caution!) PayPal.

Essential: Planet Of The Blogs

PLANET OF THE BLOGS -- An essential stopping place for anyone interested in the talking points around Ireland: Planet Of The Blogs. It's a self-organising effort scripted by John Breslin, powered by who else? Boards.ie. Recommended for anyone seriously interested in Irishblogs.

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Damien Mulley -- "PlanetOfTheBlogs kicking IrishBlogs Ass"
Bonus Links: del.icio.us links to Irishblogs and Flickr photostream of Irishblogs.

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Tim Burton Fonts

TIM BURTON COLLECTIVE -- Everybody needs the Tim Burton Font Collection.

Tim

Creative Commons Code

CREATIVE COMMONS -- The Creative Commons has licensed the work in the Open Media Classroom under a Creative Commons License. We are embedding license details into all the source material that we created for this zone and will use the code below.

rdf:RDF xmlns="http://web.resource.org/cc/"
xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/"
xmlns:rdf="http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#"

Work rdf:about=""
dc:type rdf:resource="http://purl.org/dc/dcmitype/Text"
license rdf:resource="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/"

License rdf:about="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/"
permits rdf:resource="http://web.resource.org/cc/Reproduction"
permits rdf:resource="http://web.resource.org/cc/Distribution"
requires rdf:resource="http://web.resource.org/cc/Notice"
requires rdf:resource="http://web.resource.org/cc/Attribution"
permits rdf:resource="http://web.resource.org/cc/DerivativeWorks"

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Time Management Tips

UNL -- Just in time for students revising prior to spring examinations, we have 13 time management tips worth considering.

Spend Time Planning and Organising. Using time to think and plan is time well-spent. In fact, if you fail to take time for planning, you are, in effect, planning to fail. Organize in a way that makes sense to you. If you need color and pictures, use a lot on your calendar or planning book. Some people need to have papers filed away; others get their creative energy from their piles. So forget the “shoulds” and organize your way.

Set Goals. Goals give your life, and the way you spend your time, direction. When asked the secret to amassing such a fortune, one of the famous Hunt brothers from Texas replied: “First you’ve got to decide what you want.” Set goals which are specific, measurable, realistic and achievable. Your optimum goals are those which cause you to “stretch” but not “break” as you strive for achievement. Goals can give creative people a much-needed sense of direction.

Prioritise. Use the 80-20 Rule originally stated by the Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto who noted that 80 percent of the reward comes from 20 percent of the effort. The trick to prioritizing is to isolate and identify that valuable 20 percent. Once identified, prioritize time to concentrate your work on those items with the greatest reward. Prioritize by color, number or letter - whichever method makes the most sense to you. Flagging items with a deadline is another idea for helping you stick to your priorities.

Use a To-Do List. Some people thrive using a daily To Do list which they construct either the last thing the previous day or first thing in the morning. Such people may combine a To Do list with a calendar or schedule. Others prefer a “running” To Do list which is continuously being updated. Or, you may prefer a combination of the two previously described To Do lists. Whatever method works is best for you. Don’t be afraid to try a new system - you just might find one that works even better than your present one!

Be Flexible. Allow time for interruptions and distractions. Time management experts often suggest planning for just 50 percent or less of one’s time. With only 50 percent of your time planned, you will have the flexibility to handle interruptions and the unplanned “emergency.” When you expect to be interrupted, schedule routine tasks. Save (or make) larger blocks of time for your priorities. When interrupted, ask Alan Lakein’s crucial question, “What is the most important thing I can be doing with my time right now?” to help you get back on track fast.

Consider Your Biological Prime Time. That’s the time of day when you are at your best. Are you a “morning person,” a “night owl,” or a late afternoon “whiz?” Knowing when your best time is and planning to use that time of day for your priorities (if possible) is effective time management.

Do The Right Thing Right. Noted management expert, Peter Drucker, says “doing the right thing is more important than doing things right.” Doing the right thing is effectiveness; doing things right is efficiency. Focus first on effectiveness (identifying what is the right thing to do), then concentrate on efficiency (doing it right).

Eliminate the Urgent. Urgent tasks have short-term consequences while important tasks are those with long-term, goal-related implications. Work towards reducing the urgent things you must do so you’ll have time for your important priorities. Flagging or highlighting items on your To Do list or attaching a deadline to each item may help keep important items from becoming urgent emergencies.

Practise the Art of Intelligent Neglect. Eliminate from your life trivial tasks or those tasks which do not have long-term consequences for you. Can you delegate or eliminate any of your To Do list? Work on those tasks which you alone can do.

Avoid Being a Perfectionist. In the Malaysian culture, only the gods are considered capable of producing anything perfect. Whenever something is made, a flaw is left on purpose so the gods will not be offended. Yes, some things need to be closer to perfect than others, but perfectionism, paying unnecessary attention to detail, can be a form of procrastination.

Conquer Procrastination. One technique to try is the “Swiss cheese” method described by Alan Lakein. When you are avoiding something, break it into smaller tasks and do just one of the smaller tasks or set a timer and work on the big task for just 15 minutes. By doing a little at a time, eventually you’ll reach a point where you’ll want to finish.

Learn to say "No." Such a small word - and so hard to say. Focusing on your goals may help. Blocking time for important, but often not scheduled, priorities such as family and friends can also help. But first you must be convinced that you and your priorities are important - that seems to be the hardest part in learning to say “no.” Once convinced of their importance, saying “no” to the unimportant in life gets easier.

Reward Yourself. Even for small successes, celebrate achievement of goals. Promise yourself a reward for completing each task, or finishing the total job. Then keep your promise to yourself and indulge in your reward. Doing so will help you maintain the necessary balance in life between work and play. As Ann McGee-Cooper says, “If we learn to balance excellence in work with excellence in play, fun, and relaxation, our lives become happier, healthier, and a great deal more creative.”

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Kathy Prochaska-Cue --"Thirteen Timely Tips for More Effective Time Management"
Leader Pascal -- "Thirteen timely tips"

Blogging the EU

UPI --Margot Wallstrom, the E.U Commisioner for Institutional Relations and Communication, has started blogging. Wallstrom's role evolved last year in a bid to improve the communication between the EU institutions and EU citizens. Her first entries include reference to the weather (tsunami and Brussels rain), thanks to blog friends, and a little snippet about strategy documents. Predictably, she is attracting all sorts of comments about everything except what she blogs about. Does she understand the spam magnet that she has become? Chris Cobb, writing in The Ottawa Citizen is nonplussed. "Without visiting all 37 million sites coughed up by Internet search engines, it is safe to assume that most blogs are not worth the cyberspace they occupy. The bulk are boring or offensive self-indulgences produced by those with axes to grind, prejudice to spew, porn to peddle or without the ability to get past the gatekeepers at newspapers, magazines, book publishers and edited online publications."

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Margot Wallstrom is at weblog.jrc.cec.eu.int
Hannah Strange -- "EU Commission Gets Trendy"
Caoimhe -- "Blogging the EU"
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Breathing life into singles

LOOPDILOOP -- The iPod--and specifically the ability to shuffle singles inside the iPod--will force significant changes to the music business, writes Feargal McKay. "The way people listen to music is changing. Everyone’s shuffling their music collection on their iPod and are more and more getting in touch with the little-visited corners of their music collection. Having gone to all the bother of dusting off all those old CDs and transferring them to their computer, who can blame them? And now, rather than trading up each year from one new best thing to the next, consumers are spending more time with the old friends with whom they have slipped out of touch and spending less time listening to new music." McKay thinks "the back catalogue bounce is on, but this time, the music industry is unlikely to profit from it".

In addition to having a back catalogue on personal hard drives, consumers can now legally remix music that is slipping out of copyright. In Europe, the copyright  of actual recordings, is limited to fifty years. Both the presence of easily resuffled iPod tunes and legally remediated classics will hit the recording industry hard during the next few years. Perhaps these distinct trends will shock a few labels into providing cheap tracks that millions of iPod users want.

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Feargal McKay -- "Back to the fifties and the future of music"
Bonus Link: Hit Song Science
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First minutes

CLONMEL -- We are preparing the first minutes of the LASH-FM podcast and doing it right means respecting elements of the production process. We covered those in class already. Now we need to sort out (1) the titles of the tips and (2) a production procedure where we can book into the sound studio and record our "One Minute Tips". We can start by using the comment section below this post to name the individual topics.

After all topics are posted, the project leaders will revise this thread with the listing of topics.

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Moodle Assignment -- "One minute tip" and spoken tip.
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