Review of Microsoft Word 2010 Blog Post Feature

I am actually writing this post, for the first time, on Microsoft 2010. I think that I really like this feature of Word. First off, I notice that it is possible to directly publish to my Blogger account through the "Publish" button under the "Blog Post" menu in the toolbar. This is a nice feature and will save me some hassle from having to copy and paste the text from Word over to the Blogger text editing window. It's a small convenience, but every little bit helps.

The second thing that pops out at me is how much easier it is to edit blog entries using the Word interface than it is to use the Blogger interface. The next features I want to test are whether Word will correctly interpret html code, say from an embedded Youtube video. Here is my test case, which is a kitten falling down a few stairs:



I am a little disappointed that Word doesn't seem to have a built in java interpreter. I will have to see if the video renders correctly when I publish it or not.

The second thing that I want to check is whether pictures are correctly embedded in posts. So, I go over to Flickr and find some pictures of kittens . . .

 

 

 






It looks like I will have to insert the pictures later, through the Blogger interface, because the Word interface doesn't allow me to insert pictures from a website (which is crazy in this age of hyperlinking pictures).

So, overall, I would give the Word Blog Post feature a very marginal rating. I think that it's good for someone who is going to write a long text based article and needs a lot of formatting to make the text look nice. However, in terms of multimedia support, I would give Word a very marginal grade. There is no support for hyperlinking images and no support for java script so that movies, etc. can display real time during the editing process. However, the "Publish as Draft" feature under the "Publish" menu is nice, but it's still only nice because it means that I have a chance to fix my posts before putting them on the internet, which is something I should be able to do OUTSIDE of the blogger interface.

Final analysis: I won't use this feature, unless I am writing a long, text based article. 
 Kittens For Dummies

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Jon Stewart on Anthony Weiner

Watch this awesome clip of Jon Stewart's take on the Anthony Weiner "Penisgate" scandal. For those of you not following the story, Congressman Anthony Weiner is alleged to have sent a picture of his bulging genitals in a pair of tight underwear to an unwilling female recipient. Are the allegations true, false, somewhere in between? I have no idea, but the story is still hilarious.





The only thing that I found kind of strange from the whole video was where Jon Stewart talks about somehow knowing the size of penis in the photo is much bigger than that of Congressman Weiner's courtesy of many days spent swimming with Weiner in the Atlantic ocean when they were both younger. I mean, how the hell would Jon Stewart know . . .

On second thought, it's better to leave some things to the imagination :|

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Analysis and List of 3 Groupon Ads: Superbowl 2011

I have had some questions about this lately on my blog, so I thought that I would embed a list of the three Groupon ads from the Super Bowl in 2011. These ads are famous (infamous) for their controversial depictions and seemingly mocking attitude towards the Tibetan culture, protecting whales, and deforestation in Brazil. Love them or hate them, they're all here for you to enjoy:

1. Tibetan Culture:



2. Saving The Whales:



3. Brazilian Deforestation:



My analysis: I think that the ideas for these commercials were ones that were probably funny on paper, on the cutting room floor, and all the way up to 10 minutes after they aired in the Superbowl when the ad agency and management for Groupon both had a major "facepalm" moment. The problem here is that there are a certain percentage of people who will find a commercial like any of the ones shown above highly offensive, no matter how well intentioned the commercials were in the first place. Sure, sometimes people get too wound up about political issues (what the commercials were trying to poke fun at) but the delivery here probably only serves to agitate that tension.

Many people are already laughing a little on the inside about, for example, the highly strung environmentalists who take saving the whales as a personal mission in life. The environmentalists, on the other hand, take their work very seriously. So, on the one side, you've got people who already get the inside joke your commercial is trying to tell and have gotten the joke for years(and so probably don't care that much). On the other hand, you have a group of environmentalists, human rights activists who are ready to crucify you for mocking their causes. Does any of this sound like a combination Groupon's advertising team should have touched with a ten foot pole? Not to me.

What do you think about these commercials? Were they harmless fun, in poor taste, or downright offensive? Please leave your comments below.

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Analysis: President Obama - Bill O'Reilly Interview: Super Bowl Sunday 2010

Here is my analysis of an interested interview between Bill O'Reilly and President Barack Obama from February 2010 during the pregame show for the Superbowl. My comments are below the video.



Overall, I was impressed with the interview. Bill was a bit softer on Obama than he might have otherwise been (especially compared with this interview from 2008) but I thought that he asked just enough tough questions at the first to make the interview interesting. The one question that I wish he would have asked Obama but didn't was about the move by the Obama administration during the first two years of office away from the Bush era policy of challenging dictatorships and promoting democracy around the world. I felt that O'Reilly could have made the point that the U.S. could have been much more active in promoting change in Egypt and other places before 2010 than they ultimately ended up being.

The second part of the interview was refreshingly light. Too often, interviews with the president focus on the difficult political questions faced every day as a part of the job description and on not much else. While I'm not advocating throwing "soft ball" questions to politicians as a matter of course, sometimes it's nice to see the media call back the attack dogs a bit when dealing with these issues. I like that Bill gave Obama a chance to explain how hard the decisions are that he makes on a daily basis. As Obama notes, people have to have a thick skin to survive the election process and become president.

What do you think? Please leave your comments below. 

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