Week 4: Input and Output

I love the idea of QR Codes. It's advertising genius. I'm sitting here right now typing this out and I'm looking over at my roommates desk seeing a Pepsi cup with a QR code on it. I went over and scanned it and it brought me to the Pepsi website. When I see a QR code, I feel like I have to scan it to see what it brings me to. It's an attraction to smart phone users and it's an attraction that I need to harness.

Did you scan it?! Well if you did then you were brought to the mobile version of Orange Slice Sports. I honestly think I could print these off and just put them around the Syracuse University campus and people would scan them and go to my site. It would be an interesting experiment. If that didn't work, then creating posters to advertise for my site would definitely be a cool. And including this QR code would be simple.

Since video is a sort of input, now would be a good time to mention that I want to start a serious of video blogs (or "vlogs") for my site. I was thinking about having a weekly show featuring myself and one of the athletes. It doesn't have to be fancy at first, I could just use my webcam. But I do have access to a DV video camera that I could certainly record the show on and eventually capture it onto my computer. I think it would bring in a cool audience.

Week 3: Hardware

This week's lecture was all about computer hardware. It's tough to relate this directly to my blog but there is definitely a connection. In order to run a blog, one must know a computer. I've had all kinds of problems this year with my computer and those problems have, in some way or another, hurt my blog. The first example of this is the time my external hard drive (with all my photos and articles on it) busted. It was probably just a broken actuator arm, but at the time, I had no clue what an actuator arm was.

I try to stay away from the hardware aspects of things and just focus on the writing. But being the sites administrator, often times I deal with problems. Something that Professor Rubin brought up that is worth noting is about identity theft. Personally, I worry about identity theft but I should also worry about it from a business standpoint. Not only can a person steal another's identity, but they could steal a business' identity as well. Fake Twitter or Facebook accounts or a site with a similar title could ruin the reputation of my site. So, it's always worth Googling the site's name to make sure nothing like that is happening.

Week 2: Excel

I never really considered Excel useful. I always just thought it was a program we were taught about in Middle School that we would never use again. That assumption had rung true until class on Wednesday. Little did I know, Excel could actually be quite useful if I figure out proper ways to use it. My site relies on statistics and having them organized in an Excel file would make life a million times easier.

The problem is that, the statistical information provided by Blogger isn't exportable, therefore I would have to copy down all the info by hand, which I feel is counterproductive. There are a few alternatives. I could use another analytical service that would allow me to export the data because something important about my site is figuring out what sorts of articles my audience wants to read. I would export the individual statistics for each article and I would do some conditional formatting so that the successful articles (over a certain amount of views) would be highlighted in green and the unsuccessful would be highlighted in red. It would provide me an efficient way to figure out what's popular.

I could also use Excel for my monetization service. The information about money-per-click and data like that ARE exportable so I could definitely put those into Excel. This would be more of an internal matter. I could put my monetization information into an pivot table and it would be an easier way to organize the numbers. I would print those numbers and distribute them to my staff, giving them an idea about how the site was doing. The advantage of the pivot table is that it would make the numbers simpler and easier to read, which is good because they aren't familiar with the logic and need the simplification.

Introduction: Week 1

By Ben Glidden

For my IST 195 entrepreneurial project I've decided to ask myself the question, how can I add value to a product/service that currently exists? The service I'm going to try to improve with all the knowledge I gain from the class is actually a service I created myself called Orange Slice Sports. It's a Syracuse sports related website written by the students, for the students. I recently started this blog because I love Syracuse sports and it's taken off. Now, I want to try to monetize it. Making money by doing something I love would be great. So here it goes:

Social media was the topic of discussion in this week's lecture. For any sports related news/blog site like this, social media is crucial. I've learned that the best way to get views is by throwing out every post onto different venues of social media. However, until class this week I had never really considered using Google+ for my site. I'm not sure if it would be appropriate for a site like mine to have its own Google+ account. I have both Twitter and Facebook accounts for Orange Slice Sports and both get me quite a few hits per post, so should I get a Google+?

I don't think Google+ is ready for Orange Slice Sports yet. That might be an odd thing to say, but I think its true. I try to get these posts out to as many people as possible, but how many people am I really going to hit on Google+ that don't already subscribe to my tweets or Facebook posts? Right now, Google+ is for the advanced social media user. It's not really a social thing right now because it's still in its original stages. I could be wrong, so I tried posting one of my Orange Slice Sports stories to my own Google+ account and it saw very little traffic. So I'm happy with what I'm doing social media wise right now.