In Barb Dybwad’s post Facebook Cracks Down on Deceptive Ads, she explains these “opt-out” offers. She briefly shares the perspective of a social gaming company, Zynga. The following is an excerpt:

“In a social game like virtual farming sim Farmville, for example, users can either spend real money to buy virtual goods, or complete offers and surveys from partner companies in exchange for virtual credits. The trouble is, some of those offers include ‘opt-out’ riders that enroll the user in some sort of paid service or subscription, and require action on the user’s part to avoid misleading charges.

MySpace CEO Own Van Natta earlier characterized these ‘opt-out’ type of offers as misleading, and announced a change to the Terms of Use to clarify what’s acceptable to both developers and users. Popular social gaming company Zynga also posted a statement stating a commitment to weed out bad and deceptive ads, while stressing that the offers industry is still nascent along with a belief that non-scammy offer ads still hold the promise of value to both user and advertiser.”

Read the full article…

Have you experienced any offers from these scamming ads?

In a Facebook blog post, Nick Gianos explains these types of third party advertisements are an issue across the Web and that they will work to make improvements. They have banned scamming ads in the past and continue to do so now. Facebook explains how they will enforce their policies and discontinue networks that break the rules. They mention their interest in having high quality advertising and the trust of users:

Continued Action Against Deceptive Ads

By Nice Gianos

“As part of an ongoing effort we’ve had underway to address the quality of third-party ads running inside applications, we wanted to offer some clarifications, reminders, and information on our actions.

First, deceptive ads are a widespread issue on the Web and one we fight aggressively. This battle is not new and it’s far from over. We faced stimulus scam ads on our own system earlier this year and pushed them off the site with rigorous enforcement. We did the same months later when deceptive ads from third-party ad networks appeared in applications. We’re doing that again now as we see them appear in the form of offers.

Since introducing updated policies for third-party ads on Facebook Platform in July, we have disabled two entire ad networks and suspended or brought into compliance over 100 applications for ad-related violations in regions around the world, over half of which had more than one million monthly active users.”

Read the rest of the article…

What do you think of this issue?

Extend the time between charges.

This section is a list of things you can do to increase battery life.

Go to Settings> …

Notifications
Unless you have an app where Notifications are needed, turn this off.

Sounds
Turn off as many alert sounds as you can.

Brightness
I keep my brightness at about a third. If I need more light, I adjust as needed. The backlight is a big energy hog, and less than full Brightness is perfectly usable.
Enable Auto-Brightness. It adjusts the light level a little to compensate for changes in ambient light.

General
If you don’t use Bluetooth regularly (daily), turn it off.
Set Auto-Lock to 5 minutes (default). If you’ve set your iPhone to never Auto-Lock, you’re wasting a lot of juice while you’re not using the device.

General> Network
Unless you absolutely need it, turn 3G off. 3G is much faster than Edge for Internet activity, but it drains the battery Q-U-I-C-K! Most people don’t do enough intensive browsing and downloading to warrant the speed boost. If I need it (or want it) for something, I turn it on and off at my discretion.

What applications should I get?

This section is a list of free and paid applications (apps) I (and others) recommend–complete with clickable links that go directly to the app store so you can learn more. There’s a lot of text below. Weed through it and I think you’ll be rewarded with at least one app you’ll love.

First, if you’re at WVU, you should grab iWVU and WVU Mobile Web. iWVU is an actual iDevice app, whereas WVU Mobile Web is a webpage.

To create an icon on your iPhone for WVU Mobile Web that acts like an app, follow these instructions:

1. Use the Safari app to open m.wvu.edu


Go to m.wvu.edu in Safari

2. Click on the plus symbol.


The m.wvu.edu mobile interface.

3. Choose Add to Home Screen.


Add to Home Screen option.

4. I leave the name alone, but you can name the link whatever you want =)


Rename m.wvu.edu if you want.

5. Now the link shows up as an ‘app’ on your iDevice. Click it to open, move it wherever you want–just like a regular app.


Icon is now on you iDevice.

For other useful apps, try these:

• Free
• Paid
• My games

Free

Pandora: If you don’t already listen to pandora.com, and you love music, get to the page and sign up for a free account–now! You enter songs or artists, and Pandora creates stations for you based on the qualities of the entries. It accesses the Music Genome Project, and makes connections between songs you would probably never make on your own. It’s done more for broadening my musical interests than any other thing in my life.

Facebook, MySpace, and TweetDeck: I think these are self-explanatory, and Tweetdeck has a standalone version for Mac, PC, and Linux =)

FiatLux: A free flashlight app with different colors. Hint: red is great for not disturbing sleeping partners in bed.

WhitePages Mobile: Find people and places with relative ease.

Inquisitor and Google: The only two search apps you really need. I find myself using Google less, and Inquisitor more. Google has a neat voice recognition feature.

Wikiamo: A great Wikipedia-specific search tool. I use this less since I started using Inquisitor.

AroundMe: Find everything from Bars to Zoos, based on your current location (GPS enabled).

Evernote and Dropbox: evernote.com is offsite memory storage for your mind. See something worth remembering? Evernote it! dropbox.com is offsite file storage, accessible on your computer or iDevice wherever you have an Internet connection.

iCraig: Craigslist app.

Dictionary: Everyone needs to look up a word now and again.

Mint: mint.com is a finance tracking site. You might find it useful to keep tabs on your bills and bank accounts.

Now Playing: The best app for finding movies and schedules.

eBay Mobile: eBay search and management app.

BigOven: Recipes!

Google Earth: Great fun with maps. Fancier and slower than the built-in Maps app.

PhoneFlicks: Manage your Netflix account and queue.

Kindle: amazon.com’s book reader, in iPhone form. FREE!

Skype: Chat/VoIP app.

WootOn!: A woot.com watcher. One day, one deal… except when there’s a wootoff! That’s where they put an item up til it sells, then another, and another, until their stock is manageable again.

WebMD: Good tool for basic medical info.

Urbanspoon: Get restaurant reviews and let the app choose a restaurant for you.

Shazam: Hear a song? Don’t know what it is? Let Shazam find out what it is for you. It’s like magic- really.

Paid

Recorder Pro: Feature-rich recording app. I like it better than the built in memo recorder.

Photogene: Think of it as more Photoshop for the iPhone than Photoshop for the iPhone is. Follow that? It’s my go-to app for adjusting images. Worth every penny.

Camera Genius: Great app with built in anti-shake, digital zoom (digital zooms look like crap, but I take what I can get), timers, and other features in a nice replacement for the built-in camera app.

TiltShift Generator: Apply the in vogue Tilt Shift blur to your images. Fun.

ColorSplash: Bleed color from your images to make striking, if not slightly cliched, images.

AutoStitch: Arranges photos in to panoramas. Very cool.

QuickOffice Mobile: Office lite clone on the go.

WeatherBug Elite: My choice over the paid version of The Weather Channel and the built-in weather app.

Convertbot: A diverse measurement conversion app. Not the best interface in the world, but I like it.

RemoteKu: Turns the iDevice in to another remote for your Roku (a Netflix streaming box).

RedLaser: Wonder if the deal you found at Target or Sam’s is the best around? Use this app to scan the barcode and see if there are better deals online.

1Password: Companion app to the standalone Mac program. Helps keep my passwords/logins together and safe.

MotionX GPS Drive: Awesome, low-cost, GPS app for driving.

QuickRoll and MachDice: For my fellow rpg’ers. Customizable dice rolling apps.

BrainHack and AmbiSci BP: Brainwave apps. Tone generators for inducing different modes of consciousness. I like the tones for relaxation and concentration =)

iStumble, ICHC, FML, Flickr, Cooliris: These are fun apps. Time wasters, if you like… well… Flickr is actually a productive app if you have an account and store your images there. There are pay and free versions of most of these.

Air Mouse Pro: Turn your iPod/iPhone in to a multi-touch remote trackpad/keyboard to control your computer.

VLC Remote: App to specifically control VLC on a Mac/PC remotely. VLC is, for those who don’t know, one of the best video file playback apps available–and it’s free.

My games

I’m not listing all the games I recommend. I’ll just throw up screenshots of my game pages, and you can decide if anything strikes your fancy.

iphone games graphic

Since Sarah was unable to physically attend, she Skyped in from home. The presentation began with Sarah explaining why OIT needed a content management system and why she chose WordPressMu, such as the easy customizable web interface and its extensibility through plug ins (extensions of WordPress code). At the end, I demonstrated the areas we customized for our content managers to fit their needs such as widgets (portable code), and the media library where content managers can upload and store files such as images, flash, pdfs, and html. There seemed to be a number of people interested in using this particular system. View our presentation notes…

Although the conference was three or four days, depending on whether you attended workshop, I found it to be enough time to meet people and have informative discussions about the web. Throughout the conference, attendees actively networked with many groups and individuals. It’s a great opportunity to discuss project ideas and receive some feedback among those in your field.

Keynotes

Keynote speakers last year were the highly accomplished Jeffrey Veen and Kyle Ford. Jeffrey is the founding partner of Adaptive Path and project lead for Measure Map. Kyle Ford is the director of product marketing at Ning, Inc. and before that, he was associate product manager for Yahoo! Inc.  This year’s keynote presentation Cooking Up Gourmet User Experiences on a Fast-Food Budget was by Jared Spool, a top rated speaker and founder of User Interface Engineering. He discussed inexpensive techniques on website usability that will save time. Jared also presented a workshop Designing for Content-Rich Sites working with us on how, as the title states, to improve usability for websites with an abundent amount of content. He gave many examples of poor and successful navigation based on actual data, not arguable opinion.
[The other keynote, a social media speaker, unfortuately received poor reviews and harsh Twitter comments.]

Sessions and Presenters

There was an opportunity to attend the best presentations based on everyone’s evaluation forms.  These included Kevin Prentiss’s session on student created content using web 2.0 tools, Susan Ragland’s session on website usability, ”Maybe the Purpose of Our Redesign is Only to Serve as a Warning to Others” session by Anthony Dunn, Lori Packer’s session on strategies to demonstrate the importance of social media to your boss, and Paul Gilzow’s session titled “Cross-site Scripting: What Is It, and How Can You Protect Your Site from Becoming a Victim?”

Some other great sessions I attended were “Show Me the Data: Usability-driven Web Design” presented by Jason Alley and Kenneth Newquist from Lafayette College. They shared techniques on how to improve a website’s usability by learning how visitors actually communicate with the site. They described the usability testing in which they used ScreenFlow to gather enough information for making changes. Kyle Bowen’s presentation “Pop Culture Communication: Microsites, Major Impact” was highly entertaining talking about how microsites can help your department gain more visitors and more media coverage. I also enjoyed Joel Herron’s talking about his interactive map platform for the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater.

Check out the entire list of sessions.

HighEdWeb 2010…

I would definitely consider going another year. Not only did I bring back great content, I had a lot of fun. In fact, I’m still keeping in contact with these folks through Twitter. Anyone else with a good conference experience? Other conference suggestions?

Time to Be Afraid of the Web?

By Eduardo Porter

Internet users used to comfort themselves by thinking that to become victims of the pirates of the Web, they had to frequent the online porn circuit or respond to an e-mail from the widowed wife of the former central bank governor of Nigeria. The idea was that one had to do something naughty to get caught in the wrongdoers’ net, or at least go for a late-night stroll in the rough end of town.

But the conceit has become untenable. Two years ago, engineers at Google reported that about 10 percent of millions of Web pages they analyzed engaged in “drive-by downloads” of malware. Google today has about 330,000 Web sites listed as malicious, up from about 150,000 a year ago.

Continue reading…

What do you think? Are you concerned that your personal information can be swiped without your permission?

Read OIT Information Security Tips and Tools for more information about protecting yourself from cybercrime. Keep yourself updated on virus, spyware and adware alerts from Sophos and other sources reported by our Malware Alerts.

Subscribe to WVU OIT Malware Alerts

In a nutshell, we are going to use a freeware scripting language called AutoIt to run the gMigrate program for us, and then we are going to use the Windows Scheduled Tasks utility to automatically run the script.

AutoIt

AutoIt is a freeware scripting language, which can be used to automate the Windows graphical user interface. It will work on Windows 2000, XP, 2003, Vista, and Windows Server 2008. One of AutoIt’s cool features is a Windows Info monitor, which you use to determine the ID numbers of command buttons. Once you know those IDs you can write an AutoIt script that will execute a program and interact with it by clicking specific command buttons. In addition, you can also complile the script into an executable file.

The download page for AutoIt is here: http://www.autoitscript.com/autoit3/downloads.shtml.

Assuming that you have already configured your gMigrate with your GroupWise and GMail account information, here is a simple script that will run gMigrate and click the appropriate command buttons:

; gMigrate Automation by Roman Olynyk, 8/4/2009
Run ( “C:\Program Files\gMigrate\CompanionLink.exe”)
WinWaitActive(”gMigrate”, “”, 10)
ControlClick (”gMigrate”, “”, “[ID: 1881]“)
WinWaitActive ( “gMigrate”, “Completed Synchronization”, 20)
ControlClick (”gMigrate”, “”, “[ID: 2]“)
ControlClick (”gMigrate”, “”, “[ID: 1]“)

I saved my script with the name “automigrate.AU3.” Here’s what this script does:

1. Comments begin with semi-colons
2. The Run command needs the exact path. In this script I am using the default installation path for gMigrate. If your path is different, change it here.
3. The WinWaitActive command will wait for up to 10 seconds for the dialog box titled “gMigrate” to appear.
4. Once the dialog box appears, simulate a mouse click to the ” Migrate” command button (ID 1881).
5. After clicking, wait for up to 20 seconds for the message “Completed Synchronization” to appear.
6. When “Completed Synchronization” dialog appears, click the OK button (ID 2).
7. Finally, clicking the OK button (ID 1) on the gMigrate dialog causes that program to close.

That’s it. This is a bare-bones script. A more careful programmer can add proper error handling routines to allow for instances where the gMigrate program might fail. Also, this script will run as a foreground task, as I have not added any commands to hide its operation from the user.

You can test out the script by right-clicking over the AU3 file and selecting “Run Script” from the top of the menu. Once you are satisfied with the operation, you can go to the Tools menu of the SciTE4AutoIt3 program editor and run the complile command, which will convert your script into an executable file.

In a separate posting, we’ll talk about how you can configure Scheduled Tasks in Windows to periodically run your migration script.

1. In the Windows XP Control Panel, select the Scheduled Tasks command.
2. With Scheduled Tasks open, double-click on the “Add Scheduled Task” icon, which should be at the top of the list of tasks.
   
3. A Scheduled Task Wizard will appear; click Next> to continue.
4. The Scheduled Task Wizard will display a list of programs from which you can select. Your automigrate program will not be in this list, so you must use the Browse command button to locate and select it.
5. Once you have selected the program, the wizard will ask you to type in a name for the task, followed by a group of radio buttons for when you would like this task performed. I chose “Daily.”
   
6. After clicking Next> again, the Scheduled Task Wizard asks you to select the time and day when you would like the task to start. I’m configuring my task to run while I’m usually at work, so I chose a time in the morning after I’ve had a chance to settle in and possibly work with my calendar — say 9:30 a.m. Also, since I don’t normally work weekends, I can opt to run this task only on Weekdays.
   
7. The next dialog asks you to provide your username and password for you computer. When you have typed in that information, click the Next> button.
8. The wizard will display a dialog box, which confirms when Windows will run this task. Notice that there’s a checkbox where you can “Open advanced properties for this task when I click Finish.” Select this checkbox, because it will allow you to set how often you want this task to run. As an added precaution, note that you can choose to stop the task if it is still running at the time you’ve selected.
   
9. The Advanced Schedule Options let you set how many times a day you want the program to run.
   
10. Once you click the Apply button, your scheduled task will run under the conditions that you have set for it.

Millennials find sharing and connecting through social networking services a big communication priority. Students trust other students immensely because there are obvious parallels. Social media can potentially be an important tool for a campus community. Although WVU currently uses popular social media, I wanted to share with you an article that follows along these lines. It states how prospective students actively research for potential colleges through social media sites rather than the limited printed information found in review books. Future students desire this information from enrolled and experienced students. In addition to tuition cost and college enrollment, potential students can read to find blogs, news, and tips. They can find ratings and reviews on professors, best and worst parts about the college or campus, campus crime, diversity, food, parking, etc. This is the information that’s missing; the information that gains their trust. Colleges should be aware of this confirming the information posted as true. A particular site mentioned, Communiversity, is a wiki that encourages participation to add or edit the information.

WVU students participate in most of the sites mentioned in the following article:

10 Ways to Use Social Media to Pick a College

by Josh Catone

When I started looking at colleges back at the turn of the century (the middle ages in web time), really the only resources available to me were traditional college guidebooks like The Princeton Review. While those books offered some great general information, they really only scratched the surface of what each college was actually like for students. Even if I sent away to the school for more info, it was still vetted and edited by the school’s communications department.  Read the rest of the article and don’t forget the comments…

So how can the university participate using social media? An example would be Zinch’s strategy.  Zinch is a social media website mentioned in the comments of this article. Zinch reduces the stress of the admission process for the student and for the college. Zinch believes that students are “more than a test score.” Many colleges are changing their recruiting methods looking outside the box of test scores. For the benefit of the college, Zinch is a tool used to recruit students based on who they are, including their passions and background. So it’s a great opportunity to “showcase your college.” What better way to showcase than encouraging interaction among students?

What do you think? We would like to hear from you, opinionated readers.

References: http://trustedadvisor.com/trustmatters/521/Building-Trust-with-Millennials

First of all, the conference is a steal at only $65.00/per person.  Most conferences in this field will cost you upwards of $600.00 + travel expenses. Both times we stayed at a local Holiday Inn Express and it was quite nice and very reasonably priced.  There are also some really great places to eat in Athens…but this isn’t a travel blog, so I’ll spare you the details.

Anyway – the conference was as good as the Web Design World conferences I attended years ago in Seattle and Denver.

The conference is also only one day.  This is actually kind of nice because it means less time out of the office, but just enough time at the conference to get a lot of great information.  I did feel at the end of the day that there was enough momentum to do a second day, however.

They get excellent speakers.  Last year Eric Meyer, renowned author, speaker, and expert on all things CSS, was the keynote.  This year we had the pleasure of hearing from Greg Rewis and Stephanie Sullivan.  Rewis is currently an “Adobe Evangilist” and way back when was part of the team that developed GoLive (before Adobe bought it) and later Dreamweaver. Stephanie Sullivan owns W3Conversions and is part of the Adobe Task Force with the Web Standards Project.  They recently co-authored Mastering CSS with Dreamweaver CS4.

In addition to giving the keynote, both gave additional presentations during the conference.  We attended both of Stephanie Sullivan’s: Content: Everywhere, Everyone, Everything and CSS Tips & Tricks for Design Challenges. I thought both sessions were really informative.  She went over things that I kind of knew already, but it was great to have the affirmation and to see how she deals with web design challenges.

Other great sessions I attended were Eric Meyer’s session on Javascript, Richard Worth’s session on JQuery (a really nice intro for someone who has not yet used it), Chad Udell’s session titled “Developers are from Mars, Designers are from Venus” (loved this one).

If you or anyone on your team works with the web, I cannot stress enough, the importance of attending at least conference a year related to web development.  Spring <br /> is a good option if you are in the OH, WV, KY, PA region an only swing attending one conference a year.  This industry (web design and development) moves quickly and if you don’t keep up, your web work will soon look and feel dated – believe me I know.

If you haven’t attended or planned to attend anything yet this year, consider attending one (or more) of these conferences:

Higher Ed-related:

• Sept. 21-22 – EdUi – Charlottesville, VA
• Sept 28-29 – WV Higher Education Technology Conference – Morgantown, WV
• Oct. 4-7 – HighEdWeb – Milwaukee, WI

Web Design & Development:

• An Event Apart (various  dates and locations)
• Web Design World (incidentally Greg Rewis and Stephanie Sullivan are both speaking at WDW this year).

Other Conference Suggestions?

These are just a few of my favorites, if you have suggestions for other great conferences to attend, post to the comments!

Digital Textbooks Call for New Business Models

by David Wiley
July 8, 2009

In the 1997 film adaptation of Carl Sagan’s Contact, S.R. Hadden teaches Ellie Arroway “the first rule of government spending: Why have one when you can have two for twice the price?”

When it comes to curriculum materials like textbooks, practice exercises, instructional videos, and online simulations, our universities ask students to pay for them again and again, year after year.

This made sense in the days before the advent of the Internet, when students had to compete for access to educational materials. In those days, if John was using the graphing calculator, Jen had to wait her turn; if Mary was using the physics textbook, Mark had to wait his turn. Students needed to purchase calculators and textbooks of their very own if they each wanted to have ready access to these resources.

Read the rest of the story on the Chronicle’s Wired Campus blog

The OIT Web Communications team (e.g. Alisha and I) have been working on coverting the entire OIT website from its current static html form to one powered by a content management system – WordPress Multiuser (WPMU).  We’ve taken our time with this project carefully evaluating every requirement for each OIT Unit and have come to appreciate the overall flexibility, ease of use, and stability of this platform.

To implement this transition, we will need to have some website downtime so we can shift the domain name (oit.wvu.edu) to the WordPress driven version of the site and make sure the switch has not broken any links to files, etc.  To minimize the impact of the site being down, we’re planning on implementing the change on Sunday, June 28.

One thing that will need to be taken into account (as with any switch in platform such as this) is that it will invariably break links that people may have had bookmarked, referenced in emails, documentation, on websites, etc.  We will redirect broken links to an updated sitemap, however.

Overall the website will have the same design and content, but there have been some changes/improvements to the look & feel in places to “freshen” the appearance a little.  We are planning to start working on a redesign for next year, though.

During this last week while we’re tying up loose ends and tweaking, I would love to get some feedback and…  well… help.  Alisha and I have been looking at this for months and as you know when you are working on something for a long time, you can easily overlook things.  We’d really appreciate it if you could look the site over while it’s still “in the wings” and let us know about anything that we’ve overlooked or that you simply don’t like. Kudos are ok, too, but I want to know anything and everything you spot that is off, so we can tackle it.  (Suggestions on new content are welcome too.)

So if you have a few minutes, please visit http://wpmu.oit.wvu.edu and look around.

Also, I’ll be glad to answer any questions you might have about the website, WordPress, WPMU or whatever.  Just post to the comments.  Thanks!