Archivos diarios: 28 enero 2011

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Why Make Effective Networking Part Of Your Freelance Job

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Why Make Effective Networking Part Of Your Freelance Job

http://www.1stwebdesigner.com/design/networking-freelance/
Posted in: Web Design • Written by: riza_gamutan

Being a freelancer is no regular job to do. It takes a lot of hard work to become successful in this field. And as a freelancer, it is essential to build contacts for your business work. You need sufficient references – people who work out as your clients. You need people to help you deliver expected results. So what drastic steps should you do in establishing contacts for your business? 

This is where effective networking comes in. Networking simply means the act of creating, extending and maintaining personal connections with different types of people in the business. It is a way to seek sources for opportunities like extending business to more clients and how to gain technical expertise.

Why Make Effective Networking Part Of Your Freelance Job

Networking is easily achieved if the person steps out of his normal work environment. This is because most people are so engrossed with what they work and the people that surround them. If they just only start breaking loose from what they are accustomed with, it is the only way towards building an effective network.

Why the need for networking?

networking
Image by Laura Leavell

1) Finding jobs easily through connections

Networking can help you land jobs of your dreams. Take for instance a manager who has sought another employment. With networking, he is able to extend jobs to his former colleagues even if distance has kept them apart. With the right connection, he gets to choose his own team in the current employment. Hence, this could be another step to achieve the company’s objectives.

This also applies to freelancers working through networking. Because people are aware with what you can extend to them, existing contacts like friends and associates recommend you to where they might be right now. This is because they need your service and therefore, a network is built out from staying closely connected with them. It is also in this way that you prolong your career. Lee el resto de esta entrada →

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Infographics to Enrich Your Knowledge

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Infographics to Enrich Your Knowledge

by Aquil Akhter

http://www.noupe.com/graphics/infographics-to-enrich-your-knowledge.html

Over the past few years, social media networking sites have been growing rapidly — this is something we all might have obviously noticed already. The question is whether we’re aware of how many users there are out there across the world who cannot imagine their lives without their social media networks.

Here is a collection of forty useful and appealing social media infographics that will enrich our knowledge, our lives and thoughts about the advantages and disadvantages of such networks. If you have found an infographic you’ve found useful, feel free to share it with us!

Useful Social Media Infographics

The Boom of Social Sites
The explosion of social networking sites over the past decade has facilitated a transformation in the way we communicate with each other. Here we look at some of these communities with over 1 million users, both active and defunct:

Socialmediainfographics399 in Infographics to Enrich Your Knowledge

Facebook’s World
Facebook is the most dominant brand in the world of social media. Ever wonder how? Click the image below to view a comprehensive infographic:

Socialmediainfographics13 in Infographics to Enrich Your Knowledge

Age Distribution on Social Networking Sites
Here’s some interesting statistics regarding the age distribution across many of the popular social networking websites:

Socialmediainfographics20 in Infographics to Enrich Your Knowledge Lee el resto de esta entrada →

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The Pros and Cons of Art Directed Blog Posts

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The Pros and Cons of Art Directed Blog Posts

by Angie Bowen

http://www.problogdesign.com/design/the-pros-and-cons-of-art-directed-blog-posts/

Art Directed Posts

When it comes to blogging, for a designer, the art can feel somewhat lacking in, well, art. So it is natural for the designer inside us to begin craving a new approach to this task, which can at times feel a bit tiresome and trying. Blogging can often feel this way for a designer, because we are not necessarily the best at expressing ourselves through our words. We tend to be much more visual creatures.

We are better at finding the right look than at finding the right words, so blogging can move us a bit out of our comfort zone, even though we tend to have a firm enough grasp on the topics that we tackle.

Art directed blog posts are posts that are designed individually to match the subject of the post, and they tend to break from the usual look and setup of your site. This allows you as a designer to keep a proverbial fresh coat of paint on your site, without having to take the time and make all of the considerations that come with a complete redesign.

Below is a look at some of the positive and negative aspects of this approach, followed by a few tips and examples so you can see for yourself if this is the next step for your blog. Or if you have already taken that step, this post can help you make sure you are solid ground as you proceed. Lee el resto de esta entrada →

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We Can Do Better: The Overlooked Importance of Professional Journalism

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We Can Do Better: The Overlooked Importance of Professional Journalism
  • By Dan Redding

    http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2011/01/28/we-can-do-better-the-overlooked-importance-of-professional-journalism/

1

The Web is a galaxy of information that is rapidly expanding. Blogs and online magazines are helping shape the future of this Information Age that we live in. Those of us who read, write and design blogs and online magazines possess extraordinary power and potential. How will we choose to use it?

If you use your website to publish news, events, opinions or interviews, you should familiarize yourself with the basics of journalism. These tools can help us develop and share information that is exciting, intelligent, and responsible. They can provide guidance and support as you pursue a career or hobby writing online.

Newsstand2 in We Can Do Better: The Overlooked Importance of Professional Journalism2

This article is accompanied by examples of photojournalism, which is the practice of communicating news through photographs. The above photo of a 1940′s newsstand in New York City was taken by photojournalist Ruth Orkin

We, designers, go on all day about the usability of our WordPress layouts and the readability of our typography, but all of those things have been considered in vain if our writing is poorly spelled, riddled with inaccuracies, or based on second-hand assumptions that will leave our audience misled, confused, or worse. Even if you’re just casually writing about why you personally love/hate the iPad (for example), you can do so in a truthful way (truthful to your own opinions and truthful to the information you are discussing).

Whether or not you strive to produce writing that you consider journalism is not all that important. What is important is that no matter what writing genre you specialize in, you have a responsibility to your readers to publish high quality writing that is truthful, accurate, and readable. Oh, and this applies to your professional Twitter stream and Facebook updates, too. All of these elements have a reflection on you and your brand.

Trained professional journalists spend years studying the complex techniques and thorny philosophical values that define the trade of journalism, so don’t expect to receive a Master’s degree from Columbia by the end of this article. What this piece can serve as is a crash course designed to introduce concepts that will improve your writing, pique your interest, and instill a sense of respect for the fundamentals of a noble profession.

What is Journalism? Lee el resto de esta entrada →

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My Revised “Most Important Task First” Model

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My Revised “Most Important Task First” Model

http://the99percent.com/tips/6980/Lab-Rat-Do-Your-Most-Important-Task-First

Step 1: Spend 30 minutes scanning email and responding to urgent items.

Step 2: Turn off email and other distractions. Focus for 2-3 hours on completing your “Most Important Task.”

Step 3: Take a lunch break away from your desk. Leaving your computer and recharging is the key to being productive after your MIT time.

Step 4: Devote the post-lunch day to taking care of ongoing tasks and other “reactionary work” that requires less mental stamina.

The Caveat

Although tackling hard work first seems like a no-brainer, I did have to alter the model a bit for it to work for me, which made me realize that this approach really depends on your personality. For some, it may be an easy switch that will exponentially increase productivity, but for others, it might cause extra stress. Lee el resto de esta entrada →

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Doreen Lorenzo: Clients Don’t Deserve Surprises

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Doreen Lorenzo: Clients Don’t Deserve Surprises
 

A World of Tweets: Data visualization Frog created to show tweets from across the globe.
According to advertising maven David Ogilvy, “Great hospitals do two things. They look after patients, and they teach young doctors. We look after clients, and we teach young advertising people.” It’s an apt comparison. Like doctors, creatives are regularly called upon to educate their clients, and a good bedside manner is crucial.
Client relationships are the bedrock of innovation at Frog Design, a global innovation firm founded in 1969. To name just a few of Frog’s accomplishments: they partnered with Apple to create the revolutionary Apple IIc in 1982; they designed the highest grossing e-commerce site of its time, Dell.com, in 2000; and, more recently, they created the popular Roku Netflix video player. 

So how do they do it? We sat down with president Doreen Lorenzo for a conversation about how Frog “looks after clients” and “teaches young designers” – and how both of these elements play into the company’s remarkable ability to create break-through products.
Lee el resto de esta entrada →

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The Five Levels of Communication in a Connected World

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The Five Levels of Communication in a Connected World

In the digital world in which we live, it has become too easy to send emails, ping people via instant message, text, tweet, etc. Upon reflection, I think I’ve been too haphazard about how I communicate with my colleagues, clients, friends, and family. Oftentimes, an email about a problem should have been a phone call. And sometimes a phone call should have been an in-person meeting.
Knowing what to say and when to say it is not enough. In the modern day, we must decide HOW to communicate. Lee el resto de esta entrada →

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Sigue la publicación de resultados financieros: Motorola, LG, Nokia, Qualcomm, Samsung

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Sigue la publicación de resultados financieros: Motorola, LG, Nokia, Qualcomm, Samsung

Ricardo Sametband
http://blogs.lanacion.com.ar/

El mundo móvil sigue anunciando su performance económica en el último trimestre fiscal (porque recuerden, aunque lo hacen con todo el amor del mundo, el fin último de estas empresas es vender). Hace unos días les contaba los números de Apple, Sony Ericsson, HTC y Alcatel, en un ambiente generalmente positivo.

Como aperitivo, les dejo los últimos números generales de cómo crecieron los sistemas operativos móviles (es de Allaboutsymbian).

smartphone-q4-10-allaboutsymbian

Lee el resto de esta entrada →