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Learning and fun top the list.

If idle hands are the devil’s workshop, the Internet is a pretty hot place.

According to Ruder Finn, 100% of US Internet users surveyed in Q2 2009 went online to pass the time.

Other popular reasons were education, connecting with others, researching and sharing.

The least common intentions when logging on were to make purchases, manage finances, comparison shop and join causes.

“Intent is the new demographic,” said Kathy Bloomgarden, Ruder Finn co-CEO. “Delving deeper into the underlying motivations of online behavior is critical to developing proactive strategies.”

Overall, Ruder Finn divided online activities into six categories, listed from most common to least:

• Learn
• Have fun
• Socialize
• Express oneself
• Advocate
• Do business
• Shop

Men were more likely than women to go online for business, entertainment and to keep informed on news and current events.

Women, in turn, were more likely to use the Internet to advocate for a cause or issue, express themselves and socialize.

You can view the entire article by visiting EMarketer.

This past Saturday, I initially begrudgily attended the ConvergeSC Conference held in Columbia at the University of South Carolina’s Swearingen Engineering facility.  I certainly could have thought of a hundred better things I would rather spend my Saturday doing than attending an all day conference; however I must admit that my time was well invested.

This conference was rich in content, well organized and offered a wide array of credible speakers.  While some of the things that I learned  were well over my head, such as hadoop, git, ruby, rails, rest, etc, the balance of the topics covered were spread evenly through web marketing strategy, design and technical presentations.

Below I will categorize the speakers by topics and reference some examples that were used in their presentations:

Design Presentations

Jason Beaird of Cyberwoven – Design 4 Developers.
Jason presented on good use of textures, typography and fonts for the web.  Textures have the ability to make a website sort of pop and not look so much like a website.  Typography is important in web design and there are only 9 standard fonts that are used across the web; however many web developers have been using (sIFR) Scalable Inman Flash Replacement.

(sIFR) is a combination of Javascript and Flash where developers can choose the font of their choice and render it as a text element in html.  (sIFR) is not designed to use fonts in body copy because of demands of computer processing; however it can be used in titles or in areas to display and signal out text.  One drawback is that the end users computer must have that font installed on their computer in order for the (sIFR) to function correctly.

Another font technique that is rapidly gaining presence is the use of Cufon.  This is a text replacement technique that uses canvas and vml eliminating the need of Flash rendering.

Here are some sites that were referenced by Jason:

designbygrid.com
960.gs
modexcms.com
webgrapes.it
blueacorn.com

Matthew Smith of Squared Eye - Simple Steps From Decent to Great Web Design

Matt touched on designing in the grid system as well and how to use white space effectively, typography and use of complimentary colors in web development.  He has created a site patterntap.com, which demonstrates good use of design across many different web related examples.  Also, here are some sites that he referenced:

inkd.com
simplicitylaw.com
whywewhisper.com

Greg Lunn of Cyberwoven – Cross-Media Workflows with Adobe Creative Suite
Greg dove into Adobe’s CS4 suite and it’s cross platform compatibility and timeliness for more rapid development.  He showcased some features in Bridge as well as Illustrator, Photoshop, Fireworks and Dreamweaver integration.

Strategy Presentations

Geno Church of Brains on Fire - Creating a Brand Ambassador Movement Online
Geno presented on effective ways to create brand ambassador movements.  He took us through a live case study with Fiskars and the Fiskateer brand ambassador movement.  Fiskars is a 360 year old brand and mostly known for fine hand tools and scissors.  The Fiskateer movement was more than people purchasing scissors, it was about a hobby and passion for creating memories that lasted a lifetime.

Here are some notes and takeaways on Geno’s presentation:
Movements are built on passion.
Movements need inspirational leadership.
To build a supportive community, you need passion, inspiration and leadership to start a conversation and dialogue.
Word of Mouth (WOM) plays a huge role and 90% of WOM handles offline.
Movements make advocates feel like rockstars.

Jessica Cook of ADCO – The Power of Content.
Jessica  presented on the importance of content on the web.  Content is King, Right? Why?  People want answers.  Many times we build websites with good design, yet the content is poor.  For anyone who has worked in web development long enough they’ve gone through a battle with an art director, copywriter or coder.

A good website is rich in content, design and code and all must work hand in hand in the very early stages to build and construct rich meaningful websites that have an impact on their intended audiences.

Mike Mann of Nexsen Pruet - I wrote it; I own it….Don’t I?
Mike discussed the differences in real property, personal property which is tangible and intellectual property which is intangible.  Patent rights are assigned to the inventor but they have to be assigned in writing.  Different companies have varying policies on who maintains rights to IP so developers need to be aware of employment agreements and the details that reside in various legal agreements.

Robert Prioleau of Blue Ion – Elements of Experience
Robert presented on the engagement between a brand and community.  He emphasized “The Story”, there is a story in everything.  You must have a secret narrative and a social agenda.  He referenced the Vietnam Memorial as an example and while it is not a website, it’s design as a monument is emotional in the connection and meaning that it takes on.

Joel Stevenson of the USC Technology Inubator – Starting a Business
Joel discussed with the audience the services provided by the USC Incubator and how it works to strenghten, incubate and grow partipating companies.  When entrepreneurs have a business idea, the most important thing they can do is create a “Business Plan”.  This plan should be brief yet detailed and effective in presenting to potential investors or financial institutions.  The most important elements of the business plan are:
1. Who are you? What do you do?
2. Who is your management team and what experience do they bring to the table?
3. Most importantly, how will you get people to pay you for your idea, how are you going to make money?

Less is more, the plan needs to be read and understood in less than a 5 minute time frame.

Robyn Tippins of Yahoo – Marketing Socially
Robyn discussed many important topics in how to market socially from the use of viral campaigns like Mafia Wars and MorphMonkey on Facebook to gaming, as well as one to one marketing and traditional awareness and public relations.

She mentioned the success of MorphMonkey on raising awareness for std’s amongst a younger audience as well as Target’s effective use of My Weekly Ad Deals in keeping consumers engaged and increasing conversions.

Technical Presentations

Jason Dew of Catamorphic Labs – Ruby on Rails: Opionated Development
This is where I first started getting lost at the conference.  Jason Dew of Catamorphic Labs presented and demonstrated developing on the Ruby on Rails framework.

Ruby on Rails is a web development framework written in Ruby.  Twitter is built on the Ruby on Rails platform.  Ruby allows web developers to generate applications rapidly and efficiently via the use of modules which generate code and sql for backend database connectivity.  Ruby on Rails can significantly speed up the development process.

Chris Eargle of SC Farm Bureau Insurance - REST
Chris demonstrated how REST, Representational State Transfer functions.  The Web is built off of REST functionality and architecture.  Systems that use the REST principle are considered to be RESTful.
What all that means – I have absolutely no idea.  You can check it out by clicking on the REST link and reading and researching for yourself because the content is wayyyyyyyy over my head.

Mark Gunnels of Catamorphic Labs – MapReduce in the Cloud
Mark presented on Hadoop and it’s ability to mine mass amounts of data.  One might wonder what the heck is Hadoop?  It is a Java based framework that supports data intensive distributed applications.  It allows applications to work with thousands of computers and petabytes (1 PB = 1,000,000,000,000,000 B = 1000⁵ or 10¹⁵ bytes of data) That’s a lot of data!

Hadoop was founded by Doug Cutting who named the application after his son’s stuffed elephant.  He now works for Yahoo who uses the framework in their search and advertising business.

Mark referenced how the NY Times used Hadoop to convert 4 Terabytes of data (11 million articles) into PDF documents in less than 24 hours.
Jonathan LeBlanc of Yahoo – Yahoo! Developer Network
Jonathan offered insite into integrating with the Yahoo Developer Network.  He took the group through using live demos of retrievr, which is a flickr app and also dove into how to use yahoo query languarge (yql) with mapping and geographic based tools.

Jonathan stressed that many of the advantages of integrating and using apps with Yahoo is that you utilize their massive serving and computing power to process applications as well as the credibility of working with one of the largest internet properties in the world.