Cre8tive Flow

It’s been a little over a year since Cre8asiteforums rolled out a newly designed user interface, with new forums software, new server and the ability to accept advertising.

While still experimenting with ad placement (because our members loathe distractions), and charging very low monthly fees to a members’ first ad placement system, enough funds were generated in 2006 to achieve one our goals.

We wanted to help support education in the search engine marketing, user centered design and web design industries. Today, we’ve presented six possible ideas for where we would like to help sponsor a student. Members are voting now to select four choices from the list of six.

Trying to make a living can mean that forum members balance between supportive learning and giving away the farm. Fence-sitting is only a beginning. Healthy exchange of ideas about member tools and tutorials is one demonstration of how the Cre8asite Forums community works to deepen knowledge and broaden connections.

eKstreme agrees:

Tools like these are all about communities. Even if there was only one person actually writing code, the ideas that shape the development and inception, the testing, the feedback from users, etc., are all community based. If you are involved in a community like Cre8asite Forums, promoting tools created by other community members is the way forward. It fosters community feeling and makes you new friends.

I’m addicted to CiteSeer. It’s one of my favorite sites on the web.

So, I got pretty excited when I saw earlier tonight that Penn State and the University of Kansas have been awarded 1.2 Million dollars to bring us the Next Generation CiteSeer.

Originally launched in 1997, CiteSeer is an online document repository which has provided public access to over 700,000 documents involving information and computer science topics. It presently receives over 1 million searches a day. While there are some fun tools to use with CiteSeer like the CiteSeer browser, there are some even more interesting plans ahead for the service.

There’s a new school in town. OK, it’s not really a school (at least, not in a conventional sense). And, it’s not in town. But it sounds like a lot of fun.

And, it’s a chance to learn about search engines, about building links, and finding keywords, and optimizing pages for search engines, and it’s about building sites that are usable.

Now you can do that here. You can do that at the Cre8asite Forums, or by visiting the SEO Round Table, and following their links back to some great discussions on many different forums. But…

It’s getting close to graduation for many students, and the timing on a couple of essays from Scott Berkun couldn’t be better. The former project manager from Microsoft has learned some interesting lessons in his days since school.

I can’t recommend highly enough his two part essay from UIWEB.COM: What they didn’t teach me in Design & Usability School and (Part 2) What they didn’t teach me in Design & Usability School.

One thing I’ve learned in my days after school is that it’s possible to keep on learning long after you take off your cap and gown. You don’t need a classroom to get an education, and you don’t need a degree to be an expert on a subject.