Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category
Danbo with his laptop.
Photo credit: Laptop by JaredVanderzell
As a part of Philly Tech Week, I decided to attend the Green Tech Showcase. Here, four different groups spoke about different innovations they were doing for the environment. The speakers included Micah Gold-Markel of Solar States, Christine Knapp of GPIC, Deb Boyer of Azavea, and LJ Petroni of Mark Group.
Solar States installs rooftop solar panels on buildings in Philadelphia. They lease the space on the rooftops from the owners, then sell the energy back to the organization. Their most recent project was an 81kW solar array on the roof of the Crane Arts building and is the largest in center city Philadelphia.
GPIC is the Greater Philadelphia Innovation Cluster for Energy-Efficient Buildings. Ms. Knapp spoke about their focus on energy efficient buildings and integration of production retrofitting for current buildings. They are located in the Navy Yard in Philadelphia and use that area as a hub for energy innovation in an effort to create energy independence and create jobs for the region. They received $122 million from the Department of Energy for their work, plus addition grants. Their goal is to improve energy efficiency by 50% over the next 10 years.
Azavea partnered with the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society, Philadelphia Parks & Recreation, and the Delaware Valley Regional Planning Commission to create the PhillyTreeMap, a website to create a collaborative inventory of trees in the Philadelphia urban environment. The site allows users to add new trees, upload pictures of existing trees, view information about trees in the database and promote tree planting throughout Philadelphia.
The Mark Group provides energy efficient upgrades to homes and businesses to provide them savings in the form of reduced energy bills. They are also located in the Philadelphia Navy Yard. They are originally based in the UK, but now have a US presence. The services they provide are an assessment of the current location, recommendations and priority of upgrades and implementation of conservation measures. They use non-invasive, state-of-the-art technology to capture thermal images of the location to determine how to better insulate it to reduce energy waste. Their typical customer sees 15-20% savings in utilities and reduces their overall carbon footprint.
All the groups were very informative and provided great information on how technology can be used to help the environment.
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[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=30yrORPLdR8[/youtube]
A short stop-motion video I put together about an unsuccessful villain. The images were shot with a Canon 7D and a 35mm 1.4f L lens. Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Premier Pro were used for post processing and compiling.
Danbo surfing the web.
Photo credit: Laptop by JaredVanderzell
Promoting you blog is an important part in increase traffic and your online presence. It is important to develop strategies to do this that are both realistic and measurable, to ensure that you are effectively doing what you intend. Below, I developed 2 such strategies.
Idea #1: Use social networks for post promotion
Description: Use a URL shortener and post the link of the blog post in Facebook status updates and Twitter tweets, along with a short attention-grabbing description.
Rationale: Due to the fact that I have friends in these social networks who do not know about, or read, my blog, this would be an effective way for them to hear about it and possibly drive them to visit my blog.
Objective: I want to increase the number of visitors to my blog overall, and each individual blog post. This will allow me to post those links to increase traffic.
Measurement: I will know if this is successful by checking Google Analytics to see if page visits increases, as well as if the referrals are coming from Facebook and Twitter.
Idea #2: Photography blog ring integration
Description: Join a photography blog ring of authors who refer and cross-promote other similar bloggers in the ring to increase traffic to each individual blog.
Rationale: By joining a group that is interested in, and posts, similar content as me, I’ll be able to attract more relevant visitors to my blog, where they will stay longer and look around.
Objective: I will continue to focus on and use my own photography to generate content. Then join a blog ring of similar-minded bloggers to help cross-promote the different blogs to increase traffic of relevant visitors.
Measurement: I will know if this is successful by checking Google Analytics to see if the traffic is being referred from any of the other sites in the blog ring and if the duration on site increases over the implementation period.
Danbo and Social Media.
Photo credit: Social Media by JaredVanderzell
The below questions were prompted from this blog post by Professor Steven L. Johnson regarding the use of social media promotion for companies. The companies that I picked were Coca-Cola and Turkey Hill, both beverage producers.
Do the companies do a good job of promoting themselves through social media?
On Coca-Cola’s site, there was a box that showed the Twitter tweets as soon as they were posted, as well as links to it’s other social networking pages. It did a pretty good job of promoting itself by linking to its social media pages, as well as using those pages to link back to its site.
Turkey Hill had a Facebook Like button right on the home page and an ad to follow them on Facebook and Twitter. They could have done a better job of incorporating social media on its actual website, but its social media pages did a good job of linking back to the website.
What do you think they hope to achieve via a Facebook or Twitter presence?
I think that both companies are looking to increase brand awareness as well as provide a community place for their fans and customers.
If you were in charge of a company’s Facebook or Twitter initiative, how would you measure if it was a success?
I would measure their success by the number of people who “like” it and join the page. Additionally, I would measure success by the about of web chatter about the company/product. For example, by setting up a hash tag campaign, you can see the tweets by people who tag them #tag and measure how often it is being used.
Cork Spider
Photo credit: Cork Spider by
I am the Editor-in-Chief of Temple University‘s undergrduate yearbook, the Templar. In our reading of The Starfish and the Spider, by Ori Brafman and Rod A. Beckstrom, I have come to realize that this organization is very much like a spider. My reasoning can be found below.
Hierarchy
The organizational structure of the staff is very rigid and top-down. I, as Editor-in-Chief, am at the top. Below me is the Production Manager and the Section Editors. Under them are the writers and photographers. Without the level above, everything below would just fall apart and “die”. This is very similar to a spider in that without the head, the rest of the spider is dead and not functional.
Oversight
With this organization, there is a central command and everything stems from there. Nothing is done without the approval of the Editor-in-Chief. This type of control and linearity in operations again makes this similar to a spider. A starfish is the complete opposite where each part can function on its own if separated from the rest. Not so in our program.
Location
Additionally, we operate out of a centralized location. We have one office where all of our work is done. Without the office, we couldn’t be the program.
These are just some of the insights that I have realized based on reading this book. Makes me wonder if there should be some restructuring to make this organization more sustainable.
Jared J. Vanderzell