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I recently attended a workshop that featured Jerry Monti of the Knight Digital Media Center at U.C. Berkeley.

Jerry had some excellent slides about search engine optimization (SEO) and social media optimization (SMO). Here are the three versions he sent me: PDF, PowerPoint, and Keynote.

The Knight Center site has some interesting tutorials for the general public, although its primary audience is “mid-career journalists [who want] to enhance their expertise and multimedia skills.”

Thanks for sharing these tips, Jerry. And thanks to Colleen Paretty and Jan Greene of the Bay Area chapter of the Association of Health Care Journalists for arranging the evening’s meeting and inviting members of the Northern California Science Writers Association to attend.

Tags: Tech by GD
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A colleague recently sent this information about some security and privacy settings for Mozilla Firefox, with screenshots, courtesy of the Academic Computing and Networking Services team at Colorado State University.

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The Librarian in Black reports on Open Source Living: A Mecca for All Things OS. She also raises a cheer for OpenOffice, an open-source project with roots at Sun Microsystems.

Thanks to my library connection for the pointer.

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Usability expert Jakob Nielsen is “still bullish on mobile websites and online services,” despite the fact that recent tests with users who tried to access sites on their mobile phones were “cringeworthy.” Read Mobile Web 2009 = Desktop Web 1998.

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Susan Chaityn Lebovits of the Boston Globe writes about web sites where caregivers can find and schedule help for ill or aging loved ones, no matter how far away they live. Read more.

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I mistakenly hit a key combination the other day that caused my Windows XP machine to start reading aloud to me. This speech-synthesis program is called Narrator, and it works on any XP machine that has a sound card and a speaker.

I must have hit the Windows-U combination. (Note to Mom: The “Windows” key is the key with the little flag, in between Ctrl and Alt, at bottom left of the QWERTY or English-language keyboard.) Microsoft says that Narrator works with “Notepad, WordPad, Control Panel programs, Internet Explorer, the Windows desktop, and some parts of Windows Setup.” It may also work with some other programs, but no one is making the user any promises.

You can also start Narrator this way: Start > All Programs > Accessories > Accessibility > Narrator. Practical PC Online provides several keyboard shortcuts.

The XvsXP.com site, which compares features on Mac OS X with those on Windows XP, has information on how to start Narrator on Windows XP and how to enable speech functions such as reading aloud, voice recognition, and speech synthesis on Mac OS X.

Note: XvsXP.com is moving to the Mac vs. Windows wiki site, where you can sign up to contribute your knowledge.

Tags: Tech by GD
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Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Digg, YouTube, and other social media offer us new ways to communicate with one another. Tamar Weinberg offers some tips for making better use of these tools.

Thanks to Alec Muffett, who posted a link on a Sun email list in December to this blog post, which referred to Weinberg’s social media etiquette handbook.

Did you get all that?

Good.

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Sun campus ambassador Cindy Dalfovo has an interesting design on her new blog, Geek cor de rosa. It’s from Roller themes, a storehouse of visual themes (or designs) for use with Apache Roller. Roller’s home page describes it as “a full-featured, multi-user and group-blog server suitable for blog sites large and small.”

You’re looking at a Roller-based blog right now.

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Career expert Liz Ryan provides some advice for the unemployed.

Thanks to the San Francisco Chronicle and Yahoo Hotjobs for syndicating this column.

Tags: Reading by GD
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Software engineer and journalist Sandip Roy writes in the San Francisco Chronicle that a growing number of Indian software professionals are returning to their native country to live and work, making the move from Silicon Valley to Cyberabad.

“Immigrants founded 52 percent of startups in the valley from 1995 to 2005,” according to Roy. Says one interviewee, “The trickle is going to become a flood.”

What will this mean for the U.S. software industry? Read more and don’t miss the photos by Bishan Samaddar and Roy.

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How do you type those accented characters for non-English languages from an English-language (or QWERTY) keyboard? Here are some online resources.

If you need these characters only occasionally, you can use key caps on the Mac or character map on Windows. Note: Apple has discontinued the key caps function on newer Mac operating systems, but you can find alternatives in Apple discussion groups. Fair-and-balanced note for Windows: The Windows environment prefers the term international characters to accented characters.

This document from City College of San Francisco has good cheat sheets for typing accented characters in French, Spanish, Italian, and German on both Mac and Windows keyboards.

If you do a lot of typing in foreign languages from a QWERTY keyboard, a good option is to use a foreign-language keyboard layout. Here’s the official Microsoft page on activation of non-English language keyboards in Windows.

This page from Wellesley College contains a good guide for activating non-English language keyboards in both Windows and Mac environments. Some of the jump links don’t work; scroll down the page to see the text.

I hope you’ll find these resources helpful. Let me know if any of these links becomes outdated or if you have additional links to share.

Update Feb. 17, 2009: Reader Katsumi Inoue sent the following link for OpenSolaris. Petr Hruska of the Prague OpenSolaris Globalization Group wrote the blog posting Learning Chinese – How To Write Tones in Pinyin on OpenSolaris. Petr has also posted Switching Keyboards in OpenSolaris Using setxkbmap and Keyboard Shorcuts.

Tags: Writing & editing by GD
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“What if you could also access literature’s greatest works, such as Emma and The Jungle Book, right from your phone? Or, some of the more obscure gems such as Mark Twain’s hilarious travelogue, Roughing It?” Google Book Search makes 2 million copyright-free books in English available on the web browser.

The posting from Inside Google Book Search discusses the thorny issue of optical character recognition (OCR) and difficulties in rendering text captured by that method.

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In today’s San Francisco Chronicle, staff writer Deborah Gage presents a short interview with Bill Joy, a cofounder of Sun Microsystems and now a venture capitalist who specializes in green technology.

The article mentions Joy’s 2000 article in Wired magazine: Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us.

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From the Librarian in Black blog comes this pointer to resources on How to Embed Almost Anything in Your Website: videos, MP3, Flickr slideshows, Google calendar events, Google maps, Picasa albums, chat, spreadsheets, PDF, and so on. What did Amit Agarwal miss? Not much.

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My job used to be to read the text of an article, correct grammatical and punctuation errors, make queries to the author for clarification, go back over the revised text to fix any new errors, and shepherd the article through production. The finished article appeared live on java.sun.com. Simple, right?

Jobs change over time, maybe especially at a technology company. I still do that kind of editing and still enjoy it, but other duties are slowly coming to take up about half my time.

Newer assignments include finding blog entries by Sun employees and affiliates to feature in the blog sections on the java.sun.com and developers.sun.com home pages, gathering material to publicize updates to core Java and Java ME technologies and student-developer activities on SDN Program News, writing entries for this blog, working on lexicon entries for search-engine optimization as our developer sites move to a different search engine, identifying good material on the Web for a new developer-news page in the works (on hold since the team leader’s layoff a few weeks ago) and for the My Sun Connection portal, and working with a team of people from all different parts of Sun to provide material that will attract student developers to Sun technologies.

At times, I feel like a fish out of water, wondering how a copy editor ever got here and where this is all going.

At other times, I feel more part of a school of fish, each of us threading in and out of a group, sometimes taking the lead, sometimes filling out the main part of the school, occasionally falling behind, then catching back up again.

This isn’t the life I’d imagined for myself when I graduated college in 1981, but I like to think that some threads of that old imagined future are still present in this current life and career.

Tags: Personal by GD
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