Video Content Licensing Fail?

As a content and intellectual property creator I have a keen interest in all things content licensing. Of course I am also a voracious content consumer, so I feel I have a good handle on both sides of the equation, while obviously having no better solutions than anyone else at this point.

In most cases I shake my head with dismay at the crazy people of Hollywood, but on some occasions I can see people getting this stuff right and it makes me glad.

Catching up on my feeds, I had both experiences on the same day.

First of all comes the good news. I read that MTV has released a new service that aims to show every music video. They are in effect putting the Music Videos back on top, like when they launched as a TV channel, after years of reality tv and other non-music nonsense.

This service can be found at MTVMusic.com and it certainly looks slick.

Now the first of the bad news. I can’t view it.

MTV Fail

This is a real shame, and I can’t really think of a good reason why they would want to restrict who views the music, especially in this day of instant iTunes downloads. It seems a prime opportunity to ditch the region release idiocy and have an immediate worldwide market. Yes, new music needs to be rolled out and promoted, but old already released music?

My daughter and her friends love going to YouTube to check out music videos, but they have to be supervised for obvious reasons! While they would still need to be supervised going to MTV, I am sure there would be fewer opportunities to click into video nasties, once my part of the world is allowed to view it.

So onto the other bad news, those crazy hollywood folks are at it again, this time it’s Redbox accusing Universal of trying to grab a big share of their DVD rental kiosk business via what seems like a procedure that the Corleone family might have balked at.

It would prohibit Redbox from selling used DVDs, require Redbox to wait until 45 days after a DVD is released before offering it for rental, limit the number of movies that can be distributed through the kiosks, and would force Redbox to give Universal 40 percent of its total gross revenues.

Consumer-friendly, eh?

Now obviously this is going through the courts and we only have one side of the story, but on the face of it this does not seem the behavior of companies with the end customers best interests in mind. More the “sue grannies and small children for downloading nursery rimes” kind of Hollywood that we are growing to know and loathe.

So how could all this be made good?

Perhaps a leaf out of MTV’s book, but with better distribution. People obviously like and use these kiosks. Killing the distribution model is not a solution, you just get bitter customers who turn to illegal downloads. Give people what they want, how and when they want it, at a fair price, otherwise they will route around you. First to YouTube, then to the P2P download networks.

Or am I wrong? What do you think? Please share in the comments …

Excel Design and Usability Tips

In the last part of this Excel Design series I offered some basic tips so you could avoid the most common Excel spreadsheet design horrors.

Spreadsheet design is not just about aesthetics, usability is an important aspect to take into account as well. If you are creating spreadsheets for other people to use then you absolutely need to make your spreadsheets easy to use. For a start, you don’t want filling out your sheets to be more of a chore than they need to be, but also to prevent data entry errors.

For this article I turned to an Excel expert, Debra Dalgleish, who is an independent computer consultant who specializes in Microsoft Office programming and development. As well as being awarded the Microsoft Office Excel MVP award each year since 2001, Debra is the author of three brilliant Excel books.

  1. ValidationMany data entry errors can be avoided by reducing the amount of actual typing, or decision making on the part of the of the person doing the inputting. Debra recommends “Create data validation drop down lists so users can select a valid item instead of typing.”
  2. “Use colour only as a guide for users. For example, type data in light blue cells and select from a list in light green cells.”
  3. Consider also the readability of your spreadsheet when printed. “In the Page Setup dialog box, on the Sheet tab, add a check mark to ‘Black and white’. If a user prints the sheet, it will be easier to read, and will use less toner”.
  4. Another printing tip that I snatched from Debra’s site is to selectively turn off cells when printing.
  5. I asked Debra about her use of images in spreadsheets. Many people seem divided on if they add or detract from a layout. “I will sometimes add a client’s logo on a report that will be printed, or on their data entry page but I will rarely use any other pictures.”
  6. You can shade alternating rows to make dense tables figures more readable using conditional formatting.
    1. Click the Select All button, above the Row 1 button, to select all the cells on the worksheet.
    2. Choose Format|Conditional Formatting
    3. From the first dropdown, choose Formula Is
    4. For the formula, enter    =MOD(ROW(),2)
    5. Click the Format button.
    6. On the Patterns tab, select a colour for shading
    7. Click OK, click OK
  7. Debra recommends you use lines and borders sparingly, and to choose appropriate line colours. “In a data entry form I’d use lines as borders around data entry cells, in addition to colour in the cells. If the data entry form is long, lines would separate the sections. In a report I’d use lines to separate the totals from the report body. For separating data in a long list, white space is preferable, but if lines are necessary I’d use grey, instead of black.”
  8. Excel Comment ImagesHere’s a nice trick Debra uses for adding a picture to a comment which keeps the sheet from looking cluttered
    1. Right-click the cell which contains the comment.
    2. Choose Show/Hide Comments, and clear any text from the comment.
    3. Click on the border of the comment, to select it.
    4. Choose Format|Comment
    5. On the Colors and Lines tab, click the drop-down arrow for Color.
    6. Click Fill Effects
    7. On the picture tab, click Select Picture
    8. Locate and select the picture
    9. To keep the picture in proportion, add a check mark to Lock Picture Aspect Ratio
    10. Click Insert, click OK, click OK

I certainly learned a lot from Debra and I hope you did too! Be sure to check out Debra’s blog for more Office tips.

If you have any tips of your own, please share in the comments …

WordPress SEO Tips

I just got back from an excellent conference in London, the A4UExpo.

One of the best sessions was about WordPress and SEO by Joost De Valk. Check out the slides here:

WordPress SEO & Optimisation
View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: plugin plugins)

Another fantastic resource for anyone using WordPress to create their sites and want to rank in search engines is the free guide about SEO for bloggers by Aaron and Giovanna Wall.

Between those to sites you should be well set up to rank your blog or WordPress based website :)

It often surprises me just how well WordPress sites perform in search engines. Even out of the box, with none of the recommended tweaks, you can find yourself appearing under searches within a few weeks of launching.

The most important factors are:

  1. Great content - Write about what people want to know
  2. Search phrases - Use the phrases that your audience is looking for, and also use keyword tools for research
  3. Interlinking - Link out, link to your own content, network to get links from other sites

All of these things happen very naturally with a blog, and can be easily implemented on a WordPress-based sites.

Add the recommended tweaks and plugins and you will have an even more search friendly site!

Excel Design Tips - Make Your Excel Spreadsheets Look Good

Excel Design

Excel is a powerful numbers tool, no question. Most of the time when we talk about spreadsheets we are focusing on the mathematical side, rather than how the results look.

Thing is, spreadsheets are a tool for creating content to be read also. In fact, I would go as far as to say a spreadsheet is an influential tool of persuasion, when used correctly.

On top of that, many business rely on Excel for their business forms, such as invoices, expenses, time sheets and all kinds of paperwork.

It is possible to not only have your spreadsheets make you more productive, but also look good.

In this series I want to show you how you can beautify your spreadsheets without requiring any real design skills.

Formatting Reports With Spreadsheets

Although the features available in the latest software surpass anything that came before, this use of spreadsheets is not a new thing, can you remember the old Lotus 123 and Supercalc days?

Even back then, spreadsheets were used to make data more presentable, more professional, and less, well, like it had come straight off a music-ruled dotmatrix report, which was often the main alternative.

Of course back then a lot of the data was retyped, causing inevitable transcription errors. Now Excel can read in data exported from numerous systems natively, and also understand common open formats, even down to interrogating live databases directly through ODBC.

So this is not just about spreadsheets you create form scratch, Excels presentation abilities can help you with presenting any kind of data that Excel can import.

Things have come a long way. In the past you were pretty much restricted to having lines, boxes, bold and italic. If you were lucky. Now Excel has features only previously found in desk top publishing packages.

Excel’s graphic features are both a blessing and a curse.

Yes, you have a huge amount of freedom and functionality to create the look you want, but the downside is a lot of people over use these features and make their spreadsheets look like a Nascar, and reports appear to be a page from a comic book.

Let’s focus on some basics!

10 Tips for Avoiding Excel Formatting Horrors

Excel Design Tip 1: Less is More

When working with the formatting and design features of Excel please do not treat it like a kid in a candy store!

Restraint is important if you want to provide the best possible result.

Excel Design Tip 2: Comic Sans has no place in business

Sometimes I wish I could build a time machine so I could go back to whichever lunatic was presiding over the meeting when Microsoft decided to bundle Comic Sans with their operating system and give them a sound thrashing.

Ahem.

If there is one thing that will reduce the professionalism of your spreadsheet it is the inclusion of any kind of comic font, but in particular Comic Sans. Just don’t.

Excel Design Tip 3: WordArt can kill your design

WordArt is a nice and flexible feature that has been an addition of Office for years. Many people are comfortable with it. But does it ever look cheesy! Just look at the header image of this article - geeky, no?

You know where we agreed restraint was important a few paragraphs ago? That goes one hundred fold for when using WordArt. In fact, if in doubt, leave it out!

Excel Design Tip 4: Clipart Clichés

Photography or illustration can bring a page to life and stop it being a sea of text and numbers, but if the clipart looks over-used, out of place, hackneyed or just plain BAD, then you are only doing damage. I would recommend instead of the default clipart to look to outside sources such as Istockphoto, but there is a similar risk in using those also!

Excel Design Tip 5:  Careful with colors

Color is essential in aiding clarity of your data, providing of course you are going to view the spreadsheet on screen or your printer can output color. What often happens though is people get carried away and the end Invoice in excelresult is a rainbow mess of clashing, garish, neon. Excel is not the best at allowing color flexibility, so make the best of a bad set of colors by selecting muted tones that go well together, such as grays and blues.

Excel Design Tip 6: Templates are your friend

Rather than starting from scratch, especially if you are design challenged like me, consider trying one of the many freely available pre-built templates out there. You can find everything from invoices to timesheets. There is a great list in our Excel Wizardry article.

Excel Design Tip 7: Use grid lines selectively

Just because you are working in a spreadsheet does not mean you have to show your grid lines. In many cases it is easier to only add the lines that aid legibility, and switch off all othes. In Windows you can find the option to turn off gridlines in the view tab, or in older versions tools, options. In Mac, look in the preferences.

Excel Design Tip 8: Background images can lift or distract

A tasteful background image can work well. Unfortunately all too often the images used are busy, detailed and when combined with columns of numbers, just make your eyes water. Go for something plain and delicate, such as a subtle graduated tint or a slight drop shadow..

Excel background images

Excel Design Tip 9: Align your text

Another legibility tip is for you to not just accept Excels defaults when working with your text. For example did you know you can format your cells and select to align your text at the top and to wrap around?

Excel Design Tip 10: Use appropriate font sizes

Your basic font needs to be large enough to be legible without an electron microscope, plain enough to read (step away from the “handwriting” font!), and there should be a clear visual hierarchy. What do I mean by that? While most people in their wordprocessor will use headlines and subheads, for some reason fewer people think to do this in a spreadsheet, but breaking up a report in this way can really help get your point across. So if you are using 10-12 point body text you might make your subhead 14-16pt and your main headline 18pt.

Summary

Yes, much of this will be seemingly obvious, but if you go into any Excel using business I guarantee at least one and probably more of these excel formatting crimes are being committed right now.


Got Excel design tips? Please share in the comments, and look out for part 2 of this series!

VOIP Choices

You know it is going to be an interesting day when you spot your wife scowling at a telephone bill. Some times our bill is a mile long and the figure at the end appears to have been confused with the national debt of a small country.

I’m not having an affair or calling dodgy premium lines. Honest!

Part of my work involves a fair amount of time on the telephone. This is fine for consulting calls as the client pays me well for them, but lately I have been doing a lot of interviews since our book and my course were launched.

When you have to pay for your own transatlantic calls that can last an hour or more, you start looking into better options for telephone service!

Of course the first place I turn is Skype, which is brilliant in many ways, especially because I can record, but all too often on calls that go on a while the sound breaks up or drops me entirely, especially over long distances. This is not good in live interviews.

Even though I live in the UK where we are a fair bit behind the US, there are still a confusing array of alternative VOIP service options.

The problem is how to work out the good from the bad? Will any of them be any better than Skype?

Please let me know if you have any recommendations in the comments …