The California Institute of Earth Art and Architecture is a 501 (C)3 non-profit/charitable foundation at the cutting edge of Earth and Ceramic Architecture technologies today. Founded in 1986 by its director, Nader Khalili (1936-2008), its scope spans technical innovations published by NASA for lunar and Martian construction, to housing design and development for the world's homeless for the United Nations.

Continuing in his tradition, Khalili's associates and apprentices are dedicated to research and education of the public in environmentally oriented arts and architecture. Its philosophy is based on the equilibrium of the natural elements of earth, water, air, fire, and their Unity at the service of the arts and humanity.

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Click to view the trailer for "Making of a Dream", in which award-winning architect and humanitarian Nader Khalili asks, "How can we build shelters for people in the world who have no money?" In the first of a five part DVD series, Nader Khalili shares some of his insights about how to empower others to create change; he says, "To have a quest is the key to all of your desires."

NADER KHALILI, ARCHITECT AND HUMANITARIAN (1936-2008) Architect and author Nader Khalili developed the simple breakthrough building technologies known as Superadobe (sandbags and barbed wire) and Ceramic Houses, with the freely available material of earth, for almost thirty years. Inspired by the poetry of the 12th century mystic Rumi, who wrote in his native Persian language, Khalili served as a consultant to the U.N. (UNIDO) and a contributor to NASA, as well as directing the Architectural Research Program (ARP) at SCI-Arc (Southern California Institute of Architecture). For his work in Earth and Ceramic Architecture since 1975, he received awards from organizations such as the CCAIA for "Excellence in Technology," the U.N. and HUD for "Shelter for the Homeless," the ASCE (Aerospace Division) for his work in lunar base building technology, and most recently the Aga Khan award for architecture for "Sandbag Shelter Prototypes". Through his work, Nader Khalili has inspired a global movement and left a rich body of philosophy, design and innovative construction technology. His work is continued at Cal-Earth Institute, as the basis for its research and educational mission.

The California Institute of Earth Art and Architecture - Luke Skywalker would appreciate this!

Writing a book will never be easy, but FastPencil's mission is to make things easier for authors by bringing this process online and to collaborate with others. FastPencil takes writers from idea to published book. The service offers features for collaboration, editing and design, as well as professional consulting services for authors. One cool feature of FastPencil is that it can import blog posts and turn them into books and e-books that bloggers can then sell through all the major book distribution channels.

Features

The areas where FastPencil exceeds are online editing, collaboration and distribution. Fast Pencil offers a surprisingly comprehensive online editing suite. While this editor isn't quite as fully-featured as Microsoft Word, OpenOffice or Apple's Pages - there is no feature to create headlines or tables of content, for example - it's more than enough to power the service's online collaboration tools.

In it's latest update, which launched earlier this week, FastPencil introduced a number of interesting new features. These include new templates, new roles for collaborators (co-authors, project managers) and forums for prospective authors to meet and discuss their work.

Turn Your Blog Into a Book

If you import your blog feed, FastPencil will turn every blog post into a chapter. The service also imports images from these posts. These images have to be inserted at the beginning or end of a post, however. You can't have your text flow around an image.

Publishing: Hardcover, Paperback, E-Book

Once you have finished your book, you can publish it as an e-book and printed book. These services, however, do cost. These paid services include printing, obtaining ISBN numbers, and organizing the distribution of your book on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Ingram Digital and other retail partners. FastPencil also offers a number of editing services like design, illustration and editing services. Besides printing hardcover and paperback books, FastPencil can format books for virtually any digital platform, including DRM-free ePub e-books and the Kindle.

Don't Need All These Services? Try SmashWords

If you don't need all of these services from Fast Pencil - or if you have already finished your book - another service worth looking at is SmashWords. Smashwords specializes in e-books. Thanks to deals with Barnes & Noble and Sony in the US and Indigo Books & Music's Shortcovers in Canada, self-published authors can get their e-books into traditional distribution channels, or sell their books directly on SmashWords. Smashwords acquired the New Zealand-based e-book self-publishing service BookHabit earlier this week.

SEO for Flash – is it a reality yet?

One of the most common issues for web sites with poor search visibility involves Google not being able to crawl and index a site’s content. Web sites made entirely with Flash are problematic because there are often no links for search engine crawlers to follow or HTML text to copy.

According to the Opera (browser) developer center, somewhere between 30% and 40% of all pages tested contained Flash files representing a lot of content that may not be included in search results or only partially indexed. Despite a large number of sites publishing content using this type of file format, Flash and search engines have been like oil and water. They just didn’t mix.

In the summer of 2008, Google announced it had improved the indexing of Adobe Flash files. Many Flash developers and SEOs across the globe could breathe an optimistic sigh of relief: Text in Flash files was now crawlable.

But what’s the whole story? Can a site be built entirely with Flash and expect to gain the same search benefits as an HTML site?

Consider these 5 points that Google makes in regards to SEO for Flash:

1. Google can crawl and index all of the text content users see as they interact with the Flash file. That’s a big step in the right direction, since ensuring a site is crawlable is the No. 1 SEO basic. A few points to keep in mind concerning SEO for Flash:

• Google maintains that the text in Flash files is treated like text in HTML or PDF files.
• If identical content is used in both Flash and HTML, Google will likely see it as duplicate content.
• If a Flash file is embedded in HTML, you’ll be able to add meta information, but the content will be indexed as a single item.

The below image illustrates how a Flash site was previously seen in search results (without meta description text) and how it is currently seen (with descriptive text):

2. Google can discover links within Flash files. In other words, if a Flash file includes links to your website pages, you can increase your odds of Google finding and crawling more of the site – just as is the case with links that appear in HTML and other files.

3. Google can index external content that a Flash file loads and associate it with that Flash file. This capability is an update from the summer 2008 revision. Previously, if a Flash file were to load an HTML or XML file, Google would not associate that external content with the Flash file. This new capability, introduced just this summer, allows external content to appear in search results.

The image below shows the results to the query “2002 VW Tansporter 888.” Before the introduction of the new Flash search capability, this result did not appear because the content is contained in an XML file loaded by a Flash file:

4. Google supports common JavaScript techniques for embedding Flash. Another update from the 2008 revision, this capability also applies to SWFObject and SWFObject 2. Previously, if a page loaded a Flash file using JavaScript, Google wouldn’t recognize or index it.

5. Google can index sites scripted with ActionScript. That includes AS1, AS2 and AS3 versions. Google also maintains that is does not decompile Flash files or expose ActionScript code if it’s not visible to users.

All that said, Google’s ability to crawl Flash files is still evolving, so building a site entirely in Flash isn’t best practice. To create the right balance when it comes to using Flash and implementing SEO for Flash, consider these tips:

• Don’t use Flash as the navigation.
• Embed Flash files into HTML pages.
• Use descriptive page titles and meta descriptions.
• Don’t include an entire site in one Flash file. Instead, break the content into multiple Flash files with different HTML pages.
• Use Flash for design elements and less-important content, and use HTML for the most important page elements.
• Enhance web fonts in Flash files by using slfr, per a suggestion by SEO Zombie Blogger Justin Briggs. Because the Flash styles enhance the HTML content rather than replace it, the engines can still read titles.

While Flash, Ajax and JavaScript offer enticing user experience, they continue to offer a less than ideal experience for search engine crawlers. What tactics or best practices have you found in balancing rich media and SEO?  Do you think it’s reasonable to for a web site to have an amazing Flash component and still be able to compete in aggressive search categories?

Here is compact one page Twitter Cheat Sheet, that answers a lot of common Twitter questions.

It outlines,

* Twitter commands
* Twitter search parameters
* Twitter terms
* Twitter resources
* Twitter directories
This is a handy resource that can be used to quickly refer to when needed and contains links to many of Twitter’s official pages.

All in one page!

As long as this PDF remains in its original format and isn’t modified, you may print it out.. email it to your friends.. tweet about it.. or show it to any Baby Boomer who needs help with Twitter!

Download your Twitter Cheat Sheet here

(watermark free)

This adds a new dimension to Christmas 'sexy stocking stuffer'

Description

20 DEN thigh high stockings

Size: One Size XS/S/M (they are One Size which fits XS, S and M)
I noticed that this specific color in this length is a bit tighter than the other socks.
I don't think these tights would be comfortable for a large size.

These are so cool!!! (in a Geek Chic kind of way) :)
They are wonderful conversation starters and help you meet new people easily! They are sexy, funny and flirty. Guys love them!
Even if you're not on twitter these socks would make a perfect gift for your friend who is :)
I like to call them twitter "STALKINGS" :)

Sexy FOLLOW ME TATTOO thigh-high socks LIGHT MOCHA.
These socks are a must have in every fashion lover's drawer!

We produce our socks at home in small batches and they sell out quickly. ONLY THE SPECIFIC COLORS/DESIGNS/LENGTHS LISTED IN OUR SHOP ARE CURRENTLY IN STOCK.
If you don't see the desired design/color/length please check back as we update our stock frequently.

To make sure the socks look natural and blend perfectly with you skin tone we now have 4 body color shades and white! Please see the color chart in the last photo.
This pair is in LIGHT MOCHA.
This is the color that works best on my legs.
It's a great shade for all average bright skin tones.
The socks are semi transparent and they blend with your natural skin tone.
These are thigh-high and look gorgeous with thigh high skirts, shorts and dresses.

They are guaranteed to turn some heads! They compliment your feet and make you feel like you have a gorgeous tattoo. They are cheap, chic and unique and you won't find them anywhere else!

The design is printed in black on one sock. You get one printed and one blank sock. I really like the asymmetric look, it gives more focus and attracts more attention.

I love that you can play with the design and rotate the tattoo to position it wherever you want! Stockings are so much fun!

I recommend hand washing in cold water.

Shipping: only 2.8$
Free if shipped with another item.

Enjoy!

Call for submissions

I am in the process of putting together a holiday gift guide, one for women like myself, one for geeky husbands, one for infants, and one for five-year-old girls who think life is totally unfair. Maybe just some coal for her.

I'm looking for handmade goods, products from small businesses, and would love to see unique things from independent artists. If you've seen my style section and think I'd like what you have to offer, please send me a link to your stuff at style at dooce dot com. Note, I do not accept compensation for featuring products on this website, I truly just want to introduce my audience to things I like and think they would enjoy as well.

Please don't send me naked pictures of yourself, I don't have any more room in that file.

ALSO! Jon and I are working on putting together a SAFE FOR WORK AND KIDS version of the 2010 Chuck calendar where we trade out the racy picture of Chuck and Coco in February with something a little less unsettling. I knew some of you would love that I included that photo, but I also knew some of you might blush and go ARE YOU EVEN KIDDING ME. So. That version is coming later today or tomorrow.

And now back to your regularly scheduled program.

View this link: http://www.dooce.com/2009/11/19/call-submissions

Update : Along with account types, we have also introduced an “Industry/Cause” indicator in your profile information. You can specify which industry you are working in. For the new account types, this is a compulsory field. For the default/normal type, this is optional.

Ever wondered this? Who are you on SlideShare?

Well till recently, we gave everyone the same kind of account (i.e. the default/normal account). So if you were a teacher, a university, a company or a lone user, you had to use the same account type (and have to specify your gender & DOB as well!) Not any more. We have released 7 new types of accounts. This was preceeded by an exhaustive research exercise we undertook to understand our community. And the research indicated that these seven types of accounts (along with the default/standard one that has always existed) should cover the main sub-sections of SlideShare users.

Account types are free, off course. If you want to change our account type, just log into your SlideShare account, change your account types, fill out the options and you are all set to show the world WHO YOU ARE.

Why are we doing this? SlideShare has grown into a vibrant community and (behind the scenes) we are building custom features for different accounts. As and when these features are launched, we want you to best positioned to leverage on them.

Check out this quick slide deck for a walkthrough.

WHO ARE YOU on SlideShare?

View more documents from SlideShare Help.

Here are the seven new account types for your quick reference:

Company: The Company account type is meant for professional organisations & firms.

Non Profit/Gov: The Non Profit/Gov account type is meant for non profit institutions, non government organisations, central or provincial governments (or government departments) etc.

University/School: The University/School account type is meant for educational organisations - schools, universities, colleges, classrooms, educational institutions.

AD/PR/Marketing Agency: The AD / PR / Marketing Agency account type is meant for firms dealing in advertising, public relations, marketing etc.

Professional Speaker: The Professional Speaker account type is meant for people who speak frequently at conferences, seminars, events etc.

Presentation Design Firm: The Presentation Design Firm account type is meant for professional firms dealing in presentation design services, trainings etc

Event Organiser: The Event Organiser account type is meant for professional firms that organise events, conferences, trade shows etc.

Let us know what you thought of this new release.

There aren’t enough hours in the day for all the chores that social media puts in front of us. The best writing I’ve found on how to manage your time in social media is via Amber Naslund’s social media time management series. Her efforts in crafting this should become a little ebook that you hand around to everyone. If you skipped over that link, go back, click it to open a new tab/window, and then read it when you’re done with this (or skip mine and read Amber’s- it’s that good). If you’re still with me, here’s what I want to say on the matter.

These are written from a marketer’s perspective. I can write from other perspectives if you want. Just let me know in the comments.

Prioritize Your Social Media Efforts

First, the Foundations

Without the following, there’s no point doing social media and social networking for business.

• Goals first – If you don’t stick to your goals, there’s no reason to put any time into social media, period. If your goal is to build relationships that yield sales for your organization, then make sure you’re always trying to answer the question: “how do I know which relationships will yield, and how do I attract/find more of those people who are perfect for my product/service?”
• Dashboard – At New Marketing Labs, we’re going into 2010 with the rule that all projects have a dashboard of measurements. We will be clear with every client which needles we’re going to move for them, and how. Without an understanding of progress, how will we know we’re helping them with their goals?
• Strategies – Strategies are paths one might take to accomplish one’s goals. Come up with a few strategies (not too many, but not one), and make those strategies relate to your goals and not to the tools. To start with the tools in mind is to believe those tools will be there forever. Where’s your Plurk strategy? Right.
• Wins/Losses – What do you want to count as a win or a loss? Make sure your dashboard can report on this.

In Order Of Value

• Listen – Listening gives you data, gives you metrics, gives you topic material for content, gives you a sense of where your crowd is. Use professional listening tools and even some free ones to be sure you’ve got information and a hot map of the territory.
• Read/Consume – Might seem counter to what you think I’d say, but I read several blogs and news sources before I start in on many of my other social media duties. Why? Because it gives me perspective, it lets me know what folks are finding useful, it gives me ideas on what the topics I follow might need from me.
• Comment/Share – I comment and share other people’s work for two reasons: first is that I want you to see the good stuff. Second, is that it also starts/encourages new relationships between people. Some of these relationships benefit me. Many benefit the person I point out. It all works to form a nice ecosystem.
• Create – Making media (blogging, video, podcasts, ebooks, tweets, email marketing, whatever) is the reason you came to start using these tools. By all means, use them. Creation is your chance to have a voice, to share your thoughts, to encourage people to do business with you. This blog is where I share with you, because I’m also simultaneously signaling to my typical clients (midsized-to-Fortune-100 companies) that if I’m giving you all this for free, you’d be thrilled with what I charge you for. Creating is important, but only after you’ve done the other steps.
• Communicate – It might be weird to see email/phone calls/face-to-face so low in my social media prioritizing. It’s “social” media after all, right? But if you look at all the above, you’ll note that they’re all meant to help the most possible people. With email/phone/f2f, that’s about a 1:1 connection (most times- email can be more). I find that communications help out fewer people than all the above so I try to handle them after I’ve done my other work.
• Close – Okay, closing is more sales than it is a social media tool, but that’s what I try to do last in my order of priorities. Not all that I do is a sales funnel (at least not for my own site and personal use of social media). To that end, I think closing goes last in my order of things I try to do, though I still have goals and targets for this. This might seem the most backwards for business people, especially sales people, to think about. But then again, think about what REALLY goes into a sale: awareness, education, negotiation, purchase, support, renewal. Right? Sales, or the close, is only the last in the line of all that. The rest of what I’ve listed out above lines up with those other parts of the funnel. Now does it make sense?

In Explaining This to The Leadership

The way I do business with companies is by sharing what I’ve learned and what I know, and then mapping that to the company’s goals and desires. I work mostly from the mindset of “how can I get you more _____” and then we talk through the various ways that can be accomplished. In almost all cases, we work to “teach them to fish,” as our goal isn’t to be in some kind of endless retainer loop.

In how YOU might explain this and get your goals across, try lining everything up with business objectives. Try working out how this all integrates to your departments, how the process flows will go, etc. Make sure you think of as many questions that other departments and key voices will throw at you, and work out your answers ahead of time.

If you’re a small business, then you get to make all the decisions. You’ll note that I wrote this from the marketer’s perspective. I haven’t factored in the time you need to create your product or service. Let’s cover smaller business in another post. Fair?

Your Take

How do you think this maps for you? Do you see it? Do you have questions based on what I covered up there? How can I help you better understand the priorities?

Today, Twitter moved into a new, much larger office in San Francisco. The space, which was previously Bebo’s SF office, is right around the corner from their old one.

A few members of the Twitter team spent much of the weekend decorating the new digs with a number of Twitter-themed elements like birds and @ symbols. Check out some of the pictures being posted to the web by Twitter employees below. And yes, there is a DJ booth — and apparently vanity mirrors in the toilet stalls.

[photos: flickr/ryansking, twitpic/caroline, yfrog/robey, twitpic/wfarner, twitpic/jennadawn]

Update: And a bunch more pictures from the @twitter Flickr account:

by MG Siegler on November 16, 2009

I think it is. And I tweeted so  yesterday.  And the reason is obvious. What is SEO about? Ultimately, it is about one thing: the ‘website’. It’s about making a website and its pages discoverable, ranked favorably in search results, described appropriately so that searchers hook on the description etc.

But ‘websites’ are not ‘in’. Check the diagrams below from Google trends for websites for the past 12 months.

Website traffic for 5 major IT companies

Website traffic for the 2 major consumer goods companies

While the overall number of people online is increasing, the visits to the web sites keep falling.

At the same time the volume of searches for these brands shows a completely different picture.

Search volume for the 2 major consumer goods companies

Search volume for 5 big IT companies

In the last 12 months CG companies see a volume increase or remain steady (amidst the crisis) while for IT, a longer perspective reveals a mixed picture that has to do with what these companies are and technologies they offer:

• oracle and ibm are gradually decreasing,
• apple is increasing,
• dell the same although less quickly,
• and hp seems to hold its ground or slightly decreasing.

But there is an equally important movement undergoing: people shift their reliance from search to peers for news,  recommendations and answers.

I don’t remember how many times and about how many things I  have asked my twitter friends’ advise. But it always comes. And most of the time  it’s good too. Not so  abundant as  search results but who reads search results past the first page anyway?

Enter social seach. Google injects (opt in) results in search from our social graphs. I don’t have to reason the usefulness of this.

What should we expect? What else than  these two inversely related trends accelerating: less reliance on search, more reliance on peer recommendations.

There are some interesting implications here: SEO consulting and search advertising have profited from the reliance on search. Search won’t go away anytime soon, especially with the social element in it. But what would be the need for SEO? And what would be the need for adword advertising, if the important factor in search results turn out to be your peers?

Is Google shooting its own foot?  So it seems. But I am sure they have figured it out already and they are thinking of alternatives.