I remember several years ago when Facebook was fresh out of the coding gate, college seniors feared that their employers would look at a certain picture of them at the fraternity mixer holding a can of beer, and that would be the end of their resume.  In those days, Facebook (and some other social networks) was limited to college-aged persons, but now the fear has spread to high schoolers.

An article in the Chicago Tribune states that a recent study done by Kaplan claims that 10% of college admissions boards check the social profiles of their applicants.

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Two weeks into the season and I wonder… “How many Bivings Report enthusiasts play fantasy football (please, keep your fantasies to yourselves)?” Its popularity has grown to astronomical proportions nation-wide, to the point that even the Wall Street Journal is writing about it. The WSJ reports that, though no hard figure exists, millions play fantasy football and their spenditure numbers in the hundreds of millions. I’ve been playing for about six years myself. We even have a Bivings league of our own going (in which yours truly is currently third out of 10 teams very early on). (more…)

It really surprises me that more political figures and celebrities have not taken Obama's lead and created functional social networking sites that engage users and allow for not only greater transparency, but also general likeability of its moderator.  Leave it to a standup comedian to design a site capable of doing both of those things.

Aaron Karo began writing his monthly column over a decade ago, when he emailed his comedic musings (which he called ‘ruminations') to 20 or so of his closest friends.  Now, the comedian has become quite a success, boasting appearances on the Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson, two books, and subscribers to his column from all over the world.

In August 2008, he launched a new website which aims to unite his fans (and new fans) by allowing them to submit their own ruminations.  The site is awesome in its simplicity.  After signing up for a user account and doing the generic social networking tasks (i.e. uploading a profile picture, typing in some data about yourself), you are allowed to ruminate on any topic of your choosing, trying your best to emulate the genius of the comedian. (more…)

The Bivings Gorup recently launched what is easily, as far as we are aware, one of the most advanced multilingual sites made in Drupal ever built. The International Journalists’ Network, or IJNet can be seen here: www.ijnet.org. The website, built for the non-profit organization International Center For Journalists (ICFJ), leverages Drupal’s built in multilingual capabilities together with a number of custom fixes and changes.

Key challenges included:

• Creating a flexible page layout interface that allowed site administrators to easily create and customize sections in both left and right columns, giving them new colors, any kind of custom or dynamic content, as well as being able to define their own section colors.
• Having full-featured mutilingual social elements on the site, including user profiles, inter-user messaging, user networking, user network activity feeds, user comment posting, user article posting, and many other dynamic social elements.
• Enabling users to easily view the site in right-to-left languages such as Arabic and Persian.
• Creating custom displays of the site for low resolution monitors.
• Creating a platform suitable for managing mutliple mailing lists for use with third party mail systems.
• Allowing the client to easily add new languages to the platform when desired.

The International Center For Journalists administers IJNet and creates its content in five different languages, and counting…

Take a look at the site at www.ijnet.org and let us know what you think!

As if our web developers didn't already have enough standards-fudging and code-juggling to optimize websites for every conceivable end-user browser, Google launched the public release of Google Chrome today — and I was right in line to download it. The Installation .exe file was small (a little over 400 kb), only to connect to the internet and download the entire binary. I am writing this very post using the new browser, and here are some of my initial opinions on the new kid on the block.

Upon installation, I fell in love with its menu bar. I recently purchased an Eee PC 901, which has a maximum resolution of 1024×600 — so screen real estate is of particular interest to me. The menu/navigation is a minimalist's dream: tabs at the very top, address bar, drop-down menus from within the address bar. The extra 50 or so vertical pixels it saves on my screen is quite noticeable on this netbook when compared to Mozilla Firefox.

Each tab in Google Chrome is treated as a different process (at least in Windows XP) when I open up the task manager. I am not really sure what this does in terms of efficiency, but it is a different approach than Firefox (which I have been known to inflate to nearly a gigabyte through the over-use of tabs). If you have an opinion on this technical matter, please, let us know in the comments!

The Chrome's default start page is like the desktop version of iGoogle. It will apparently track the most visited sites, and display them in page previews for easy access. I am not convinced of this yet, but it could turn out to be a great addition to a streamlined product.

I fooled around a bit on Meebo, YouTube, Wikipedia, Gmail, Flickr, and some WordPress installations, all without encountering any glaring errors or compliancy issues.*

Since the blogs and forums I frequent will be all ablaze about this over the coming months, I thought I'd get my limited initial reaction to the product out there with the promise of a full review to come. Something to add? Drop it in the comments.

*Update: The WYSIWYG editor in WordPress doesn't appear to be very compatible with Google Chrome. More comparisons and compatibility issues to come in the full review.