Friday Five: not that you asked, but…

The Internet is full of unsolicited advice. Some of it is even useful. Here are five bits of counsel that may interest you:

  1. For writers: Five easy steps to editing your own work, by Anna Goldsmith of The Hired Pens, guest blogging at CopyBlogger.
  2. For marketers struggling with ROI of social media: Valeria Maltoni of Conversation Agent offers some ideas about measurement as part of a marketing meme making the rounds.
  3. For communicators, marketers, history buffs and closet socialists: FutureLab offers a lesson in mass communications with Soviet Propaganda – The Art of Mass Persuasion. Posted by Ilya Vedrashko on Thursday, the 90th anniversary of Russia’s Bolshevik Revolution, it features Vedrashko’s slide show of images that “showcase some of the tools and techniques used by the Soviet AgitProp (agitation and propaganda) as well as other governments, democratic and otherwise, and how some of the imagery was borrowed by brand marketers.” Makes you wonder who really won the cold war.
  4. For web designers and managers: Sam Jackson’s take on why college and university web sites don’t make the grade.
  5. For alumni relations folks: Andy Shaindlin (alumni futures) introduces a new Facebook group just for you.

Bonus link: discovered later but for everyone — be they writers, editors, designers, marketers, bosses, bureaucrats, teachers, students … anyone and everyone: 10 Simple, Sure-fire Ways to Make Today Your Best Day Ever. Just gloss over the metaphysical portions if you like (although I recommend reading the whole thing). If you don’t read it today, read it before you go to work on Monday.

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Now playing: The New Pornographers – Adventures In Solitude
via FoxyTunes

Down on the cube farm: Wired honors saddest cubicles

So, you think you’ve got a crappy cube farm to work in? It probably isn’t as bad as the workspaces of some of the “winners” of Wired’s saddest office cubicle contest.

The saddest of the sad is, sadly, someone from the higher ed ranks: “David Gunnells, an IT guy at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.”

His desk is penned in by heavily used filing cabinets in a windowless conference room, near a poorly ventilated bathroom and a microwave. The overhead light doesn’t work — his mother-in-law was so saddened by his cube that she gave him a lamp — and the other side of the wall is a parking garage. Gunnells recalls a day when one co-worker reheated catfish in the microwave, while another used the bathroom and covered the smell with a stinky air freshener. Lovely.

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Now playing: The New Pornographers – My Rights Versus Yours
via FoxyTunes