The startpage reminded me a little bit of another social network, just less blue…

Google+ mainly constists of your google profile, a stream including your and your contacts posts – analog to google buzz,  photos from Picasa or uploaded ones, +1 entries, videos and the brand new features as:

1. hangout
2. sparks
3. circles

Hangouts is an unlimited video chat with your contacts and/or circles. Unfortunately I cannot tell anything personally about hangout, as I – shame on me – I do not own a webcam… But I will get one and try it out soon.

Google hangout

The feedback from others I noticed was entirely positive, so let’s see.

Sparks is a news collection of various interests you can choose from or define by yourself.

Google sparks

To me it seems yet unfinished and the results – at least for my fields of interest are kinda clumsy. Nevertheless sparks is interesting, if improved und and pimped up – maybe with recomendations of your contacts from google Reader or +1 items. I’m curious where the fellas at google are heading with sparks. Now with unpersonalized and sketchy news from preselected sources, like affirmed blogs and the big news services,  it’s quite boring, spiced up with a personal taste and more mojo, it might be entertaining and helpful.

Circles is the name for the innovative, neat and sexy contact management system of google+. Circles represent groups you define as you wish and as many as needed, a contact is allowed to be part of several different circles. Your circles are not visible to public and contacts just know they are in your circles, but do not know in which specific circle(s). This is a great advantage towards facebook as you merely follow people like on twitter.

google circles

The shared pictures, links, articles, videos and so on in your stream you send to the circles you chose, which gives complete and absolutely precise control about the visibilty of your posts.

At first time you set up your circles, you will get recommendations from your Gmail contacts and if you took part from Google Buzz.
Managing your contact list with circles is fun – yeah really! Either you choose to drag-and-drop your contacts – as single or in groups – on the circles page or you just organize them as you find them in posts, comments or +1ed lists…

There are some hidden new features, too, if you now google your own name, you will find your google profile  first in line in the results, before the google profile pages did hardly show up on the first pages.

Google+ does not just have sunny sides, the photo integration of Picasa is not properly realised, Alexander Kunz wrote a precise article of the problems with Picasa on google+.
In your Profile in the +1 area only pages you “plusoned” are displayed, it would be nice to see the posts I +1ed, too…

The big question will be how google is handling privacy and the data they get fed with, will they adopt habits from their opponent facebook?

For the first days on, according to me, Google+ does a great job and I am curious how it develops.

Some Links:

Google+ demo

The Google+ Project

20 Google+ Tips to Enhance Your Google Plus Experience

Some time ago I created this set of social media icons and decided to share them with you, they were not a creative revolution, but hey, they are for free! As I got some positive feedback, I now revamped them a little bit, updated and added some new companies, like amplifiy, picasa, bebo, diigo, Google buzz, Google Plus and xing.

Same issue as before feel free to use them, if you want to give me credits, it would be nice, but you do not mandatorily have to.

I provide a .psd file and .pngs of the complete icon set.  If you would need further more logos or icons of certain sites, just wite a comment or contact me. I’ll see want I can do for you.
For some platforms I also added their logos, so you can choose. The following icons are contained in this package: amplify, bebo, delicious, digg, diigo, facebook, flickr, foursquare, friendfeed, goodreads, google, google+, google buzz, google maps, google sidewiki,  lastfm, linkedin, picasa, reddit, stumbleupon, technorati, twitter, xing, yelp and youtube.

So here they are!

All Icons as .png (256 px x 256px):
social media icons

Icons and logos in .psd format (including layers):
social media icons psd

Have a look at all the icons

Fullscreen view

Thinkup is created by Gina Trampani (she also made the Better Gmail2 FF Addon, which I can only recommend to use) in cooperation with Expert Labs.

Conceptual Artist Alexey: http://karanak.deviantart.com:

Thang Le, designer and conceptual artist: thangle.com:

Christopher Rabenhorst: his blog:

via conceptships.blogspot.com

As I had been occupied most of my time by this great open source CMS lately, I would to share my experiences withyou. If you use, you will learned to value drupal at least for its vast amount of extremly useful modules, flexible user management and easy-to-handle content editors.

As basic requirements one needs a hosting account which has php (version 5.2 or higher) and mysql installed. Download the latest versions here, I’d recommend to choose version 6.x as most of the modules and themes are not available for 7.x, which is still in development status, but will come up with neat features.

On first hand you will have to set up a mysql database, no worries you will just have to specify just the database name, a username and a password! Now you upload the drupal core file into a folder in your webspace. After doing so you reach your drupal installation via www.yourdomain.com/[drupal installation folder]/install.php .

The setup is really easy, you will just have to complete these steps:

1. After uploading you have to copy ./sites/default/default.settings.php file to ./sites/default/settings.php (read/write attributes have to set to 766, you must change that right after the installation, due to security reasons) and create a new folder called “files” in ./sites/default/ this folder and its future subfolders must have to be writable (write attributes have to set to 766).
2. Start the Installation, here you have the the chance get a check whether there is a drupal version translated into your language. If you’d like another language, you will have download the translated version and upload it to your server. Anyway you might wish to have a multilanguage site, then the english version will be fine you can install different languages via the i18n module.
3. Indicate database name, username and password of the database you created before.
4. Create your Administrator login access data by providing a username, password and emailadress. This very first user will have administrative rights, so you should use a secure password.
5. That’s it!

Now it’s time to tune up your brandnew drupal site a little bit… This will be done by installing modules!

Here’s a list of modules I’d recommend to install up front, no matter what kind of site you are intending to create:

Pathauto

This one creates nice URLs derived from the titles of your content pages. As you know this good for SEO purposes and you do torture your user with cryptic page titles. Requires the token module to be installed and activated in advance!

CKEditor – WYSIWYG HTML editor

A big helper! Especially if you’re building a site, whose content has to created or edites by not so web experienced fellas, I think you know whom I’m talking about. As an addition you should install the ckfinder filemanager, so you are able to offer no-brainer file integration and upload to your site. Before your content editors have the pleasure of the easy working with This fine editor, you have to pain to install and configure it. Now I will not offer a step by step manual, I try to deliver it later on. You will have download the drupal module files and copy the core files of the editor into the “” folder in the drupal module itself. The essential editing software files you can download at ckeditor.com. If there are serious problems just post a comment and I try to help you out!

Backup and Migrate

This should be self explaining, just to put you on the save side. You can schedule backups and store them on your or you can download them. Saved my sorry ass several times ;-)

Google Analytics

You could also paste the google into the template files, but this modules makes this procedure needless.

Internationalisation

If you like the setup your site and backend in several language, this module will do the trick. You will have to lookout for language packs afterwards and you get them here, including an overview far the translations are finished. Addiditonally I’d check out the Language Icons Module, providing you nice litte flags for every installed language pack.

Sitemap

Using the sitemap module you can add an automatically generated sitemap, including all your subpages, categories or menues.

So, that should fine as a starter, soon I’lltry to give an outlook about more sophisticated modules like views or content construction kit and how add and modify themes. Have fun creating sites with drupal!

Nevertheless these troubles are just a sign of the incredible success twitter.com is facing at the moment. Establishing as an important news source, marketing tool or social play ground the service it self has to evolve…

Now they have taken the first step, aplusk beeing the first tweeter to break the 1,000,000 followers barrier, now having 2,530,98, the twitter coders finally smoothed up the user management. You can choose between a list view and a expanded view showing the last Tweet, additionally there is a option menue offering the following activities: mention the twitter user, send a direct message, unfollow and block user.

But it still ain’t a big hit, but think it looks (a little bit) sexier now. There still are no batch operations, which would be an evident feature for the the most people…

There is still a lot to do in the twitland backend – execpt locking up the fail whale securely…

Here’s an attempt to build up a little list of the most important social media sites.

As it is far from being complete, it will be expanded from time to time…

Blogging

• WordPress  |  WordPress Factsheet
• Blogger  |  Blogger Factsheet
• Tumblr  |  Tumblr Factsheet
• LiveJournal  |  LiveJournal Factsheet
• Skyrock  |  Skyrock Factsheet
• Blogcatalog  |  Blogcatalog Factsheet
• MyBlogLog  |  MyBlogLog Factsheet
• Entrecard  |  Entrecard Factsheet
• Ameba  |  ameba Factsheet

Photo Communities

• Flickr  |  Flickr Factsheet
• Fotolog  |  Fotolog Factsheet
• Photobucket  |  Photobucket Factsheet
• Picasa Web Albums  |  Picasa Factsheet
• SmugMug  |  SmugMug Factsheet
• deviantart  |  deviantart Factsheet
• Zooomr  |  Zooomr Factsheet
• JPG Magazine  |  JPG Magazine Factsheet
• vi.sualize.us

Bookmarks

• delicious  |  delicious Factsheet
• StumbleUpon  |  StumbleUpon Factsheet
• faves  |  faves Factsheet
• Diigo  |  Diigo Factsheet
• Furl  |  Furl Factsheet
• Ma.gnolia  |  Ma.gnolia Factsheet
• Mister Wong  |  Mister Wong Factsheet
• cluztr
• Twine  |  Twine Factsheet

News Aggregators

• friendfeed  |  friendfeed Factsheet
• Digg  |  Digg Factsheet
• Google Reader  |  Google Reader Factsheet
• toluu  |  toluu Factsheet
• menéame  |  menéame Factsheet
• Mixx  |  Mixx Factsheet
• Reddit  |  Reddit Factsheet
• Yahoo! Buzz  |  Yahoo! Buzz Factsheet
• NowPublic  |  NowPublic Factsheet

Status

• Twitter  |  Twitter Factsheet
• brightkite  |  brightkite Factsheet
• Facebook  |  Facebook Factsheet
• Gmail/Google Talk  |  Google Talk Factsheet
• identi.ca  |  identi.ca Factsheet
• Plurk  |  Plurk Factsheet

Music

• iLike  |  iLike Factsheet
• Last.fm  |  Last.fm Factsheet
• Pandora  |  Pandora Factsheet

Comments

• Backtype  |  Backtype Factsheet
• Disqus  |  Disqus Factsheet
• Intense Debate  |  Intense Debate Factsheet

Video

• 12seconds  |  12seconds Factsheet
• Dailymotion  |  Dailymotion Factsheet
• Joost  |  Joost Factsheet
• Seesmic  |  Seesmic Factsheet
• Hulu  |  Hulu Factsheet
• Vimeo  |  Vimeo Factsheet
• YouTube  |  YouTube Factsheet

Books

• Goodreads  |  Goodreads Factsheet
• LibraryThing  |  LibraryThing Factsheet
• Shelfari  |  Shelfari Factsheet

Friendship

• myspace  |  myspace Factsheet
• Windows Live  |  Windows Live Factsheet
• Bebo  |  Bebo Factsheet
• hi5  |  hi5 Factsheet
• Orkut  |  Orkut Factsheet
• Goggle Friend Connect  |  Goggle Friend Connect Factsheet

Miscellaneous

• Amazon.com  |  Amazon Factsheet
• Netvibes  |  Netvibes Factsheet
• Netflix  |  Netflix Factsheet
• Polyvore  |  Polyvore Factsheet
• SlideShare  |   Factsheet
• tipjoy  |  tipjoy Factsheet
• Upcoming  |  Upcoming Factsheet
• kongregate  |  kongregate Factsheet
• Wakoopa  |  Wakoopa Factsheet
• Yelp  |  Yelp Factsheet
• Plinky  |  Plinky Factsheet
• care2  |  care2 Factsheet

Career

• LinkedIn  |  LinkedIn Factsheet
• xing  |  xing Factsheet
• meetup  |  meetup Factsheet

Search

• lijit  |  lijit Factsheet

Looking for informations, advices, strategies or hints guiding you on your paths through the social media djungle?
Here you’ll find a composition of free ebooks that might be helpful on your efforts to successfully use social marketing mechanisms for building a brand, attract traffic or gain significance on a certain topic.

So these Links will keep you busy for a while…

Instructions and sum ups

The Art of Listening and Engagement Through Social Media
Brian Solis about new tools and philosophies, how to effectively listen and engage with customers and in turn, cultivate a more significant community, enhance your brand and build relationships.

Social Media and Social Networking Starting Points
Social Media expert Chris Brogan gives you starting points how to inroduce your organization into social media and social networking

What is Social Media?
“a short, sweet summary of the phenomenon called social media”

The Essential Guide to Social Media
A sum up of some essential guidelines, written by Brian Solis

The Art and Science of Social Media and Community Relations
Interesting example of a company entering the realm of social media communities

Social Media Marketing Kit
Tips and tricks for the survival in the social mediasphere, plus a video Webinar

The Zen of Blogging
Really amusing story about a guys efforts to dive into the higher spheres of blogging – with a slight wink of an eye

Learning Web 2.0
Examples of ways in which associations are using new web 2.0 technologies and what possibilities they
may represent for your organization’s professional development

A Primer in Social Media
Advices for approaching social media with their new paradigms and, rules and philosophies

Studies

Blogs & Social Media
This article reports on a three-year-long international survey of public relations
practitioners examining the impact blogs and other social media are having on public
relations practice.

Social Web Analytics
This ebook gives a brief overview of the characteristics of the Social
Web, also known as Social Media.

Research-Based Webdesign & Usabilty Guidelines

Distributed Influence: Quantifying the Impact of Social Media
Attempt to propose a new way of calculating an individuals online influence beyond the “traditional” method of analysing a blog’s inbound links to incorporate other social media tools such as Twitter and Facebook.

Search engine optimization (SEO)

SEO for WordPress blogs
How to use WordPress to ensure success for your weblog in the Organic Search Engine Results.

Google Adwords Secrets
Tips for keyword research, choosing a domain name, placing keywords, link building, effectively using SEO tools

We Have a Website. Now What?
This ebook provides straightforward advice for entrepreneurs new to search engine optimization.

Marketing

Get Viral Get Visitors
Trying to give and understanding of what viral marketing is about and how methods of successful campaigns can be adopted

The New Rules of Viral Marketing
Whatever you call it—viral, buzz, word-of-mouse, or word-of-blog marketing—having other people tell your story drives action. An example how it’s done…

Marketing With Case Studies
How to Sell Your Products or Services Using Story-Telling Techniques

Twitter for Business
A compact and dense round up how to use twitter.com to promote your company successfully

Geeks Guide to Promoting Yourself With Twitter
If you use the site properly you can build up another stream of traffic to your website or blog, not to mention developing a brand for yourself as well.

New_Rules_Of_Business_Blogs
How business owners and managers should act in blogosphere if they want to explore this new communication channel.

Masters of Marketing
Cleaning up some hypes and myths of internet marketing and giveing ideas for using social media mechanisms

Podcast Marketing eBook
This guide is intended only to give you a broad overview of some of the basics of podcast marketing.

Effective Internet Presence
How to build up a significant and productive internet identity

How to Write a Marketing Plan
A marketing plan guides a company step-by-step how to market its product or service to a specific target market and it helps a company remain focused on its marketing objectives.

I searched for free to use web 2.0 icons of social media sites, but I did not find anything nice except some stock icons.

So I’ve made my own ones and I like to share them with you!

Feel free to use, modify and integrate them on your blog or website.
There is no need to link back, if you’d like to do so anyway, it is appreciated.

UPDATE:

I made a new icon set, you can download it here.

Here’s the download for all icons and logos and the .psd containing templates for 256×256 pixel buttons:

social-media-icons

Free Social Media Icons (PSD)

Have fun folks!

• Create a Mac style CSS Dock Menu
  

  Really nice tutorial for creating a cool and fancy navigation using CSS and a Jquery Javascript library. Comes as complete Download, including a icon set.

• How to: CSS large Background
  

  Here you’ll find instructions how to integrate a large image as webpage background properly.

• Blurry Background Effect
  

  A very nice and eye teasing visual effect, unfortunately not working for Internet Explorer 6.

• 12 Useful Web Tools for Designers
  

  Several neat tools making a webdesigners daily work less miserable, a color schemer, tools for creating templates, favicons, background patterns or fonts.

• Creating scalable Layouts
  

  As the design of a site is confronted with a huge range of completly different screen resolutions, it should be pretty flexible. Should. Here’s ecplain how to achieve that.

• Massive collection of CSS hints
  

  Ok, this might be quite an old post, but it’s still very useful and just through it’s coverage and useful tricks, all the techniques are great helpers.

Afraid of evil extra terrestrian parasites? Time to get equipped with the same awesome alien species extinction device like Ripley (Sigurney Weaver) in Aliens:
The M41-A

With is fully functional hero models that fired 45 cal. blanks, and blank 12 guage shot gun rounds, to the ultra-slick O.D. green shrounds, this prop is the rare weapon that seemed it could actually do what it appeared to do in the movie! Shoot! This ain’t no ray gun, baby!

Here you’ll find a really neat how-to, so you soon might call yourself a proud owner of this instant classic!

Made from three real world weapons, the M41-A even has a cool sounding name. The World War II vintage M1A1 Thompson makes up the bulk of the weapon, and the Remington 870 shotgun is the guts for the “grenade launcher”. Carefully hidden inside a SPAS-12 heat shield cage and pump handle. The filming hero prop was made with a metal shroud, and is truly a work of art.

In case you are a wanna-be Imperial Stormtrooper, this make-your-own-blaster-how-to definitely will make you happy.

Via TechEBlog.com

View a plain demo here.

So here we go:

First of all design two (or three, if the focus state should be used, too) buttons, then cut the left part of the two states and paste them into a single graphic above each other. Add a little space so the text won’t stick too close on the edge, which should, depend on the design somewhat like this:

Then repeat these steps for the right end of the button:

That’s it for the graphical issue, the HTML is just a div container and an unordered list in the inside:


<div class="mouseover">
<ul>
<li><a href="#"><span>Item 01</span></a></li>
<li><a href="#"><span>Item 02</span></a></li>
<li><a href="#"><span>long Item name 03</span></a></li>
</ul>
</div>


The only things to pay attention is the class assigned to this div tag as it hands down all the attributes to its tags within and that the linktexts are embedded in span tags.

Now as all the action is done via CSS, we have to get into details:


.mouseover ul {list-style: none;}
.mouseover ul li {
display: inline;
font-size: 14px;
line-height: 14px;
font-weight: bold;
}

For the unordered list the list-style value “none” is mandatory as any other value like “square” or “circle” etc. would avoid a proper alignment of the navigation elements.
The list elements must be displayed “inline” otherwise they show up vertically ordered. If you wish them to do so, just drop “display: inline;”.
Besides that the apperance of the textlinks of the buttons can be edited here individually by additonal CSS attributes.

.mouseover ul li a {
padding: 0 0 0 9px;
background: url(button-left.gif) no-repeat;
float: left;
}

The padding values have to be set individually, as they depend on the measurements of the left graphic.
The “float: left” attribute is mandatory to assure both graphics are displayed besides each other.


.mouseover ul li a span {
padding: 9px 9px 9px 0;
background: url(button-right.gif) no-repeat right top;
display: block;
float: right;
color: #666;
}


As before please adjust the padding values as they fit the button layout.
The background attribute contains values as the image path and “right” and “top”. The last two are important as the grant that the alignment of the background is not influenced by the padding values. Setting the background alignment value “right” is the reason why the button lenght fits for a different number of characters of the textlink.
(If a textlink is to long, though and gap appears, simply expand the lenght of the background on the left side.)


.mouseover ul li a:hover {
background-position: 0 -36px;
}

The attribute “background-position” for the element “a:hover” is defined by the two values “0″, which aligns the graphic to position 0 of the x-axis and to -36 pixels on y-axis. The y-axis value derives from the half of the overall height of the background graphic and has to be adjusted, if the height of the graphic is not equal to 72 pixels.


.mouseover ul li a:hover span {
background-position: 100% -36px;
color:#fff;
}

The value of the y-axis of the attribute “background-position” must be set to “100%” so the graphis is aligned to the right.
Additional font settings of the mouse over state might be defined here, too.

…and that’s it!
Happy coding!

• Steampunked version of Noah’s Ark
• Flickr set “Alternative Histories” containing lovely, but armed steampunk ladies
• Lego steampunk yacht Radiant Kestrel and flyer Cantankerous Prospector
• Cool 3D steampunked Star Wars characters
• Rebel Attack! Star Wars diorama on flickr

Enjoy!

Hope you like it.

[Update]

Unfortuanately this great collection of Star Wars Pics is no longer available, cause Lucasfilm accused Mr. Heilemann of copyright infringement and had flickr.com delete the albums. Read the whole story here
This is a very sad and according to me not very clever move, though eexecuted technically correct, due there really was a infringement. But is this behaviour reasonable? The collection was loved by the fans, there was no commercial use and it was easier to watch as the legal source of SW pictures (No, I do not want to link, even mention it).
So does it make sense to anger the fans and delete their fanworks just cause you can do it and got the right to?

Shame on Lucasfilm!

Sheer awesomeness! A set of 304 Star Wars photos from the film set of the actors, George Lucas and the space ship models, of course! Featureing taking a nap, script drawings, Darth Vader on Hoth and laser sword fights!

Pure SW eye candy!

I cannot spot the “We brake for nobody” sticker on this Imperial star destroyer? Wait, maybe I’m confusing something here…

Thanks jason kottke, that made my day!

The Force may be with you!