My friend Scott Abel from The Content Wrangler turned me on to these videos from CommonCraft. They’re really simple, really fun and really informative.

I’ve embedded a playlist of some of them below.

Topics you may find interesting are:

• Social Media in Plain English
• Wikis in Plain English
• Twitter in Plain English

And you won’t want to miss Zombies in Plain English.

Enjoy!

This comes via NTEN- The Non-profit Technology Network. The post, “25 Ways to Increase Your Organization’s Communication Capacity” has some great ideas for making communication easier no matter what kind of organization you have – sole proprietorship, big business, government, non-profit, education, association or club.

Here’s the highlights.

Clarify Your Strategy

Automation

Get Everyone Participating

Peachpit Press ( a personal fav) is offering a free webcast with Garr Reynolds, author of Presentation Zen: Simple Ideas on Presentation Design and Delivery (Voices That Matter). (Note to self – write presentation Zen blog post.)

If you create presentations, video, what have you for you, for you or your clients this is well worth watching. The book is great and I’m sure there will be some ideas here that will work for you. Here’s all the details

Garr Reynolds, author of  Presentation Zen: Simple Ideas on Presentation Design and Delivery, will be featured in a free Webcast hosted by Safari Books Online on December 15, 2008 at 2:00pm PT/5:00pm ET. To sign up for the event, visit http://www.facebook.com/l.php?u=http://safaribooksonline.com%2Fevents%2Fgarrreynolds.html.

The Presentation Zen Webcast participants will learn to:

• Challenge conventional wisdom and think differently about the preparation, design, and delivery of “slide presentations” in today’s world.
• Apply Zen simplicity to the fields of communication and business.
• Put together speaking points and represent them on slides in new and more powerful ways.
• Improve the way they give presentations, from conception to creation to delivery.

All attendees receive 45 days complimentary online access to Presentation Zen on Safari Books Online; the first ten registrants will also receive an autographed copy of Presentation Zen.

I really like Gerry McGovern (why didn’t I look him up while I was in Ireland?); he always hits the nail on the head. And he drove it home again in his recent post Web content migration: disastrous strategy.

So many organizations think that a new technology solution will fix an old business problem. The only thing “fixed” are the consultant and vendor bottom lines and maybe helping someone climb the corporate ladder by increasing departmental headcount. If only people would allow that the emperor has no clothes and work on both their content AND the processes and people and attitudes that created it.

Gerry calls all of them out.

Content migration-and its first cousin, website “redesign”-are all about pouring sour old milk into new portal jugs. At some stage, we have to address the core web management challenges. Why do we have such bad content?

Ya gotta love anyone who can effectively use a sour milk analogy!

This came from a friend who is NOT an early adopter. It’s the summary of a study about LinkedIn users.

Not All Social Network Users Alike: 4 Types of LinkedIn Users

To highlight some key findings:

• Most users connect to people they know
• Users like look and feel of LinkedIn
• Users tend to be more senior (uh, career-wise)
• The majority are decision makers
• Those with personal incomes between $200K-$350K were seven times more likely than others to have over 150 connections!

From experience, I would guess the inverse of the last one is NOT true.

I’m on LinkedIn too!