Topic: TBA: To be announced / MacGurus / Raffle, This Thursday, January 19, 6:30 PM (main meeting Q&A)

WHERE: MSU Communications Arts Building, room 155. It’s on the north side of the building.

AND: Everyone is welcome to come to the afterglow at the Pizza House restaurant in the Hannah Plaza on Hagedorn Road following the meeting.

MACGURUs
Take advantage of our MacGurus, where paid up members can get one-on-one help for a few minutes with knowledgeable members of our group. MacGurus starts at 6:00. Your turn will be on a first-come, first-served basis, so get there early. Organize your question because if others are waiting, we will limit your session to 10 minutes. (You may be able to arrange an outside meeting if you need more time.) MacGurus is limited to a half hour total (three 10-minutes sessions) since we don’t want our gurus to miss the main meeting. And besides, we need them to answer questions during the Q & A!

6:30 Q & A – This is our regular session open to everyone.

RAFFLE
You must be a paid up member to pick up your free ticket at the door. Just one more reason to be a member! (Bring your cash or checkbooks.) The raffle is always held at the end of the meeting.

LOCATION & PARKING INFO. Here are two links to maps:

If you use the first map, it’s the balloon marked with the letter “A” over on the right side (you may have to scroll the map a little). If you expand and zoom in on the map you’ll see the parking ramp just to the south where we have free parking starting at 6:00. (There are meters, but you don’t have to feed them after 6 PM.) Come in the doors closest to the parking ramp. Room 161 is on the north side of the building (far from the parking ramp). Look for the LAMALUG signs.

Rules:

• Don’t demonstrate anything that is obscene or illegal
• Sign up for each demonstration when you get to the meeting (the order will be determined when we start)
• We want to encourage many people to demonstrate, so if you have more than one demonstration, please understand we’ll rotate through all the other people first, then come back for seconds. (And be sure to save room for dessert at the After Glow following the meeting!)

Check back here to see the details of the demo’s after the meeting.

Grouping search terms in quotation marks forces the search engine to look for the phrase within the quotes, rather than finding the separate words anywhere on the whole page.  The rather silly example used was to search using the terms cow and gun. Typing those two words alone is the same as searching for pages that have the word cow and the word gun somewhere on the same page.

The logic of search engines is that performing a search for “cow gun” is the same as the search “Cow with Gun.” It turns out that they both find a bunch of listings for the song, “Cows With Guns.” Using either a plus sign (+) to indicate “with” or the minus sign (-) to indicate “not” or “without,” gives totally different results: When you search for “cow -gun” you get no reference to the song “Cows With Guns” at all in the top two pages of the search results.  A search using “cow +gun” brings up references to both cowboys with guns and, of course, cows.  Go figure.

Mention was made of the way that search engines rank the results you see for your search.  When a YouTube video, or any website page for that matter, shows up on the first page of the results, it got there because of the criteria the search engine uses to give you the best possible result.  It includes such things as the popularity of a video (how many different people watch it and how many times it has been watched), as well as the number of other places online that have provided a link back to that site.

The field of Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, which is the ways to make a web page appear near the top of the search results for particular terms, is a big deal for both website owners and for website designers and developers.  This means that sometimes you will run across a site that ranked high in your results, but was really below par.  While the search engines keep tuning their algorithms to give you better results, websites keep trying to game the system (and around it goes!).

One area that did not get covered during the meeting is the availability of free audio and video podcasts from within iTunes.  Most all of these are free subscriptions.  In iTunes, go to the iTunes Store, and click on the Podcasts link along the top of the page. This will bring up a page full of only podcasts, and typing in key words for what you are looking for.  The classes available in the iTunesU are provided by colleges and universities around the world, and provide free acres to you so you can learn just about anything.  This will be demonstrated at the beginning of the next meeting on February 17th 2011.

Members can “Ask-A-Geek” from 6:00 PM until the start of the meeting at 6:30 PM.  Be sure to join us at the East Lansing Pizza House (located in the Hannah Plaza on South Hagadorn Road for our afterglow following the meeting.

Something New:

This month we’re trying something new for those of you who visit this page before the meeting.  We’ve uploaded our meeting as an event at EventBrite.  If you would be so kind as to register for the meeting with them, we want to see if it will help our check-in process at the meeting.  We’ll be doing this for a couple months this winter to get a better feel for the process, both for you as a user/member, and for us as the ones who have to make the meetings happen.

Here’s the link to register: http://lamalug-jan2011.eventbrite.com. Thanks in advance.

Officer Elections:

At the beginning of the meeting, LAMALUG will hold elections for the new Board of Directors.  Nominations were opened at the December 2010 meeting, and will close as the election begins.  The current slate of Officers is here, and the nominated list is here. (The list of nominations will be removed after the election.)  After the election, the new Board of Directors will be posted.

Board Nominations

We’re going to accept nominations for the Board of Directors tonight at the meeting.  The Board positions are President, Vice President, Treasurer, Recording Secretary, and a number of at large positions.  (The WebMaster and MacGuru positions are classified as at large.) There are a couple of vacant at large positions ready for a willing volunteer.  Ask one of the current Board members about it at the meeting!  Elections will be held in January at our normal meeting on Thursday, January 20, 2011.