Josh Sager Media: Creative Technologies Blog

8 minutes.

Thats roughly how long it takes to listen to 2 songs.
It will get me halfway to work.
It’s approximately the time it takes to make a new pot of coffee for the office
All I need to check up on gmail, tiwtter, myspace, google reader, and hotmail

8 minutes.
Also the amount of time it took from blog post to prize giveaway. Congratulations sirpsychosexy! You are officially the first ever winner of swag on Star Dot Star Comics.

Thanks to everyone who participated and thank you for reading. Be on the lookout for more fun games in the future.

Sylvester Stallone was in the news recently and it got me thinking about a bunch of caricatures that I’ve been meaning to post online. So in light of Sly making the news here is a caricature I drew a while back.

While setting this up it got me thinking about doing more celebrity caricatures and cartoons. Every time I check my web stats “Tom Cruise” and “Britney Spears” always seem to float around the top of my keywords simply because of the cartoons I made for them in the past. So I might start doing more topical cartoons just for fun.

I’ve been wrestling with joshandrachelwedding.com for far too long. And by wrestle I mean fighting with the domain to resolve on my web server. I honestly don’t know what the bid deal was, nonetheless it is a good feeling to have the domain up!

Stop everything your doing and go and check this out! Outsmart OS3D Demo

The next generation of Flash and Flex is upon us.

In celebration of Helvetica’s 50th Birthday we are having a party at the Creative Treehouse. Stop on by and help to recognize the versatile yet underrated font.

Sharing my knowledge and experiences is something I very much enjoy. Especially when it’s about something I’m passionate about. Such as Flash… or any technology for that matter. Which is the core reason why I participate in local new media events, users groups, and so on.

I’ve often been asked why I do all of these things when I could be sleeping, watching movies or otherwise. Until just recently I’ve been at a loss for an answer. But today as I was coding it sort of came to me. I’m addicted to learning.

Over the past 8 years I’ve been a designer, developer, and instructor teaching multimedia and to my surprise it hasn’t gotten old. I wake up every day pumped to create, share, and explore. I dream about it, and some days I’m up before my alarm because I literally can’t wait to get behind a computer screen. Although I can get burned out on the minutia from time to time I still look forward the next thing I get to create and share with the world. Especially when I can learn from the creation process. That’s when I find myself enjoying my work the most.

Last weekend I finished teaching a 3 week Flash brush up course at PTI. Where I shared my Flash expertise with about 10 hungry individuals willing to spend the good part of a Saturday listening to me geek out about Flash and web technologies. Even though I consider myself to be a seasoned veteran when it comes to Flash basics, I seem to always learn something new from my class. Whether it’s how they learn or how they approach technology or even cool websites I’m usually getting just as much back as I’m giving out there. On many cases I’m getting much more.

Even though I was exhausted by the end of the last Saturday it was a great feeling leaving that classroom knowing that I made an impact. And that it was just a talking head experience. I felt a mutual engagement as we all learned together.

Reflecting on this experience helped me realize a mantra my farther passed on to me as a kid which is “Learn to Live and Live to Learn”. Everytime I think I really know and understand what this means I wake up and experience it all over again.

There are still some people out there that are bashing new media and discounting it’s validity. Here is just another example of how new media is helping to keep everyone more honest.

VW got Busted for google spamming. What is google spamming? That is the act of placing text in a hidden div layer so that the google bots will find text on the page, but the user does not. Brilliant, but kind of shady.

Recently the Cartoon Barry Blog pointed out VW’s Google hack and what do you know? Google contacted VW and set them straight. Typically this would get a site deindexed, however VW is a large company and I’m sure something was worked out.

The point is that Blogging, Podcasting, and Web Video matters! It helps to level the playing field so media giants aren’t the only ones distributing information. Which in turn helps the entire community. It keeps everyone honest. Furthermore it should bother the big boys because this disrupts their monoply on the information they chose to give to us.

But the tides have turned once again. Like the printing press before it, new media will once again revolutionize the world.

Over the last 4 months my website, stardotstarcomics.com has been receiving a lot of traffic. Which is totally awesome. I’m really excited to see that people are following the blog and checking out some of the comics.

Much of the traffic increase is as a result of social networking and participation in local events, like Podcamp Pittsburgh, Bootcamp Pittsbugh, Creative Marathon, Pittsburgh Flash Users Group, and The Creative Treehouse. Which has been terrific, but there’s one small problem.
Verbally saying stardotstarcomics.com is very difficult and is very confusing. It’s a very long name and the spelled out dot throws everyone for a loop. My only battle strategy is to say stardotstarcomicsPERIODcom, but a lot of people think the PERIOD is spelled out too. It makes for an uncomfortable conversation and the worst web marketing ever.

It really came to head that other night when my mom lost my web address and I had to explain to her what it was. That conversation lasted about 5 minutes longer than it really needed to. If I can’t simply tell my mom what my web address is, then I need to do something about that.

In 24-48 hours I will be the proud owner of sdscomics.com pointing to this website. Don’t worry I’m also keeping the stardotstarcomics.com name as well. sdscomics is much easier to say and to type. Hopefully this will make it easier for me to talk about and easier for you to get here.

PS I want to thank all of you reading my blog. This has been a great way to share really cool things going on in the creative and technology communities.

The Creative Treehouse is hosting a benefit this weekend to help raise money for the Schools for School foundation. This is an opportunity for Art to help benefit the less fortunate.

Check the flyer for more details.

Alright. I admit it. I am addicted to twitter. I really didn’t see the point of it before I started and now I really can’t stop twittering all day long. I’m sure this phase will pass, but damn is it so much fun to continue the conversation all day long despite not having an internet connection.

The best way I can describe twitter, is that it is sort of like a group chat will all of your friends. But the conversation really never ends similar to an ever changing IM away message. Even typing this it out twitter does seem very silly. Nonetheless, once you start you will get hooked. Especially if you have the kinds of friends that I do, where just about everyone is hilarious. Sharing tidbits, and general day to day observations which I find to be very fascinating.

Twitter Website