• A multi-column layout. You’ll see one, two, or three columns of content depending on your screen size and orientation.
• Awesome-sized media. Photos and videos can fill the entire width of the stream, making it easier to scan, and nicer to look at.
• Delightful animations. The sharebox bounces, the menus slide, and the cards flip and fade — just to name a few.

When you go in for the first time you will see some screen prompts that tell you about the new look.

Hangouts and chat options are now on the top right corner. Click on the green parenthesis and you will see this new drop down menu.

Photos: your darkroom is now a Google data center

Great pictures aren’t taken, they’re made. And it’s the making part that many of us don’t have time for. We’d all love to have photos that capture our vacations and birthdays and anniversaries the way we remember them. But wonderful images require lots (and lots) of work.

We think everyone should be able to make beautiful photos, so today we’re launching a set of initiatives aimed at improving your photos automatically — basically your camera, plus Google’s cloud. Here’s a few things you’ll enjoy once your pictures are powered by Google:

• Auto Backup (aka Instant Upload). Too many pictures stay stranded on the phone, so with your permission, we’ll automatically back up your mobile pics as you snap them. Everyone receives unlimited free storage at standard size (2048px), and 15GB of free storage at full size (up from 5GB).

• Auto Highlight. Sifting through vacation photos to assemble the perfect album can take hours. Auto Highlight helps you find your favorites faster by de-emphasizing duplicates, blurry images and poor exposures, and focusing instead on pictures with the people you care about, landmarks, and other positive attributes. Simply visit the Photos page, and you’ll see your Highlights ready to share.

• Auto Enhance. Taking a good photo and making it great is a task generally reserved for professional photographers. That’s why, for example, we continue to support and improve tools like the Nik Collection. For everyone else we’re introducing Auto Enhance: a new way to improve brightness, contrast, saturation, structure, noise, focus… and dozens of other factors automatically. Simply upload some photos, then open the lightbox to see Google’s enhancements. And that’s it. (And of course: you can undo the changes at any time.) Here’s some sample images to get you started.

• Auto Awesome. Sometimes we’ll create a brand new image based on a set of photos in your library. For example: if you upload a sequence of photos, we’ll try and animate them automatically. Or if you send us a few family portraits, we’ll find everyone’s best smile, and stitch them together into a single shot. Likewise with panoramas, filmstrips, and a whole lot more. We call these kinds of enhancements Auto Awesome.

The new header menu is very easy to use with tabs along the top.

Communities look a lot different but I love that the guidelines for the community are on the right and easy to use.

This is what it looks like when you’re going to share a new post. Google+ is now going to add related hashtags:

• We’ll look at the post, determine what it’s about, and tag it accordingly.
• Behind the scenes, we’ll also identify and rank relevant conversations across the network.
• When you click on the related hashtag, we’ll flip the card, and let you browse related content inline.

When you click on the sharebox, you get a very cool pop up like this:

What’s hot got a nice update with a little red flame icon and more prominent display.

What do you think of the new Google+ update? I love it and can’t wait to really test all the new features.

Photo credit niallkennedy

Writers have much to think about when building their online presence and Pinterest can be a smart part of it. Pinterest has consistently been in the top four traffic referrers for blogs based on research done by Shareaholic. One benefit of using Pinterest is that you don’t have to create new content for Pinterest, you can add your blog content, add from other web sources or repin existing content on your boards.

When you’re working on the entrepreneur part (when you need to start marketing and selling) of your book or trying to get the word out about your blog, Pinterest is a great way to connect with readers. Pinterest takes less time than the other high traffic referrers, Facebook, Twitter and Google+, but can bring awareness and traffic to your writing. Your Pinterest boards can show more of your personality and that’s exactly what people want: a connection with you.

 Some Pinterest basics:

1. Build a foundation for your platform by creating a good profile with your avatar.

2. Create your Pinterest account in your name and add boards for your book and/or website.

3. Let Pinterest showcase the special things about you. Your readers will love to learn about the person behind the writing.

4. Write original descriptions when you re-pin things to your board to put your own stamp of creativity. This is the description for a pin by photographer and Pinterest superstar Trey Ratcliff for this pin. Trey has an impressive Pinterest following of almost five million Pinners.

Trey adds the following to every pin:

• Description with location of photo
• His name with and without a hashtag
• A link to his website Stuck in Customs
• The photo also links back to his website

5. Create at least ten unique boards with your own original names and themes.

If you’re looking for some additional Pinterest resources, I’ve created a Pinterest board called All Things Pinterest to help you out and check out the following:

Kelly’s Pinboards — follow Kelly for great Pinterest tips and #PinChat each week on Wednesday at 9 pm EST.

My Pinterest  & an article on Pinterest Tips

The APE Pinterest Board

A link to the Storify summary that Kelly created from the #PinChat interview.

How do you like to use Pinterest with your writing?

This story originally published on the APE: How to Publish a Book blog.

Photo courtesy of mkhmarketing via Creative Commons.

Article by Peg Fitzpatrick

Five traits of a kick ass Plusser

1. Posts consistently on Google+: reliable

• Sharing on Google+ with Do Share
• Don’t be a spammer! What is link litter? And how to avoid it.
• Social media post length? Use the proper size for the win!

2. Comments on other’s posts: engaging

• How to have remarkable social media conversations
• Comments, why do we post them?
• 6 things you don’t know about Google+

3. Shares others posts: generous

• Wanna Rock Your Social Media? Some Tips on Engaging for Newbies

4. Hangouts out with their Plusser peeps: social

• Tap into the power of people
• How to build an awesome network on Google+
• Miss Linda Dee is always hanging out, I call her the Hangout Queen. Follow her and see how it’s done.

5. Rocks a few communities: super social

• Show a little love to Google+ Communities

You’re on Google+, now what? Is a great resource as well. The good news is that you can do all this yourself! So, is you a kick ass Plusser or ain’t ya?

Photo courtesy of by The Hamster Factor via Creative Commons.

Article by Peg Fitzpatrick

Her bio:  Hi.  I am Holly.  I have a blog.  Of the mom variety.  Yep, I am a mom blogger.  I write June Cleaver Nirvana and Kids Activities Blog.  My hometown is Dallas which is why I started She is Dallas and DFW Bloggers.  If you are headed to a casino, please stop by and pick me up.  I like to play poker. Oh, and if you think I am just making up the beaver trapping thing, then read how fierce I really am.

Where you can find Holly:

Google+

Twitter

For those of you who aren’t on Google+, this was a Google+ hangout on air (HOA) that was live for people to watch and now on YouTube. It’s a great way to meet people, learn new things and share it later. We talked a lot about Google+ so I’m sharing some resources that will help you get a jump start if needed. Lots of people loved the discussion and had questions afterwards so please let me know if you have any. I’d love to hear from you.

A few articles that I’ve written that might be helpful:

Basic Tips for the New Google+ User

Five Easy Steps to Make the Perfect Google+ Post – I share how I create a post on Google+

Content Curation Tips for Stellar Social Media

Links to things we talked about:

How to set your set up Google Author Rank by super smart Mark Traphagen

APE Writer’s community

Mobile Devices community

Do Share for Google+

Evernote

Writer.ly {Disclosure I advise Writer.ly}

Buffer 

What the Plus!

APE: Author, Publisher, Entrepreneur — How to Publish a Book

My Pinterest boards

Photo credit jspad via Creative Commons.

Article by Peg Fitzpatrick

Ideas from Fascinate:

• Anyone, and anything, can become more fascinating
• Fascination affects every part of our life
• This is the new competitive advantage

Why do you need to be more fascinating?

• We are barraged with an overload of distractions
• Everyone has Shiny Object Syndrome (SOS)

“Every time you introduce yourself, you have 9 seconds to engage your listener. This is your golden window of opportunity. If you fail to fascinate, your listener will lose interest and you will lose the opportunity.” Sally Hogshead

Nine seconds is about the attention span of a goldfish. Yikes!

Becoming more fascinating using the strengths that you already have boosts your own “it factor” and makes your message more compelling. In other words, being MORE you is a good thing, what could be easier than that? There is a lot of talk about personal brands and this would fall into that realm but it’s what Sally calls “personality branding” which is learning more about yourself to use your strengths and master the ability to fascinate.

Sally’s research created seven main triggers that create a matrix of forty nine archetypes.

Power — lead others

Passion — connect with emotion

Mystique — communicate carefully

Prestige — set the standard

Alarm — protect the details

Trust — build loyalty

Rebellion — get creative

To give you an idea of how Fascinate works, I’ll share my two fascination triggers from my Fascination quiz: passion and rebellion. People with a primary trigger of passion connect with emotion. The traits of passion are: expressive, intuitive, playful, impulsive, and affectionate. People with a primary passion trigger attract others to them and their ideas, combine that with my secondary trigger of rebellion, guaranteed my mom would agree with that one. People with a rebellion trigger change the game with creativity. The traits of rebellion are: innovation, independence, entrepreneurial, unpredictable, and mischievous.

Combine my two triggers of passion and rebellion and I’m a catalyst: outgoing, experimental and out-of-the-box.

Here’s a link to an interactive Trigger Chart that you can look at which will work best for you once you’ve taken the quiz yourself, below is a solid graphic.

I had the pleasure of interviewing Sally online for My Book Club and here’s what she had to say:

Q What sparked the idea for a book on Fascination for you?

I wanted to understand why we become captivated by certain people. Why do certain leaders inspire and motivate, while others are ignored? How do some presenters captivate the room? And then, there’s the most important question of all… What makes YOUR personality fascinating?

The science of fascination begins deep inside the human brain: what fascinates us, and, how we each fascinate others. Fascination isn’t about how you perceive the world— but how the world perceives you. Fascination is an intense emotional focus. It’s instinctive, irrational, and irresistible.

How to fascinate? That is the question… and here is the answer… (dramatic pause here)… here it comes.. You already have everything you need to fascinate. It’s built into you. But, you need to identify and express it. The world does not need another tweet. It needs YOU!

Q You discuss the “Gold Hallmarks of a Fascinating Message” in Fascinate. Can you explain these to #MyBookClub?

“The Gold Hallmarks” is our criteria for determining how fascinating a person or brand is… Gold Hallmark 1: Evokes strong and immediate emotional response. (Love it or hate it)

Fascinating things and people make us instantly feel a strong response. We are gripped immediately.  Ask yourself: “Do I evoke a strong and immediate response?” Your social media, resume, etc. all must fascinate. You will not win by being quiet. You win by being heard.

“You don’t learn to be fascinating, you unlearn how to be boring.” Sally Hogshead

Sally was a recent guest on Marie Forleo’s MarieTV. A double dose of fascination for you. I highly recommend the book Fascinate and hope that you’ll take the time to learn more about yourself and be more YOU!

Photo credits CuteCultureChick  and josullivan.59.

Article by Peg Fitzpatrick