Pimp My Blog: Blog Promotion Tips May 3rd

OUR NEXT CLASS RUNS
Saturday, May 3rd

Current course:

Pimp My Blog: Promotion Tips

What: Blog Promotion Tips for Beginners

When: 10:00am-2:00 pm, Saturday, May 3rd, 2008

Where: Tradeworks Training Society, Chinatown

Why: Now that you’ve got a blog, why toil in obscurity? This course will teach you effective blog promotion techniques to reliably increase your readership. Each course is limited to 8 students, and covers blog basics like:

· what a blog can and can’t do for you, famewise, and how to get there
· professional vs personal profiles, privacy and promotion
· community netiquette and joining the blogosphere at large
· what the world wants to hear vs what you have to say

Who: raincoaster media ltd, in partnership with Tradeworks Training Society.

How(much)? $125 tuition prepaid only, or $100 if registered along with any other half-day social media course.

To register: email bloggingclasses at gmail.com and reserve your space via the secure Paypal link at the top right-hand corner of http://raincoaster.com or http://runningthroughrain.wordpress.com .

Reservation guaranteed only upon acceptance of payment.

Upcoming Courses: Corporate Blogging, Blogging for Nonprofit Organizations, Blogging for Entrepreneurs, and Photoblogging (online and in Montreal, courtesy Neath of Walking Turcot Yards). Please email to be put on the notification list for dates.

Vancouver Film School and YouTube hold scholarship contest

VFS and YouTube have just announced an international scholarship competition that should interest anyone in eligible countries who is looking towards a career in the entertainment industry.

The prize is a full tuition scholarship to internationally-respected Vancouver Film School, the school out of which Kevin Smith dropped to go on to produce the magnum opus, the veritable Big Chill of his generation, Clerks.

The challenge is to make a compelling YouTube pitch explaining just exactly why you’re the natural choice to win. Anyone with enough self-confidence to go into film should have no problem with this part. The school picks the finalists, and then the viewers on YouTube make the final choice.

Official Rules

Full Press Release (PDF)

A few more details, from the FAQ:

This competition is about making film school accessible to everyone. The YouTube community will award three aspiring artists (that includes directors, animators, actors, sound designers and more) with full-tuition scholarships to the Vancouver Film School program of their choice.

Between March 18th and May 9th, submit a short film, animation or creative pitch addressing the theme “What Matters to You.” You must start your video by identifying the VFS program you wish to attend and you must limit your video to no more than three minutes. On May 20th, we will announce the 10 finalists, selected by Vancouver Film School.

From May 20th to May 27th, the YouTube community will view and vote for their favorite videos.

On May 30th, we will announce the 3 scholarship winners.

What programs are up for scholarship awards?

1. Foundation Visual Art & Design
2. Acting Essentials
3. 3D Animation & Visual Effects
4. Classical Animation
5. Digital Character Animation
6. Houdini™ Certification
7. Acting for Film & Television
8. Digital Design
9. Entertainment Business Management
10. Film Production
11. Game Design
12. Makeup Design for Film & Television
13. Sound Design for Visual Media
14. Writing for Film & Television

Some handy tips:

Be creative. Don’t just tell us what’s important to you – show us. For example, if you’re a director, make a short film or documentary about an issue you care about. If you’re an animator, animate a story about an issue, person, place, etc. that matters to you. If you’re a writer, pitch a fresh screenplay concept about something that matters to you. If you’re a makeup artist, transform a stranger into someone who matters to you. These are just ideas and we know you can do better, but the point is: think creatively!

What gets into the shortlist?

Vancouver Film School will judge submissions based on the following criteria:

a. Creativity and Originality (up to 25 points)
b. Relevance of the video to the particular program of study selected (up to 25 points)
c. Technical Execution: Camera/Sound/Lighting/Editing (up to 25 points)
d. Overall Impression (up to 25 points)

And after that, it’s all up to the community on YouTube, so start sucking up building relationships now!

Blogging for Nonprofits March 26th

OUR NEXT CLASS RUNS
Wednesday, March 26th

Current course: Blogging for Nonprofits

 

• What: a hands-on, blog building workshop including advice on how your organization can get the most impact from social media and blogs.

• When: 9 - 4 Wednesday, March 26th

• Where: Tradeworks Training Society, Downtown Vancouver

• Why: Learn to use social media and blogs to complement your organization’s mission. Get a blog up and running in one day with personal instruction in a small, intensive workshop.

 

This workshop covers blogging issues like:

> what social media can and can’t do for your organization

> posting rich media like podcasts, video, and images

> basic copyright law and accepted practices

> solving basic technical problems, where to find help

> privacy, confidentiality, and the internet

> balancing accessibility and professionalism online

> SEO, publicity, and building your media presence

Tuition is $200 per participant. Please pre-register via email prior to Friday, March 21st. No late registrations will be accepted. Computers are provided; you may bring a laptop if you prefer. Presented by raincoaster media ltd, in partnership with Tradeworks Training Society. Contact or 778-235-0592, bloggingclasses AT gmail DOT com .

With class size limited to 6, this will be a program of personalized, intense learning. During the workshop you will create a blog, customize the design, and publish several draft posts including various multimedia formats such as video. You will leave with a functional, professional blog and the skills you need to run and promote it.

Why blog? Check out the creative, effective ways that other nonprofits are using blogs to distribute their message independent of the mainstream media:

> 10 reasons every nonprofit must have a blog

> 10 ways nonprofits can use blogs

> blogging basics for nonprofits

> the nonprofit blog exchange

> net2learn blogging for nonprofits

> how nonprofits can use social media

> should your nonprofit have a blog?

Upcoming Courses: Corporate and Nonprofit Blogging, Pimp My Blog (blog
promotion), Blogging for Business, Audio Podcasting, and Photoblogging (online and in
Montreal, courtesy Neath of Walking Turcot Yards). Please email bloggingclasses AT gmail DOT com to be put on the notification list.
Bio: Lorraine Murphy has been blogging for many years, and her flagship blog, raincoaster, is ranked in the top 20,000 blogs in the world. She maintains The Shebeen Club Blog for the literary group of the same name, running through rain for students of her course Blogging to Personal Growth, and Blogger’s Blurt, a resource for beginning WordPress bloggers. She mommyblogs at TeenyManolo and celebrityblogs at Ayyyy!. Ms Murphy is the author of Terminal City: Vancouver’s Missing Women and a former Small Business Columnist at Business in Vancouver newspaper and Occupational Pursuit magazine. As one of the cornerstone volunteers in the WordPress.com technical help forums, she has long experience helping beginning bloggers develop fluency and achievement online.

Contact us below for more details:

Name (required)

Email (required)

Website

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Jack London on inspiration

“You can’t wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.”
– Jack London, Author

passed along from Raj

quiz: how powerful are you?

Powerful enough to come back from the dead, apparently! Yes, we are reanimating the running through rain blog, and wish me luck preventing the computer from crashing with all this blogging I’m doing lately. Here, raincoaster, tumblr, TeenyManolo, Ayyyy; I’m blogging 24/7 and then some.

In any case, here’s a quick quiz designed to see how powerful you are. I think it really measures self-determination, not power, but what’s a little semantics between friends, eh?

Borrowed from this time, this space.

Your Power Level is: 84%

You have all the tools you need to be a success - both professionally and personally.You’ll probably go beyond reaching your goals. You’ll change the world (at least a little).

How Powerful Are You?

Blogging for Beginners January 5th

OUR NEXT CLASS RUNS
Saturday, January 5th

Current course: Learn to Blog

 

What: a hands-on learn to blog workshop

Current course: Learn to Blog

Upcoming Courses: Blog Promotion (Pimp My Blog) January 12th, Blogging for Nonprofits and Community Groups, January 23.

What: a hands-on learn to blog workshop

When: 10-2 Saturday, January 5th, 2007

Where: Tradeworks Training Society, Downtown Vancouver

Why: Get a blog up and running in one day with personal instruction in
small classes. This workshop covers blog basics like:

* what a blog can and can’t do for you
* how to post podcasts, video, audio, images, and text in your blog
* basic copyright law and accepted practices
* solving basic technical problems, where to find help
* privacy and the internet

Who: raincoaster media ltd, in partnership with Tradeworks Training Society.

Contact bloggingclasses AT gmail DOT com or 778-235-0592.

How(much)? $65 tuition, or $100 for Learn to Blog PLUS Blog Promotion (Pimp My Blog).
Please pre-register via email to ensure your reservation.

With class size limited to 8, this will be a program of personalized,
hands-on learning. During the class you will create your own blog,
tweak the design, publish your first few posts, add a YouTube video,
and even some music. You will leave with a functional, personalized
blog and the basic skills you need to run it.

Upcoming Courses: Corporate and Nonprofit Blogging, Pimp My Blog (blog
promotion), Blogging for Business, Audio Podcasting, and Photoblogging (online and in
Montreal, courtesy Neath of Walking Turcot Yards). Please email
bloggingclasses AT gmail DOT com to be put on the notification list.
Bio: Lorraine Murphy has been blogging for many years, and her flagship blog, raincoaster, is ranked in the top 20,000 blogs in the world. She maintains The Shebeen Club Blog for the literary group of the same name, running through rain for students of her course Blogging to Personal Growth, and Blogger’s Blurt, a resource for beginning WordPress bloggers. She mommyblogs at TeenyManolo and celebrityblogs at Ayyyy!. Ms Murphy is the author of Terminal City: Vancouver’s Missing Women and a former Small Business Columnist at Business in Vancouver newspaper and Occupational Pursuit magazine. As one of the cornerstone volunteers in the WordPress.com technical help forums, she has long experience helping beginning bloggers develop fluency and achievement online.

Contact us below for more details:

Name (required)

Email (required)

Website

Text only. No markup allowed.

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If Things Look Down, Look Up

This is a marvelously inspirational column by Thomas Hoving, heartlessly stolen from the December, 1985 issue of the now-defunct and oft-lamented Connoiseur magazine.

Early this fall, I had one of those “Chicken Little” kinds of days. Not only the sky but the whole world seemed to be collapsing. Riots, bombings, apartheid, earthquakes, and plane crashes dominated the news. There was less fruitful discussion on disarmament than in a decade. What apparently was an entire family of navy people had betrayed us to the Soviets.

The hot new artists in SoHo seemed to be broadcasting a message of anxiety and disaster. Nor were the other arts, which so often offer solace, of much help. The wells of creativity had surely dried up. No one expects brilliance from the fall television fare, but we don’t need this season’s seepage of sewage, either. And the fact that not one but two new magazines entirely devoted to gossip were to appear - one having Princess Diana on the cover; the other, Joan Collins - an indication of our chief interests? If so, we are already awash in trivia. Did you know, for example, that Bijan was going to launch a perfume? Or that Halley’s comet might wander into another solar system this time around? That last brought to mind the waggish Daily News headline announcing that a killer comet was going to destroy the Earth: “SERIES OFF, NO WORLD!” And when that in turn reminded me of what George Steinbrenner has done to the Yankees, I knew for sure that Chicken Little had come home to roost.

Yes, the weather was rotten, with this, menacing clouds scudding close to the ground. The air seemed two parts hydrogen and three parts depression. Then, suddenly, the gusty winds stilled. The clouds abruptly disappeared seaward, leaving a cool atmosphere of such pellucidity that you’d have thought an immense diamond had replaced the Van Allen belts.

I looked up to the night sky, and there, a few feet above my head and at the same time a billion light-years away, lay the canopy of the Milky Way. The glory of the sight exhilarated me. Here was something no mortal had made up, manipulated, hyped, gussied or tarted up. Here was infinite mystery, the enduring dusty glimmers of the first trillionth of a second of the birth of the universe. I could only reflect on how different those heavenly bodies are from us willful, cruel, posturing mortals! The shimmering dome of the Milky Way seemed everything we humans could never be - orderly, mathematically pristine, revolving at benevolent and polite distances from one another. Up there could be no fools, fakirs, killers, crazies, or sleazes devoted to bad manners and bad taste. Nothing but perfection.

The clear air had brought a chill with it, and, before going inside, I looked up once again at that majestic curtain and felt lifted and peaceful. Suddenly, a shooting star ripped through the firmament, and that brought me to my senses. I laughed. I realized that I had been wrong on two counts. Chicken Little hadn’t come home to roost. There is as much good news as bad - more, in fact - but you have to dig it out; and there’s more substance than trivia…

And my fatuous idea that the Milky Way was utterly pure was wrong, too. Up there in the billions of stars, there had to be some bums and phonies: that shooting star, other mavericks spinning wildly and crashing into innocent ones, greedy black holes, overbright and arrogant stars, shyster stars, stars with the most vulgar taste. I had to smile at my early reveries. The sky isn’t pure, but it sure isn’t falling, nor is humanity, either.

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Fundraiser for Trevor Greene tonight!

Save the date for No Turning Back - A Fundraiser For Trevor Greene

Date: Wednesday September 26

Time: Doors open: 8pm,

Show starts: 9pm - 12am

MC: Todd Battis CTV News Reporter

Band: So Tight Band & Brickhouse the Band

Place: The Yale Hotel - 1300 Granville Street

Price: $20

On September 26 we are gathering together at The Yale Hotel for a

fundraiser to assist Trevor, Debbie and Grace on their miraculous

healing journey. Captain Greene was attacked from behind and struck with

a taliban axe on March 4, 2006 while sitting in a peaceful Shura

discussing how to bring clean drinking water and basic medical care and

education to the women and children of Afghanistan. His survival has

been called a miracle in the medical profession as he presently

undergoes extensive rehabilitation to speak and to reconnect his brain

and muscles in order to regain function over his entire body. Hosted by

Master of Ceremonies and CTV West Coast News Reporter Todd Battis, the

entertainment line up will feature the infectious sounds of the SoTight

Band (www.thesotightband.com) and Brickhouse

(www.brickhousetheband.com). Tickets to No Turning Back - A Fundraiser

for Captain Trevor Greene are $20 in advance or at the door. Doors open

at 8pm. Show time begins at 9pm. Price of admission includes a silent

auction, 50/50 draws and raffle items. Proceeds from this fundraiser

will go to the Captain Trevor Greene Trust Fund.

Items for door prize, raffle draw and silent auction include two flights

tickets and accommodation to La Penita Mexico, wellness gift package,

one room night in an executive suite and dinner for two, dinner for

four, dinner for two, brunch for two, wine gift basket, chocolate gift

basket and much much more.

Companies that have generously donated are: Casita de la Penita,

Signature Vacations, Foundation for Integrated Health, Fairmont Hotel

Vancouver, Fairmont Waterfront Hotel, Sylvia Hotel, Century Plaza,

Brockmann’s Chocolate, Safeway, The Yale Hotel, In Motion Lotion, Cactus

Club, T tea room and merchant, Terra Bread, Liberty Wine Merchants, The

Atlantic Trap & Gill and Tamsen Ogden Photography.

If you can’t make it to the fundraiser but would still like to

participate following is the trust fund information: Captain Trevor

Greene Trust Fund, CIBC Account #39-31137 (Bank 010,Transit 00500).

You can conveniently purchase a ticket using your credit card through

paypal: http://www.eventbrite.com/event/71765653 . If you do your

tickets will be kept at the door the night of the event.

For more information you can contact Valerie Gibbs by phone at

604.992.4697 or via email at vcg at sfu.ca.

For more information on Trevor here is a few links:

The Globe and Mail’s story

Hazel’s story

My story

the perfect moment

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