Today the beta version of DC-based journalism startup NewsiT is launching its first major news assignment, and is seeking volunteers to sign up and help them prove that it is possible and viable to create ‘crowd-sourced’ news of quality and impact using community contributions. NewsiT is a mobile social network for people who want to create and share news that’s meaningful, trustworthy and riveting.

“NewsiT believes people want their news portable, personalized and participatory. Our mission is to ‘reinvent’ news content creation by engaging citizens as mobile reporters all collaborating via social networks to produce multimedia coverage of relevance, quality and value.”

Yesterday marked the inaugural “What’s Next DC – Your Marketing Communications Roadmap” Conference. Marketers, PR Specialists, Web Development Companies, Technology Experts, Associations, Government Organizations, Social Media Addicts, and more converged on George Washington University in Washington, DC to listen, learn, share, and network. Whats Next, the brainchild of Tod Plotkin of Green Buzz Agency in Arlington, VA, was born of Plotkin’s frustration with the fluff and sales pitch-iness of typical events, and so he set out to create something different. His goal was to keep people engaged constantly with good information and make sure they got any questions answered that day. While not quite an “unconference” like Nonprofit 2.0, it was a veritable assault of information lined up with no breaks (except for a quick lunch) in short bursts with scheduled “niche conversations” and “floating experts” on the side. Captico sent 3 emissaries: our Lead Developer, Todd Fisher; a Project Manager, Bob Wolfe; and New Media Coordinator, Corrie Davidson (me).

How much is too much? At what point do we overwhelm our websites with links to, lets be honest, 3rd party sites? Are we driving users away from the very place we purport to use social media to drive them to?

In previous articles we have shown you how to add Facebook Like and Share buttons to your site and how to embed a Tweet button on your site – you can even see our Twitter feed on the right of this blog and retweet or share on Facebook this article from links below (we hope you do)! We are obviously big fans of engagement through social media, and while perhaps we need to take it a step further on our own site (stay tuned for our forthcoming redesign), I think some people might be taking it too far.

Well, maybe not fun, but less annoying for sure!

You’ve probably encountered a 404 or “Page Not Found” error in your web browsing experience. It is an HTTP standard response code indicating that “the client was able to communicate with the server, but the server could not find what was requested. 404 errors should not be confused with “server not found” or similar errors, in which a connection to the destination server could not be made at all. A 404 error indicates that the requested resource may be available again in the future.” This kind of error is commonly displayed after you click a broken link or follow a link to a page that has moved or no longer exists on a website. (If you want more technical details, check out Wikipedia.)

Of course no one wants their website to have errors, but sometimes they occur. There is definitely value in taking a little time to dress up your “Error” or “404″ page to decrease the frustration when a user encounters it. So what can you do to make the navigation process on your website less of a headache to users?

Online video watching is steadily increasing among all user demographics. Below you will find some statistics from a survey by Pew Research Center’s Internet and American Life Project.

The Holiday Season is upon us! You may have noticed that Captico.com is experiencing some wintry weather – our developers are making it snow! Now the design team is getting in the festive spirit with an animated gif tutorial designed to make all of your images sparkle and shine!

This week Washington, DC played host to the annual Government Video Expo. In addition to an exhibit hall full of equipment and technology (and more displays playing Avatar than I ever care to see again) there certification classes, paid conference sessions, free presentations, and community meetings. The Expo runs Nov 30-Dec 2 2010, but I attended yesterday to scope out the scene, walk the tradeshow floor, and see what the manufacturing industry had to offer. In this article I will talk about the presence (and lack) of social media among attendees, and advice on how to get work as a freelancer for government agencies, in addition to mention some of the sessions I attended.

What is color? According to the dictionary, color is defined as: The characteristics of light by which the individual is made aware of objects or light sources through the receptors of the eye, described in terms of dominant wavelength, luminance, and purity. Thus a color can be represented from white to black with all the colors in the rainbow in-between. Now that we defined the word color what does each color represent? Let’s separate the colors into color families: warm colors, cool colors, and neutral colors.

I recently was using Omnigraffle and realized that I wanted to use my own custom icons for a client that was specifically related to fishing. I had already created the custom icons for the client in Illustrator. So I had to figure out how to create my own stencil in OmniGraffle so I would have access to my icons. It was surprisingly easy. If you find yourself in a similar situation here is how to do it and hopefully this is of some help to you!

I don’t know about you but it is an everyday battle with designers, developers and clients on what the proper terminology for a box that holds content on the website is called. As a designer I know it as a module, for developers it is known as a widget and for clients it is known as the whatchamacallit/box/thing.

How can one simple box have so many different names for it? Why can’t the world wide web use one name instead of a range of names?