Revealing of CS5

Wow!! The National Association of Photoshop Professionals (NAPP) Photoshop World celebrated their 20th anniversary this year. Russell Brown, one of the instructors performed an interactive slideshow showing off the main points of photoshop throughout the years, starting with version 1.0 and all the way to Adobe CS4. If you are wondering about Adobe CS5….well the lucky few hundreds of people who went to the keynote opener of the conference got to take a peek into Photoshop CS5. April 12th, 2010 will be the ultimate reveal date. Besides the huge announcement of CS5, the instructors this year taught well beyond my expectations from my previous trip in 2009. Being a designer, I went to the “hacking into photoshop” and ” Online portfolio gallery with Dreamweaver” along with 10 other classes.

Expo Stations

The expo had stations from Wacom, Istockphoto, Kelby Training, and many more. If you thought you might not be learning enough about the Adobe programs, the main vendors of the expo were holding classes right within their station. Wacom held cintiq tutorials, Kelby training had photography classes, and Medialab used Sitegrinder 3 to create websites.

Overall, PSW 2010 was an amazing conference (like always) and if your wondering what else you might have missed by not going, there will be a West coast conference in Vegas in September!! By that time, I am going to assume CS5 will be out and you might get a few chances to win a master suite!! (They did give out 10 copies of CS5.. and I was pretty close to winning too!)

About Laura Bissell

Laura Bissell is a contributing blogger for Rio Online Development. She is a Graphic Designer, Photographer and President of The Graphic Design Student Association (GDSA) for the University of Central Florida. The GDSA is a student run organization that strives to open a dialogue about contemporary design practice to students and the community through a series of workshops, print tours, portfolio reviews, design contests, and other related events.

An Entrepreneurs Showcase with some of the biggest names in Tech.

Leaving San Diego right now to go to the 007 Twiistup event in Los Angeles. Twiistup is The Entrepreneurs Showcase where venture capitalists and entrepreneurs come to find the next big thing. Can’t wait for an amazing day.

Here is a video from the 2005 Twiistup:

Here’s just a sample of the top 30 people we’ll meet at Twiistup:

Michael Jones, COO of MySpace
Dan Benyamin, co-founder and CEO CitizenNet
Rahul Sonnad, founder and CEO Geodelic
Chamillionaire, Grammy winning and Platinum selling artist
Peter Guber, Chairman and CEO of Mandalay Entertainment, former Chairman of Sony Pictures
Kevin Pereira, co-host Attack of The Show, G4 TV
Dave Waldman, CEO of Bccthis
Peter Lee, Partner Baroda Ventures
Loren Bendele, CEO of Savings.com
Ralph Barbagallo, CEO, FLARB LLC
Ezra Roizen, Investment banker, co-host Vator Box on VatorNews, Ackrell Capital
Richard Rosenblatt, founder, Chairman and CEO of Demand Media
Anurag Jain, CEO, Gigzee
Christopher Macho, Founder and CEO, WeFridge
Babette Pepaj, founder/CEO, BakeSpace
Ben Parr, co-editor, Mashable
Steve Raymond, VP Product/Strategy, Comcast Digital Entertainment
Paul Graham, founder and Partner Y-Combinator
Mark Suster, Partner / VC, GRP Partners
Brian Deagon, Reporter, Investors Business Daily
Tyler Crowley, Dir of Corp Dev and Strategy, Mahalo
Neil Patel, Co-founder, Crazy Egg / KISSmetrics
Justin Kan, Founder/President, Justin.tv
Rick Heitzmann, Managing Director, FirstMark Capital
Jolie O’Dell, Writer / Community Manager, Read Write Web
Brian Newton, Managing Member, Aurum Ventures
Gilad Elbaz, CEO, Factual Inc
Jason Nazar, Founder & CEO, DocStoc
Clark Landry, Co-Founder, Top Level Domain Holdings
Dmitry Shapiro, CEO, Veoh

Going to be an exciting day!!

How do I make my blog into a top blog?

“I don’t have a secret, but I have a single piece of advice that I like to give to people who are starting blogging. One, simple, important thing that people who are blogging rarely do, and can make a huge difference in how widely read your blog is, and particularly how widely read your blog is by people who don’t know it exists, who find it through RSS feeds and through Google, and that’s to write headlines as though you are a wire service writer,” Cory Doctorow explains.

Your blog titles and opening lines are used by readers to help them decide whether they want to take the time to read your article or not. Cory suggests that these elements should contain all the information you need to know to completely skip the article. It sounds counter-intuitive, but in the long term, your readers are happier and more likely to trust your articles in the future.

Take a look at the video, which is dated back in 2007, yet is even more relevant than ever:

Click here to view the embedded video.

I think Cory’s underlying philosophy is to do everything you can to gain your reader’s trust.

In The Blogger’s Guide to SEO, Aaron Wall suggests, “Descriptive headlines help put your story in context, and make people more likely to click on your site when it appears in search results.” He also references Brian Clark’s series on Magnetic Headlines.

What’s your #1 tip for improving blog headlines and readership? Comment below.