The gallery space has been remodeled, an initial group of the most talented artists contacted, and the best of original art is either in the gallery or on its way. Soon Fairhaven Originals Gallery (endearingly referred to simply as FOG) will soon be opening its doors to the community. And as a part of the Whatcom County art community, FOG is beginning its role as a contributor.

FOG is a proud sponsor of the upcoming Mount Baker Theatre production of Benise – The Spanish Guitar. This will be an exciting presentation of Spanish flamenco guitar performances and dancing. Play the video above for a taste.

A very useful service, KnowEm, is designed to empower you to proactively identify over 300 online services where either your brand is being used or not. If it is being used, you can quickly identify if you’re in control of it or not and if it isn’t being used, you can quickly establish an account thus preventing future confusion or hijacking of your brand.

We recommend KnowEm to protect your brand. Check them out today. They’re good people.

More information can be found on this press release.

If you believe the information found on DVD packaging, you shouldn’t have any concerns about placing your wedding video, important business documents, family archive photos, etc. on DVDs that use gold as their reflective layer or are a little more expensive and sold under the label, “archive DVD” (a bit of an oxymoron really… keep reading). You wouldn’t have any concerns about using such DVDs for long-term storage since their packages are emblazoned with claims of ten, twenty, fifty and even one-hundred -year life expectancy. You’d sleep well knowing your fondest, most important memories and information are securely preserved.

So why are people who make a living from storing crucial, one-of-a-kind digital data not following your lead? What’s keeping librarians, archivists, photographers and genealogists from running down the same path for their long-term storage needs? The best answer may be found in a presentation prepared by the Memory of the World Programme’s Sub-Committee on Technology. This provides detailed guidance on assessing the risks associated with storing archival data on recordable CDs and DVDs.

Here are some of the warnings from the document that consumers will be well-advised to heed as they run contrary to what manufacturers and marketers of recordable DVDs have been telling us:

1. (Preface) Around [the year] 2000 … Concerns about the reliability of recordable CDs and DVDs were also supported by an increasing number of reports of discs failing at the time of their production.
2. (Preface) … and while several products have been marketed since which attempt to optimise their longevity, the principle problem remained unsolved.
3. (Introduction) Even though subsequent technological development has improved on many of the early manufacturing faults no credible claim can be made to permanence.
4. (Introduction) Recordable CDs and DVDs are often chosen as archival carriers, however, the risk of failure of a storage system based on this type technology is high when compared to other approaches.
5. (Page 10) Error measurement is a critical part of producing reliable data on a recordable disc. The fact that the data is able to be read, as assessed by “verification”, is not sufficient indication on its own because a disc with a high level of errors can sometimes still be read, but is very likely to fail soon after.
6. (Page 10) Dye type, though significant, is only one of the factors determining the life of the media. The variation in the amount of dye used in the dye layer, a result of the manufacturers’ race for even higher recording speeds and higher density recording, is a contributing factor in the long term failure of recordable optical media.
7. (Page 10 ) It should be noted that discs optimised for high speed recording use less dye, which may indicate a shorter life expectancy. DVD-R uses less dye as a matter of course, as the data rate when writing to a recordable DVD is much higher than for CD-R.
8. (Page 11) Many discs that appear to be reputable brands may turn out to have been manufactured by a second party and repackaged for sale.
9. (Page 13) The error correction capability of most replay equipment will mask the effects of degradation until the errors are well into the uncorrectable region. When this point is reached, all subsequent copies are irreversibly flawed.
10. (Page 15) The use of recordable and rewritable CD/DVDs as archival carriers cannot be advocated unless a strict testing and monitoring program is set up. It should be noted that testing and analysing, though absolutely necessary, will be time consuming, adding long-term costs to the archival solution. When planning an archival strategy, these costs should be included.
11. (Conclusion) Recordable CDs and more recently DVDs are very popular storage media. Because of the relative simplicity of their production, their easy availability and their financial affordability they have been very frequently used in projects to preserve and make accessible cultural and scientific documents of all kinds. As they were never intended for use as reliable media for long term preservation and have been developed primarily as a consumer product for the mass market their use in critical archival and preservation contexts constitutes a significant risk.

This document was revisited by the Sub-Committee in 2008 and found to continue to be relevant and useful.

No longer are you stuck with a bunch of different badges from a variety of services in a variety of colors and sizes into your sidebar. Instead you get a professionally designed badge that includes:

• Your name and title just as you have it on your PeoplePond profile
• Your photo from your profile
• Your Identity Verification status
• Chicklets (little icons) linking to your presence at all the services where your blog visitors can connect with and discover more about you.

Some of you will notice this badge follows the same great look used in the PeoplePond Facebook profile badge.

Both the ADAM API implementation and the WordPress widget provide complete SEO benefits by providing clean links from the badge back to your profile and also from the chicklets, helping boost your online personal brand’s SEO and visibility up even more.

To install the WordPress PeoplePond Online Identity Widget, simply search for the “PeoplePond Online Identity Widget” from the Plugins – Add New page and click Install when the plugin has been located.

To install the ADAM API badge on a non-wordpress site, you can call the API directly in one of two ways:

http://adam.peoplepond.com/peeps.php?displayName=XXXXXX&widget=yes

http://adam.peoplepond.com/peeps.php?displayName=XXXXXX&mini=yes

And of course, if you still haven’t created your PeoplePond and CompanyPond profiles, what’s stopping you? Get started now. 

Your friends at PeoplePond have created a personal SEO profile for Santa Claus including links to a few of his favorite charities. What would you do to help boost its rank in search results? Do you have SEO copy recommendations? Have you created some backlinks to the profile? Have you shared the profile with others on social media sites? It’s all good.

And as your reward for helping, you will receive a PeoplePond profile with a free full-service SEO and Identity Verification package subscription for one year (a $99 value) and your profile will be featured in the list of contributors. Check out the complete information and instructions for SEO Santa 2009.

Please blog, tweet, broadcast and share this information with your SEO and social media expert friends and anyone else who can help with this project. Let’s get Santa and some great charities the visibility they deserve at the top of the search results before Christmas Day.

Read the SEO Santa 2009 press release.

The ideal result would be a combination of content produced by the brand intermixed with positive content from other sources. Negative content can hurt a brand given the large number of people that turn to the search engines for information. So it is not uncommon for companies to make an effort to remove such content or actively “push” it down in the search results by promoting positive content using simple tools such our CompanyPond and PeoplePond services or hiring reputation management firms.

Admittedly, we were quite surprised at the lack of brand control these large Fortune 100 companies have over their own brands. Most of the issues can easily be averted with standard Online Reputation management practices.

This study is very interesting as it brings up some familiar questions about “controlling” one’s brands online. First, is it really possible to control how your brand appears online given the ease and freedom the marketplace has to create piles of content about your brand without your assistance or knowledge. And secondly, given this ease and freedom, how expensive and effective would it be to provide a viable motivation for people outside the organization to create and/or promote positive content about your brand? What risk exposures come with such a strategy?

24% of the bad items found seem to be opinions of a single person, versus fact or standard public knowledge.

With so many people available to create positive content around a brand, the above finding seems painfully ironic.

1. improve your online visibility with greater personal SEO,
2. prove your personal identity to your audience, trade partners and prospective contract employers (like, say, the government), and
3. assert ownership over your online presence.

This is one of the problems that PeoplePond.com is trying to solve. When someone from a social network connects with you, how do you know that this particular “John Smith” is the John Smith who you met at the chamber of commerce meeting, or at college?

What?! You still haven’t created your PeoplePond and CompanyPond profiles? What’s stopping you? Get started now.

Read the press release here and see what others are saying about the news.

CD/DVD experiential life expectancy is 2 to 5 years even though published life expectancies are often cited as 10 years, 25 years, or longer. However, a variety of factors discussed in the sources cited in FAQ 15, below, may result in a much shorter life span for CDs/DVDs. Life expectancies are statistically based; any specific medium may experience a critical failure before its life expectancy is reached. Additionally, the quality of your storage environment may increase or decrease the life expectancy of the media. We recommend testing your media at least every two years to assure your records are still readable.

From The U.S. National Archives and Records Administration Web site (Item 6 in the FAQs)

Who knew? Certainly I didn’t. For some time now, DVDR manufacturers have been leading us to believe that by replacing the silver reflective layer with gold, they have somehow increased the life-span of your data on their DVDR discs. Most of us really don’t have the time to dig into the technology behind optical storage media to know if that premise makes sense. The discs cost more, come with a claim of preserving your files for 80 to 100 years so what’s there to doubt?

Unfortunately, there are many things about DVDRs that can be considered weak points in the design. Any one of these weak points can easily and silently put your important files in jeopardy. Most notably:

1. when silver was used as the reflective layer, it was prone to oxidizing which defeated its ability to reflect. This problem was solved for conventional disc design by replacing silver with gold.
2. your data is stored on a layer of organic dye as it reacts to the laser beam when the disc is burned. This dye, being of an organic nature, breaks down even in the best of conditions. It is very susceptable to exposure to light and temperature.
3. the beam used to burn the data onto the dye layer is also used to read the data back, causing additional degradation of the data layer every time the disc is read.

Recently, people have begun going to their DVDR archives to access their important files and are discovering this unexpected data loss. A writer for the New York Times told of his experience and people commented in droves about their experiences as well.

Feel free to share your experiences in the comments here.

We’ve been led to believe our CDs and DVDs will last decades but now people are discovering the organic dye used to store the data on is prone to breaking down over time, so fast in fact that you will be lucky if your memories are still readable if you burned them more than a few years ago.

So, quickly now, go grab your saved memories and see how healthy they are. Let us know here in the comments what you discover.