Trolls

Fascinating, frightening, sad… the New York Times Magazine ran a brilliant article about internet trolls.  Commonplace for many of us – we have been dealing with these trolls in online social spaces for many years – but for the uninitiated, these trolls can wreck havoc and deep confusion.  Give it a read.

I hate camera

In a world where self-publishing has become commonplace, many challenges present themselves.  Outside of creating solid primary content, there are associated elements many do not plan for… creating effective titles, having solid links to supporting content, proper tagging, decent formatting and use of your publishing tool…

One of the big challenges for many is in coming up with associated images.  For a podcast, this is the thing that will help sell your content on iTunes or on your subscribers iPod. On the web, it is what people will see when they use something like Piclens.  Images continue to become more important everyday in supporting your publishing efforts.

One choice is to use your built-in photo manipulation software for cropping and file format manipulation or you can drop a well spent $50 on Photoshop Elements (or more for the full program), but are there any other options? 

One of our summer interns (and some of my codeing friends) have mentioned GIMP in the past few weeks.  This is a free GNU image manipulation tool that can be extremely handy for those who are cash-challenged and sick of their built-in photo software limitations.  Absolutely worth taking for a spin IMO if you need something to help you become a better publisher.