m2h blogs by Marcia Hansen » networks

Check out FrienderBenders

Marcia Hansen — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 23:17:06 +0000

My newest social media project at Allstate is FrienderBenders.com. We wanted to create a site that shows how bad driving habits can contribute to accidents, but in a fun and engaging way — without preaching at people. Who wants more preaching? Not me! So here’s the promotional video. The video outtakes are funny. If you click to watch, I think you’ll get a kick out of it.

FrienderBenders.com is social media and user-generated content. Visitors to the site can choose from among four bad driving characters: Texting Tessa, Make-up Mary, Johnny Distracto, or Hungry Horatio and add their own photos and choose from one of the sound effects.

Do you want to tease one of your friends about eating in the car? You can send him a Hungry Horatio complete with a picture and sound effect. The application creates a short Flash animation of a funny car crash featuring the unique bad driving character you created.

FrienderBenders is meant to be social. You can share your funny animation with your friends via email, save it to Facebook or other social networks, or even embed it on your blog so visitors to your site can see your creative talents.

If you’d like a walk-through of the application, here’s an interview I did on TechWebTV with David Berlind of Information Week at Web 2.0 demonstrating the site:

Click over to FrienderBenders.com and be sure to come back and let me know what you think. Feedback welcome!

Today’s Links

Marcia Hansen — Sun, 09 Sep 2007 00:46:04 +0000

Top 10 Search Engine Optimization Tips – self explanatory

Jott – [via: LifeRemix/LifeDev] transcribes voice messages you phone in. Maybe you’ve already used it?? You can call in and send email, text messages, messages to a group, or even content to your blog or twitter. Looks cool. Note: the terms of service prohibit repeatedly calling in long messages. I’m not sure how they define long, but I don’t think it would ideal to use as an interview transcription service, which was my first thought.

Links for today

Marcia Hansen — Thu, 06 Sep 2007 22:02:43 +0000

Web Strategy by Jeremiah – check out his post for today, the questions corporations ask about social media.

Social Media Today – check out IT Flower and whitepaper.

good images with these posts.

auto comment citation

Marcia Hansen — Tue, 26 Jun 2007 02:52:25 +0000

Tonight while watching a movie on FX, I saw a commercial for Ford Fusion. In the commercial, they quoted comments by Yahoo Autos users. They didn’t refer to the users by name, but they did put their comments in quotes.

I don’t watch a bunch of TV. Is this use of site comments on commercials a common practice now?

iTunes Needs an “Album-Only” Enema

Marcia Hansen — Sat, 02 Dec 2006 16:57:53 +0000

Josh over at Bokardo explains Why iTunes Needs an Album Only Enema. He has been a long-time U2 fan and the only way he can get 3 new songs is to buy the entire album of songs he already has in his collection.

I noticed this same issue recently when I was looking at Tim McGraw songs. The track, Let’s Make Love (With Faith Hill), is one that I wanted to get. However, it’s marked “album only.” Now in my case, I wanted to get a few other tracks on that 2003 Greatest Hits album, but still, I don’t want to buy tracks I really don’t want in order to get the one that I do.

Josh suggests that we all blog about this issue to try to get the music industry big-wigs to cut the crap. (He thinks that it’s not an issue at Apple). So if you have experienced this problem, or just want to join in, start posting and linking.

Odeo Social Networking

Marcia Hansen — Thu, 27 Apr 2006 20:05:57 +0000

Looks like I’ve been asleep at the blog…
I just found Odeo — a social networking audio site. Users can record posts online or by phone and even share them with friends or in iTunes. Plus, users can tag posts and subscribe to different users’ RSS feeds, as well as comment on what others have posted. Very cool!

I’m sure my students were amused this morning when I found it while searching for professional writing portfolios and I started saying, “oh, look, you can…, “oh, look, you can also…”

Featured channels are here. Oh, there is also a MacCast for Mac geeks.

Fun! Fun!

Help Badger

Marcia Hansen — Sat, 20 Aug 2005 15:27:00 +0000

From academic coach comes the story of Badger, an ABD grad student faced with extreme debt and a dying husband. Please make a donation.
Academic coach has set up a Fund For Mr. Badger’s Cancer Treatment

Badger, An awesome ABD who posts pseudonymously as Badger has only a short time left with her husband. Mr. Badger, a 34 year old artist, is dying of liver cancer.

Badger, Mr. Badger and their 11 year old son, are also faced with mounting debts — because of the expense of his cancer treatment, the insufficiency of her graduate student health insurance plan, and our government’s scanty assistance programs.

“Cost to date for surgery, CT-scans, hospital stays, doctors’ visits, and labwork: $79,000. Insurance benefit left for year: $21,000. Days left until new benefit year: 145. Response from Social Security Administration when I went down to their office with our 2004 tax returns to prove our lack of income: Priceless.

“There’s nothing I can do for you. Come back in two years.”

Prognosis of someone with stage four liver cancer: 3 months.”

More info here. Make a donation.
—–

Edublogs

Marcia Hansen — Wed, 17 Aug 2005 04:40:00 +0000

I’ve been checking out edublogs.org this evening as the Missouri Writing Project Network thought it would be good to create a blog to use as a networking tool for WP teachers. Andy and I are leading the blog project. We just need to test things and see how we like it before we open it up to other teachers to post.
So far, I’ve found using WordPress to be really easy. I like the using the tool. Plus, having the ability to assign categories to posts is a plus. Also, not having to cobble together comments and trackbacks is nice. Plus, I also like the WordPress feature where it sends me an email to let me know that someone has commented on a post. I know MT does these things, but Greymatter doesn’t–well, at least not easily and on my current hosting set-up.
If things work out, I just might think of switching. According to some of the stuff I’ve read, it’s possible to import my Greymatter blog into WordPress. Heck, I also have an old Blogger site that I could move as it would be nice to have everything in one place. With my current host and pricing plan, I’d have to pay more to have database functionality and WordPress. The pricing is based on bandwidth and I have no idea what I’d use.
Well, first things first. Get MWPN up and running and then figure out what to do with my stuff.

How to Blog, Feed, and Flick

Marcia Hansen — Wed, 20 Jul 2005 17:48:00 +0000

The blogosphere is rich in resources for people who want to get started.

About Blogs
Weblogs defined by Jill Walker at jill/txt
How Blogs Work by Ken Smith
Blogging vs. Posting by Will R. at Weblogg-ed
Using the Tools

How to Use Bloglines by betterdays (tip Ken Smith)
RSS for Educators by Will R. at Weglogg-ed
How to Set-up an Account at Flickr by Alex Halavais
Why Blog?
Lessons Learned by Anne Davis

Lessons Learned by Will R.
More on Weblogs
Learning More about Weblogs: A Webliography on Weblogs at Kairosnews
Citing a Weblog Entry in MLA Style at Jerz’s Literacy Weblog
Citing a Weblog Comment in MLA Style at Jerz’s Literacy Weblog
Grading /Evaluating Weblogs by Dennis Jerz at Kairosnews

Update 4/29/2006: For some reason, this post is attracting a lot of spam so I’m turning off comments on it. Email me if you would like to comment on it and I’ll manually post.

Blogging and writing research.

Marcia Hansen — Sun, 26 Jun 2005 04:57:00 +0000

One of the texts we’re reading for the Missouri Writing Project this month is, Because Writing Matters: Improving Student Writing in Our Schools. One of the pages that I’ve had a sticky note on quotes research from D.E. Freeman and Y.S. Freeman, Between Worlds: Access to Second Language Acquisition. Portsmouth, N.H.: Heinemann, 1994, p. 3.:

Effective school programs take into account factors from both the school and the societal contexts in planning curriculum for language minority students. (29).

Then the authors of BWM go on to say,

Writing research has shown us that learning to write involves not only learning the processes of inquiry, drafting, revising, and editing, but also a web of relationships between a child and her peers, home life and the wider culture, or a child’s culture and that of the school. (29)

This last statement, especially, makes me think of how much blogging would support this research because blogging is public writing on the Internet where students can establish a ‘web of relationships’ by linking to other web documents including fellow students’ posts, web pages, hometown web pages, cultural information, younger friends’ writing at their old high school. Also, if students share their blog URLs with parents, friends, and family, then their blogs become a new way they can keep in touch with their home communities.