It's that time of year again - we are having our portfolio night on May 22nd from 6 to 9. It will be at the ING Direct Cafe: 221 Yonge St.

Here is the invitation my student Lauren did:

I received this email from one of my students:

Hey Bernie!

How are you, I hope everything started well at school!

I wanted to message you with some news. 

The votes are in and my talk: "Using usability testing to make sure your audience gets it" was voted in (thanks Mom).

PSEWEB is a conference for college and university marketers, programmers, designers, digital architects and community managers – the people behind the online faces of our institutions.

We launched www.tedxhumbercollege.com a week ago. Two weeks before that - we did not know TEDx was coming to Humber College.

For about a week we were working intensely to get the Web site up and running. First we had to be introduced - Bernie meet Sarah - Sarah - Bernie. Then the hosting package had to be set up: Drupal and MySQL. No problems - easy to do. Then - choose a theme - we picked Slate and with a couple of modifications made it TED compatible. Two of my students: Kaleb Barker and Sean Byart helped me out with some of the work. More for them to do in the future.

I have just finished taking the Standup comedy course at Humber College. What a lot of fun and definitely out of my comfort zone. The final outcome is a very nervous me (think Beaker from Sesame Street) at an open mic night at Yuk Yuk's.

It is interesting to see the FTC figure out how to deal with consumer privacy as it applies to the Web and the Internet. It is clever how they are using the policies the companies themselves have published on their Web sites as the means of enforcement: break your own rules and you wind up in trouble. In some ways this is a more effective means of enforcement than legislation.

The first time I realized the potential impact of terms of use was in regard to the California Long Arm Statute. Ivan Hoffman wrote:

On the face of the statute, the law seems to apply not only to those sites within the geographical borders of the state but potentially throughout the entirety of the electronic world. If you are a site owner or a designer, no matter where you are located, it appears this statutes is one to which you should pay some attention.

The Copyrights are a pop punk band from Carbondale...oops that's not right - damn Wikipedia. Here's the right entry:

Copyright is the set of exclusive rights granted to the author or creator of an original work, including the right to copy, distribute and adapt the work. Wikipedia

Privacy Policies

One thing to keep in mind with this kind of information is that protecting personal information is simply good business. You tell your clients how you will treat their information and then you do what you have said. This creates trust and in turn encourages them to do business with you. Simple.

It has taken a while to decide to write a blog. I want to avoid the maunderings of the self-absorbed...well - not entirely. What I want to do is share some ideas, insights, and resources about Web development - after all I have been doing it for a long time and it is about time I had something to say.