World Usability Day New England is over....so sad.  Putting this event together with Jill Hart of Brain Logic LLC in six short weeks was great.  As we looked around the room we were so amazed at the depth of knowledge in the room and the willingness that people shared experiences.  Panelist Megan Grocki of Mad*Pow mentioned 'collabition' (collaborating with your competition).  What a great term!  Panelist James Lambert of 50,000 Feet Under shared a the best practice of 'being responsive' to your social media followers.  There were guilty looks on some  people's faces when they realized they needed to work on that one.   Speakers Patti Fousek, Jason Mark and Mike Hoefer all gave wonderful presentations and left the audience with some food for thought.   We'd like to thank our host location the Marlboro College Graduate School for being so accommodating to our first event of this kind.  Kudos to Caleb Clark and Kelly Fletcher for keeping things together behinds the scenes.  But most of all we'd like to thank everyone that attended the event.  We hope you left with some new information that will aid you in your quest to keep social media usable!

Dear Joomla,

We’re all so proud of you and how far you’ve come these five years. Your 20 parents conceived of you because they wanted to have fun. Ever since, people have come to you looking for a good time, to make friends all over the world, to contribute to the greater good.

In dog years, or technology years, you’re actually 35. This is actually a better age to describe you. You’re old enough to have been around the block, and old enough to know better. But you’re still plenty young enough to have passion, vision, ambition, and live on the cutting edge. And, of course, you still know how to party.

Last night, the Joomla leadership announced that they were looking for request for comment on a social networking community to reside at Joomla.org.

We know it will either be called social.joomla.org or people.joomla.org. We know that it's been decided that JomSocial will run the community.

We are asked for input about whether this is something we'd use, what we want included, and how we think we'd use it.

The Marlboro College Graduate Center in Brattleboro, Vermont, just released its Open Source Web Development certificate in a wholly online format.

If you've been working with Joomla, but you want to know a lot more about it, this is the certificate program for you.  The certificate introduces students to Joomla, as well as planning a website, understanding the code that runs it, and developing and executing an online marketing plan.

The certificate consists of 12 credits:

Article is here.

Leave politics aside for the moment, and just consider the beauty of this application.

The problem: You need to get millions of people to vote for you in an election. 

Barrie North, author of "The Joomla 1.5 book", came to lecture at my class over the weekend. We have been using his book as one of our textbooks, but he came to talk about social networking and driving traffic to your website.

He was an excellent speaker, and the students really enjoyed hearing from him. He had some great advice for SEO , and gave the students some new things  to think about.

He's blogged about it on his site.  This includes notes from his talk.