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2011-07-16T09:08:00.001-07:00

Gianto Widianto

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Want to Know About the Australian Flood?

2011-01-13T03:52:00.001-08:00

Amplify’d from larryferlazzo.edublogs.org
The Best Sites For Learning About The Australian Floods
The flooding in Australia does not look like it’s going to be ending anytime soon, unfortunately. Flooding is a particularly sensitive topic here, since Sacramento is considered the most likely major U.S. city to suffer a catastrophic flood.
Read more at larryferlazzo.edublogs.org

See this Amp at http://amplify.com/u/blrqa

Wolfram Alpha New Face

2011-01-13T03:41:00.001-08:00

Amplify’d from searchengineland.com
There are also some interesting tweaks to the results pages. One is the addition of linked data inside the search results, which you can see on this screenshot.
See more at searchengineland.com

See this Amp at http://amplify.com/u/blrow

Google was the world’s most dangerous website in 2010

2011-01-11T06:48:00.001-08:00

URL: http://thenextweb.com/google/2011/01/03/google-was-worl...

See this Amp at http://amplify.com/u/bleqs

Steve Jobs will join Rupert Murdoch to launch his iPad newspaper, “The Daily”

2011-01-11T06:46:00.001-08:00

Amplify’d from thenextweb.com
Murdoch is reportedly spending a total of $30 million on The Daily. While Murdoch has tried to keep the project quiet, I know a few reporters in New York City who’ve already begun work on The Daily, many of them poached from local media outlets like the NY Observer, The Daily Beast, Forbes, AOL, Politico and the New York Post and from far-flung zines like San Francisco’s Wired Magazine. In total, News Corp has already hired over 100 journalists including three managing editors: Mike Nizza, a veteran of The New York Times, AOL News and The Atlantic; Steve Alperin, a producer at ABC News, and Pete Picton, an online editor at UK Newspaper, The Sun. The company will be headquartered in the big apple with staffers in Los Angeles.
Read more at thenextweb.com

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Webclip for Google Chrome snips text to your Google Docs

2011-01-11T06:45:00.001-08:00

URL: http://downloadsquad.switched.com/2010/11/09/webclip-fo...

See this Amp at http://amplify.com/u/bleq2

KooBi - a Digital Shelf 4 Ur eBooks

2011-01-09T01:30:00.001-08:00

Amplify’d from www.makeuseof.com
Things are really on the upswing for those who like their eBooks. We have a host of digital eBook readers jostling for space. There’s the iPad with its shoulder to the door and we have always had quite a few software readers since the early days. I still love the the press smell of a new book and the charm of turning a page. But I also believe that eBooks have two things going for them – convenience and availability. If you are missing the ‘charm’ bit, here’s KooBits for you.
Read more at www.makeuseof.com

See this Amp at http://amplify.com/u/bl1q1

Untitled

2011-01-09T01:26:00.001-08:00

Amplify’d from www.makeuseof.com
Wordsmiths require words and their meanings. Sometimes, those of other languages too. I am a guy who dabbles around with words, some I carry in my head and some I need to carry with me. But where?
Read more at www.makeuseof.com

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Untitled

2011-01-09T00:55:00.001-08:00

Amplify’d from lifehacker.com
Services like the Mac App Store may be convenient for discovering software, but they can come with quite a few downsides too. Here are ten other great places to find the program you need.
Read more at lifehacker.com

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The Year in Language

2011-01-09T00:20:00.001-08:00

Amplify’d from www.boston.com

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From a lexicographer’s point of view, the best language story of 2010 was the recent paper in Science about “culturomics.” The authors define this term as “the application of high-throughput data collection and analysis to the study of human culture,” but what they literally did, working with Google Books, was take the full text of a huge number of books — about 4 percent of all titles ever published — and crunch the words as data, on the model of the Human Genome Project.
Read more at www.boston.com

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Prospector Instant Preview Gives Firefox's Awesome Bar Google-Instant-Like Powers

2011-01-07T08:40:00.001-08:00

via lifehacker.com

Memolane: Set Up Your Own Online Time Machine (250 Beta Invites Available!)

2011-01-07T08:19:00.001-08:00

URL: http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/memolane-set-online-time-m...

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Untitled

2011-01-07T08:15:00.001-08:00

Excited to try this new social service!

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Creating your own lifestream on WordPress Blog

2011-01-07T08:06:00.001-08:00

A good and useful tip from Makeuseof
Amplify’d from www.makeuseof.com
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<img src="http://b.scorecardresearch.com/b?c1=2&c2=6036211&c3=&c4=&c5=&c6=&c15=&cv=1.3&cj=1" style="display:none" width="0" height="0" alt="" /> <img src="http://b.scorecardresearch.com/p?c1=8&c2=6036211&c3=&c4=&c5=&c6=&c10=&cj=1" style="display:none" width="0" height="0" alt="" /><img src="http://pixel.quantserve.com/pixel/p-6cp0NSw2i2sSA.gif" style="display: none;" border="0" height="1" width="1" alt="Quantcast"/>
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Most of us have heard of lifestreaming before. Some refer to it has a logging of your entire life online (maybe in a blog or YouTube or something similar). You can also use the word lifestreaming to refer to a stream containing all of your online activity. For instance, you may have content on a blog or two, Flickr, Posterous, Twitter (get the MakeUseOf guide!), YouTube, etc. If you want all of that streamed into one place online, you’ll be wanting a lifestream.
Read more at www.makeuseof.com

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Google Is Now Apple’s Greatest Enemy: Here’s Why

2010-01-20T22:08:00.001-08:00

Google Is Now Apple’s Greatest Enemy: Here’s Why
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Let’s take a trip back in time. The year is 1994, and two tech giants are going to war over copyright. They are Microsoft and Apple, and they are fighting over a copyright claim by Apple over Microsoft and HP’s use of graphical user interface elements from the Macintosh OS. The resulting court case, Apple Computer, Inc. v. Microsoft Corporation, ended with a ruling in Microsoft’s favor, mostly due to a contractual license agreement between the two.
The matter was never fully settled by the case though. Instead, negotiations that took place several years later resulted in the two companies agreeing to make Internet Explorer Mac’s default browser. Microsoft also agreed to keep developing Office for the Mac. Most importantly though, Microsoft invested $150 million into Apple to keep it afloat.
This series of events, which happened while Steve Jobs was being reinstated as the CEO of Apple, set the stage for what is happening today between Microsoft, Apple, and Google (). While Microsoft and Apple are still bitter rivals, several recent events have inadvertently brought them closer together in order to fight their common enemy: Google.

Google's 20 Hottest Tools: Chrome OS - BusinessWeek

2009-10-09T21:33:00.001-07:00

Google's 20 Hottest Tools

5 of 22 next slide previous slide

Chrome OS

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/07/introducing-google-chrome-os.html
Google already competes with Microsoft in search, productivity software, and with its Chrome browser, launched in 2008. But in July the company announced a direct assault on Redmond's core product, the Windows operating system. In the second half of 2010, Google intends to release the Chrome OS, which it describes as a lighter, speedier operating system tailored to running Web-based applications. The software will be free to download, but the company may charge PC makers a fee to bundle it with new products.
read the story'); document.write('post a comment'); document.write(''); } // ]]>
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Google Wave Is Easier To Understand Than…

2009-10-09T20:26:00.001-07:00

As we’ve noted several times, Google Wave
is a service that is fairly hard to explain. And for many people, it’s also hard to understand. That seems somewhat reasonable given that it’s trying to be a new form of communication and that it is still very early in its life span. But just how hard is it to understand? A new website brilliantly takes a look.

Easiertounderstandthanwave.com
pits Wave against the other hard-to-understand aspects of life. On the site, you are given a picture of Wave and a picture of something else and asked to click on which is easier to understand. Wave’s competition includes: Metaphysics, the end of Donnie Darko, Ozzy Osbourne, Death, osmotic pressure, cardiothoracic surgery, the health care-reform bill, Google Fast Flip, and even Sarah Palin.

Humorously, Google Wave loses to all of those. As of right now, it is beating very few topics. They include: Women, Scientology, the United States Tax code, Chinese telegraph code, Microsoft Visio 2004, and Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize.

Users are welcome to submit other topics to put up again Wave in the competition. But the best part of the site has to be the elevator music-version of Avril Lavigne’s “Complicated” playing in a loop in the background.

Update: Here’s another awesome tidbit about the site. I have it on very good authority that it was built by a Facebook employee. It’s not clear if this was just one employee acting alone, or if Easiertounderstandthanwave.com can be viewed as how Facebook looks at Google Wave. Which is to say, down on it.

And now we know why we have the little “Not affiliated with any company” at the bottom.

Update 2: Okay, it was just one employee. Conspiracy theorists can rest easy. Maybe.

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CrunchBase Information

Google Wave

Company: Google

Website: wave.google.com

Launch Date: May 28, 2009

Google Wave is a tool for communication and collaboration on the web, launching in the second half of 2009.

In Google Wave, users create and invite other people to “waves”. Everyone on a wave can use richly formatted text, photos, gadgets, and… Learn More

Information provided by CrunchBase

via techcrunch.com

Social Media Cannot Deliver Business Value If Employees Are Denied Access

2009-10-09T01:03:00.001-07:00

A survey of 1,400 CIOs in the US published by Robert Half Technology (see press release) shows some interesting – and indeed worrying – results about the number of enterprises that prevent their employees from accessing social media sites from the workplace.

Here are the results:

CIOs were asked, “Which of the following most closely describes your company’s policy on visiting social networking sites, such as Facebook, MySpace and Twitter, while at work?” Their responses:

Prohibited completely                                   54%

Permitted for business purposes only       19%

Permitted for limited personal use              16%

Permitted for any type of personal use     10%

Honestly, I find these numbers quite appalling. I do appreciate that security and productivity concerns are still dominant, but I suspect this is directly connected to a limited understanding of how social media can deliver value and the mechanisms to get there.

It is clearly easier to block access than put the onus of assessing employee performances on managers. For sure there will be employees whose productivity drops due to social media use, but there will be others – and presumably many more – who will be able to leverage social media in ways that make their work more effective, more productive and – last but not least – more fun.

I am pretty sure that some of these same enterprises have their own web 2.0 plans where they aim at engaging both employees and customers through social networks that they build themselves, on their turf, under their control. But isn’t this a recipe for failure? Haven’t corporations and government agencies understood that social networks are a bottom-up. peer-to-peer, grass-root phenomenon that cannot be planned or engineered by a formal organization? How long will it take before they understand that only blurring personal and work boundaries will unleash the value they are desperately seeking (and yet denying) in social media?

Although I cover social media in government, I start to believe that most of the advice I give my clients equally applies to private sector organizations. A few months ago I wrote two posts about whether governments should use consumer tools for social networking, and looked at how codes of conduct for the use of social policies are easier than many think. I’ve also come across multiple cases where consumer social media are already mission-critical for some organizations, as decision makers do use their connections on Linked, Facebook and the likes to actually do business. I have also coined the term employee-centric government to indicate that key to unlock the benefits of web 2.0 is to understand its peer-to-peer nature (see my latest post on this).

For Gartner clients, there is a wealth of resources on strategies and tactics to support the use of social media at work, to establish frameworks to guide employees through finding business value in those media, and to identify and manage the security and reputational risks they pose. My colleague Anthony Bradley has just provided links to some of this research and suggested blog readers to take a quick survey to compare results. An additional piece of research that may be useful (available to clients or for a fee) is one describing the Gartner SOCIAL framework , which suggests a six step approach to value realization, i.e. Seek, Observe, Complement, Involve, Assess and Leverage)

Staying in denial and closing the fences is not an option. Whether to attract the best employees, or to make them more effective and productive, whether to stay closer to their customers and suppliers, whether to sense emerging needs and trends, enterprises in all sectors will have to let their staff join social media. Of course this won’t be a free ticket to waste time on browsing family pictures or arranging dinners with friends. But the boundaries between personal and professional use will blur forever, and the ability to assess, identify and nurture business value from social media will become a critical capability for enterprises (and their managers) in all industry sectors.

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via blogs.gartner.com

What's new on Vimeo! on Vimeo Staff Blog

2009-10-08T20:40:00.001-07:00

Andrew Pile October 2nd, 2009

We always try to be as transparent as possible here at Vimeo, so from time to time we like to give you guys a solid update on what we're cooking up. On the menu soon are a few BIG projects that we're very excited about and we think you're going to like them.
Desktop Uploader
You've been asking for it for years, and now it's coming: the Desktop Uploader is a fancy new way to upload your videos without ever launching your web browser. This should be perfect for those of you who sometimes have trouble uploading, and for folks who would like to batch upload a bunch of videos at once. Features include:
• More-stable uploading (no more frustrating browser time-outs!)
• Pause/resume features (Start. Stop. Get a sandwich. Start again. NBD.)
• Upload multiple videos at once (Up to 10 at once!)
• Edit titles, tags, and descriptions (more controls coming in future updates)
• Available for Windows, Macs, and Linux (it uses Adobe AIR)
The uploader will be in public beta soon, but you can get special access now by asking for it here.

Advanced Stats
As many of you know, we've been working hard on a new stats feature. It's taken us a while because we want to get it right, and so far it's looking great. The majority of the features will be for Plus users with a few key stats available for Basic members as well, so everyone can join in on the fun. Feature highlights:
• Extensive data on all videos in aggregate and individually
• Daily breakdowns of likes, plays, comments, HD vs SD plays, loads and finishes
• Awesome referrer data (where are your videos being watched?)
• Share and download stats (find out what video people download the most)
• Geo stats (see where people are watching your stuff)
• And more...
We'll be releasing advanced stats before the end of the year, but for now here's a preview:

* NOTE: We're tweaking these views a lot so what you see will change before it's done.
Larger videos
If you haven't noticed already, the video pages are now larger. For most videos they are 640x480! That means your SD videos are bigger and better than ever. And more often than not, your videos will play in their native resolution. For an example, just check out this video.
Featured Groups and Channels!
Looking for some inspiration? Check out these Groups and Channels we've been watching:
The Pictures Don't Move
Sometimes the best videos are ones where not a lot happens. Great for photographers or anyone else looking to celebrate the simple and beautiful side of capturing video, The Pictures Don't Move is a fantastic Group that celebrates the pure experience of capturing life on video.
FilmTools: How To
Not everyone has a couple grand to drop on the latest and greatest film accessories. We sure don't. Film Tools is perfect for you guys to share your DIY skills with step-by-step instructions for making all those fancy new toys everyone seems to be using. Learn how to make lend adapters, steadicams, glide tracks, and all sorts of other cool equipment.
Corkscrew Bootlegs
"Produced coaster videos are OK but, they fall short when you want to get an actual feel for the ride. This channel is dedicated to the true coaster video, when the rider sneaks a camera on board, straps in and hits record." Couldn't have said it better myself.
Enjoy the week, and as always, have fun and be creative!

via vimeo.com

Google, Microsoft In Search Engine Talks With Twitter? - Software - IT Channel News by CRN

2009-10-08T20:12:00.001-07:00

-->
--> --> --> --> Twitter may have finally found a way to monetize the billions of "tweets" its users send, thanks to potential agreements under which the social networking site would license Google and Microsoft (NSDQ:MSFT) to integrate those tweets in their search engines.
Microsoft and Google are reportedly in advanced negotiations with Twitter to license that company's live tweet feeds on a real-time basis, according to a Thursday report in The Wall Street Journal's All Things Digital blog, which can be read by clicking here.
And because of Yahoo's recent agreement to partner with Microsoft on search engines, Yahoo (NSDQ:YHOO) could potentially take advantage of any Microsoft agreement with Twitter, wrote Kara Swisher in the blog post.
While Twitter has its own search engine, it is currently not tied to other search engines. Swisher wrote that Twitter would be hard-pressed to expand its search capabilities to compete with Microsoft or Google.
It also is possible that neither Microsoft nor Google would finalize an agreement with Twitter, Swisher also wrote.
Such an agreement could have huge implications for the ability of Google (NSDQ:GOOG) and Microsoft to expand their search engine capabilities. Getting an exact number of how many tweets are generated per day or per month is difficult, but Twitter is certainly one of the most heavily-visited sites on the Internet.
Complete, an online media company measuring online consumer behavior, ranked Twitter as the 38th-most visit site August 2009, with an estimated 23.6 million visits, up about 803 percent over August 2008.
While much of the information that is sent via the 140-character tweets is mundane, Twitter users are also quick to tweet about events as they happen. This includes events spanning everything from major breaking news, such as a riot or flood, to breaking product or company news, making the real-time Twitter feed valuable to Microsoft or Google search engines.
However, even the mundane items, if data is mined properly, are valuable to search engines. Marketers, for instance, could use the Twitter feeds to check the status of a marketing campaign, or gain a sense of what Twitter users think about an event.

via crn.com

HOW TO: Integrate Facebook With Your Blog

2009-10-06T23:53:00.001-07:00

Love it, hate it, or mildly tolerate it, you can’t dismiss Facebook’s massive success. Even in markets where it doesn’t dominate the social web, Facebook is catching up and will likely succeed.

It’s easy to forget sometimes that there was an Internet before Facebook (
) and many of us have existing blogs or websites. Integrating with Facebook is a great way to get additional exposure for your content, whether you re-publish your blog content directly on Facebook, or you use something like Facebook Connect to add the Facebook login/profile experience to your own site.

Here are some great ways to integrate your website or blog with Facebook.

Custom CMS or XHTML site

Although using something like WordPress (
) to power a site or blog is becoming increasingly common, many people have sites using either a custom CMS or something coded in XHTML/PHP (
), Ruby, Django, etc.

If you fall into this category, the Facebook Developer Wiki is a great source of information.

Even better, last week, Facebook introduced the Facebook Connect Wizard and Facebook Connect Playground that makes implementing Facebook Connect into your site easier, and also offers up sample code and widgets for comment boxes, Facebook Connect buttons, and more.

WordPress

WordPress is undoubtedly one of the most popular publishing platforms out there. Given WordPress’s vibrant community, you’d think that integrating Facebook into your WordPress site would be a breeze.

Well, it is and it isn’t. There are a number of plugins available but getting everything set-up can still be a bit complicated. Never fear, here are some great resources and tools for integrating your WordPress blog with your Facebook page:

WP-FBConnect — This plugin was started by Facebook engineer Adam Hupp. Although it hasn’t been updated as much as some of the other options, it does offer a way to integrate Facebook Connect with WordPress. This way, users can use their Facebook login to leave comments (and have them published to their feed) and have their Facebook avatar show up (with a Facebook designation) on your site. Check out Adam Breckler’s excellent tutorial for more help with this plugin.

Sociable Facebook Connect — Sociable.es has a Facebook Connect plugin too and it is frequently updated and offers other features, like the ability to add a box displaying recent visitors, commenters and friends. Be aware that the Sociable plugin will create a new user for your Facebook Connect users on your blog (this isn’t always ideal).

WPBook — WPBook does a few unique things, first, it lets you cross-post all of your blog content onto Facebook (which is great if you don’t already have that set-up). Second, it makes sure that comments published on one entry show up on the other. So if you have comments on both your Facebook Note and on your regular blog entry, everyone can see the comments at both places. This is great for users who want to get their content out to more people, but don’t want to deal with trying to track down a lot of separate conversations.

Add Your Blog Feed — If you don’t care so much about comments, but just want your blog content to show up on Facebook, you can follow Six Apart’s excellent guide to adding your external blog feed. It’s intended for TypePad (
) users, but good reading for anyone using a blogging platform with RSS support.

I would be remiss if I didn’t point out Tim Marsh’s excellent Dummies Guide to Integrating Facebook into WordPress. I ran across this in my research and was impressed with the level of thought and care that went into the post. Tim also released a free 40-page eBook (PDF link) that you can download with even more information.

Movable Type/TypePad

Six Apart has two blogging platforms, the self-hosted MovableType and the hosted TypePad. Last December, Six Apart released the Facebook Connect Commenters plugin for Movable Type. This will let users log in with their Facebook credentials, leave a comment, and then share those actions on Facebook (so comments show-up in mini-feeds, etc.).

On the TypePad side, they’ve built Facebook compatibility into the newest release (and are taking it even further with TypePad Motion) — letting you post to your blog from Facebook, show your updates on Facebook, and let users comment using Facebook or Twitter IDs.

Drupal and Joomla

Drupal (
) and Joomla (
) are two of the more popular open source content management systems. Both offer lots of robust features that are especially useful for large sites and communities.

Drupal in particular is often used when creating larger community sites. Because many of these sites might already have existing user profiles or logins, adding Facebook connectivity can be attractive for users — because who wants to sign up for another account — and for site owners who want to build a broader and more robust community.

There are a number of Facebook plugins for Drupal, but these are a few of my favorites:

Drupal for Facebook is really interesting because it isn’t just about letting users login with Facebook credentials (which it can do), but about using the power of Drupal to create Facebook applications and to push Drupal-site content out to Facebook. The project has been around for more than two years and is actively developed.

Drupal Facebook Connect is a module that plugs in Facebook Connect logins into an existing Drupal site. That way, users can login with their Facebook profile, see what Facebook friends also have an account on that Drupal site and publish customizable content back to their Facebook feed. Users can also invite Facebook friends to join the Drupal site. This is very cool for anyone who has a web-app based in Drupal.

Drupal Facebook Connect Module is another option for Drupal users that want to add Facebook Connect logins to their existing site.

On the Joomla front, jwFacebook Comments 1.5 allows site-owners to add a Facebook comment box to the bottom of Joomla entries.

Comment Systems

If your primary focus is just letting users leave comments using their Facebook login, you might want to look at some of the third-party commenting systems that integrate with a variety of platforms and sites.

At Mashable, Disqus (
) is our commenting system of choice. Disqus added Facebook Connect support last December and you can link your Facebook and Disqus profiles together. Disqus also lets users log in with Twitter (
) credentials.

Similarly, JS-Kit’s Echo system lets you log in with a number of different identities and also choose where you want your comment published (on the site and to your Facebook friends, to your Twitter followers, etc.).

Third-party commenting systems like Disqus and Echo, which take some of the stress and mess of OpenID and Facebook Connect out of the equation, can do a lot to encourage more people to comment on your site.

Share on Facebook

You know that awesome “Share on Facebook” button we feature here at Mashable (
)? You can get your own here, and there is even an easy plugin for WordPress users.

So site owners — how do you integrate Facebook with your blogs and sites? What are some of the best practices you can offer to others? Did we miss your favorite plugin or tool? Let us know in the comments!

More Facebook resources from Mashable:

- HOW TO: Use Facebook for Professional Networking
- 5 Tips for Optimizing Your Brand’s Facebook Presence
- The Journalist’s Guide to Facebook
- Facebook Pages vs Facebook Groups: What’s the Difference?
- HOW TO: Build Your Personal Brand on Facebook

Forget Skype: TinyChat Launches Dead-Simple Video Chat

2009-09-30T21:49:00.001-07:00

When you want to do a one-on-one video chat with someone else, what do you use? The first thing that probably comes to mind is Skype.

While Skype is a great service, it isn’t practical for when you just want to get a video chat going (both sides must have the software). Plus, they’ve got some legal troubles brewing. Web conferencing system and even Google (
) chat via video require plugins or some getting used to.

Perhaps that’s why we like TinyChat (
)’s new Peer-to-Peer chat service that allows you to set up a one-on-one conversation with a friend in literally seconds. No plug-ins, no software, not even a username required. The only thing you literally have to do is pick a URL for your video on the p2p.tinychat.com domain.

To test this thing out, Mashable’s (
) Christina Warren and I just went to the same link (let’s say http://p2p.tinychat.com/anyroom). Once we were there, TinyChat connected to our webcams and … presto! The live chat was working. It even blocks others from entering once there are two participants, so you know your privacy is protected.

TinyChat’s system is dead-simple, and we love that. It’s an easy solution when you just want to chat with your friend or colleague with no hassle. And we’re fans of anything that takes hassle out of our lives.

Disclosure: Mashable has partnered with TinyChat to create The Mashable Lounge, our live Twitter (
) chatroom.

Yahoo Revamps Search Results (And Prepares Them for Bing)

2009-09-22T08:45:00.001-07:00

Fresh off of its homepage redesign (and the Microsoft search deal), Yahoo has launched a full revamp of its search results page.

The new search page, which is now active for all users, adds a new discovery bar just under the search box, adds a left-hand navigation column (not unlike Bing (
)), and aligns more with the functionality and color scheme of the new widget-based Yahoo homepage.

So what’s the change look like? Perhaps the best way to assess the differences is to do a before and after comparison. First, here is what Yahoo Search looked like before the upgrade:

Study it. Notice the right hand sidebar, the old color scheme, and the search bar in the far left hand corner.

Now, take a look at the redesign:

Here are some of our observations:

- Left hand navigation: The new Yahoo search page is focused on creating a relevant experience. If you search “Mashable (
),” the left-hand navigation comes up with similar search terms and related information. If you search “puppies,” you’ll get a list of searches of different dog breeds, the American Kennel Club, Iams, and Flickr (
) (so you can share those puppy pictures).

- Explore related concepts: This is a dropdown right under the search bar. Clicking on it adds even more related searches that you can explore.

- People Search: Following in the footsteps of Bing, Yahoo Search’s related concepts takes a twist when you search for people. It links you to that person’s Facebook (
), Twitter (
), and other social networks.

- Design: The new search feels like an extension of the new Yahoo homepage. That’s a good thing.

The new search does two things in the end. First, it positions Yahoo for its eventual Bing switchover. The left-hand navigation bar is just like Bing. These changes should help smooth the transition.

More importantly though, it improves the search experience a great deal. It provides some useful features and more continuity in the search experience. It’s nice to see that Yahoo isn’t just going to abandon the search experience and that they will innovate until Bing replaces Yahoo’s search algorithm.

5 Ways to Get Your Blog Indexed by Google in 24 Hours

2009-09-20T23:08:00.001-07:00

Written on September 21st, 2009 at 12:09 am by Darren Rowse

5 Ways to Get Your Blog Indexed by Google in 24 Hours

Search Engine Optimization 53 comments

This is a guest-post from AdesBlog.com. Follow Ades on twitter @ades.

We all know that content is king and that if you keep blogging… if you keep doing what you love… the traffic and the money will follow suit. While that’s partially true, there is also things that you can do to:

Index your newly launched blog fast by major Search Engines
Increase traffic to your blog

Improve your SERPs (Search Engine Result Positions)

Why wait right? Content can be king but waiting around for traffic to come by itself is not a good way to start blogging. So let’s start…

Getting Indexed

Let’s say you launched a blog today and want it on Google’s results tomorrow. Can this be done? Yes.

Easiest way to get indexed by major Search Engines is to get mentioned by established blogs. This usually will get your blog indexed within 24 hours. But since we are new (i.e the newly launched blog of ours) I don’t think any blogger want to mention it. So instead of begging other bloggers to notice your newly launched blog, you just have to figure out other ways of getting indexed by Google fast. Can it be done? Absolutely! (All it takes a little effort on your side).

1. Blog Communities

There are few blog related community portals that have a very good rankings in Google and other Major Search Engines Results, they are: MyBlogLog, BlogCatalog, Blogged and NetworkedBlogs, particularly MyBlogLog. This means that if you get your blog on these blog communities, Google will have no other choice but to index your blog. So, go ahead and register for an account on these communities and list your blog on it. Once you are done you will have a page like this, this and this.

What to pay attention: Your blog’s description (have a proper write-up), keywords & tags (add related keywords and tags to your listing, this will be used by other members to find your blog), branding (put your logo, avatars, screenshots etc. have a consistent branding everywhere), and list your blog in the correct category.

2. Site Valuation & Stats Sites

Some of those How Much Your Site Worth? sites have a good ranking in Search Engines. All you need to do is to go there and check how much your site worth. This would create a special page for your blog (like this) and consecutively it would be indexed by Google. Here is a list of worthy sites: WebsiteOutlook, StatBrain, CubeStat, WebTrafficAgents, BuiltWith, WhoIs, QuarkBase, URLfan and AboutTheDomain.

3. Feed Aggregators

List your blog’s feed in these feed aggregators Feed-Squirrel, OctoFinder, FeedAdage. Once you have submitted your feed to these sites, they will keep track of your newly published posts and index them in their site. Whenever someone clicks on the blog post title, he/she will be redirected to your original blog post sending you free traffic and getting your latest posts indexed by Google.

4. Social Sites

Registering account on Social Sites with the same username as your blog’s URL is very effective in getting your blog indexed by Search Engines. Especially for those targeted keywords.

For example, if your blog’s name is WhiteElephant, it’s a good practice to register the same username at twitter as @WhiteElephant, and to create a page in Facebook at www.facebook.com/WhiteElephant. Having a consistent keyword-username on all major Social Sites will help get your blog indexed faster, and at a later stage it will also help build a “brand” for your blog.

So, get account on major Social Sites for your newly launched blog, namely: Twitter, Facebook (create a page for your blog), Digg, StumbleUpon, Delicious etc. By the way, it’s a good pratice to create a separate Social Sites account for each of your projects. This way you can stay focused and post messages that are related to your project. In the long run, this will help build a community that are like-minded around your project.

Note from Darren: it’s worth nothing that many social media sites (like Twitter) use no follow tags on links which means the links don’t really help with SEO. Having said this - it’s still worth getting pages for your keywords/brand as these pages can rank in and of themselves in Google and can help you to have control over numerous search results for the same keyword.

5. Misc Sites

Squidoo is a community website that allows people to create pages (called “lenses”) on various topics. Creating a topic that is related to your blog and then including your feed in that page would help your blog get indexed by Search Engines. Squidoo used to have a really good ranking in Google results, but not so much today. But it’s still ranks well and it shouldn’t be neglected.

ChangeDetection is a website that monitors sites for changes. When you monitor a particular site using ChangeDetection, it will ask you whether you want the notices to be public or private. If you say public, it will be published in their news section. For example; AdesBlog.com got an update today, type of update: text additions etc. This of course will get picked up by Search Engines and Search Engines in return will index your blog.

Technorati is a search engine for searching blogs. According to Wikipedia, as of June 2008, Technorati was indexing 112.8 million blogs and over 250 million pieces of tagged social media. It’s a dying breed, but not just dead yet. You have to definitely register for an account and get your blog listed on Technorati.

That’s it. Once you are done with creating accounts and submitting your newly launched blog in the above mentioned sites, you should see your blog in Google’s Search Results within 24 hours. Most of the time it will appear within the next few hours only.

Lastly, getting indexed is one thing but sustaining that traffic is another. And this is where the Content is King phrase should truly be emphasized. Because, without a good and valuable content, all your effort will be just wasted.

I hope you have found this post useful.

Abdylas Tynyshov (Ades) is a full-time blogger based in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. He blogs at http://www.adesblog.com and is the creator of a great freeware color picker tool. You can follow him on twitter at @ades.

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53 Responses to “5 Ways to Get Your Blog Indexed by Google in 24 Hours”

JoshuaElliot

September 21st, 2009 12:27 am

Well there are other ways to index your blog and website.

Pingler is one of them, and is a very good way to inform other search engines that you have a new blog post or even a new blog.

reza

September 21st, 2009 12:34 am

wow! that’s great post! but i do all of this befor and now my page rank is ONE!

what else should I do ?

Dominique

September 21st, 2009 12:50 am

Interesting links. I didn’t know that there are so many sites to estimate the worth of your site. Bookmarked this post.

Robby G

September 21st, 2009 12:54 am

Isn’t it possible to just go on http://www.google.com/addurl/ and simply your blog there and see it up on google in 24 hours or so?

Damian

September 21st, 2009 1:04 am

Great list, this will be perfect for my endeavours, thanks!

William Womack

September 21st, 2009 1:07 am

Wow, some really great tips here!

The only one that I really knew about was the one about social sites. I started using them about 45 days ago and I nearly doubled my traffic with it! (And it keeps growing)

It’s a great way to build up back links and get indexed.

And it’s a lot of fun!

I thought the “how much is my site worth” tips was cool. Because it’s super easy!

Great post, thanks a lot!

Gloson

September 21st, 2009 1:16 am

Great tips there! Getting listed in Google could sometimes take more than a week! I didn’t know that it could get indexed so fast!

I also didn’t know that MyBlogLog helps to get your blog indexed. LOL.

I’ve something to add too.

I’ve also came across a recent post (How to Make Your Blog Searchable in Google & Yahoo) on my friends blog, Simon Blog.

On his post, he tells that you should add your site to Google Webmaster Central and Yahoo Site Explorer and they will have you indexed pretty fast!

Matches Malone

September 21st, 2009 1:35 am

This is great stuff. I didn’t know about a few of these services and I’ll immediately check them out, and get listed. Thanks!!!

Dave Doolin

September 21st, 2009 1:36 am

These are excellent tips!

In my experience, that is, this is what works for me: Posting daily content over a period of at least several months, on a WordPress blog, with a sitemap plugin, and no other promotion, will get your posts indexed in as little as 4 hours.

That’s a data point.

Nicole/MadlabPost

September 21st, 2009 1:37 am

While a few of the indexing tools you mentioned are known to me, I am not familiar with many of them so this is a useful post to consider when trying to promote a blog or individual blog posts.

If Mybloglog has good SE ranking like you wrote here, that is nice but the site does not always list all my current posts, which gives me the impression that Mybloglog is not updated as efficiently as it can be. It’s late listing my recent posts and this has been going on for a while. Blogcatalog has this problem every now and then as well but seems to be quicker on updates.

Kevin (strongandfit.net)

September 21st, 2009 1:43 am

I’ve done a few of these steps, like registering with blogcatalog. It does help the search engines find you more quickly.

Better Bodies in Training

September 21st, 2009 1:48 am

Again, another great article for blogging newbies like myself. In the quest be narrow or shorten the learning curve with my blog, I find myself reading lots, and lots, and lots of articles. Sometimes, I feel as though I might be getting overwhelmed with the content as some of what I read is not easily digestible. This is definitely not the case with posts on this site. Wow… I must definitely will be back to read many more posts.

TechThinker

September 21st, 2009 1:54 am

Very valuable and practical tips! Thanks for the great list of Site Valuation & Stats Sites.

Katherine

September 21st, 2009 1:55 am

Darren - Can your blog please keep all references to other sites up to date and accurate.

Those comments about Squidoo are TWO YEARS OLD!

Just in case anybody’s wondering whether Squidoo is doing OK in the Google index, Quantcast currently indicates that traffic is still growing and the site ranks at 157 in Google.

I don’t think that’s a ranking enjoyed by some of the other sites mentioned.

Granted it may have been a valid comment in 2007 but it’s no longer true so far as I am aware. Adult sites are banned from using Squidoo.

David Hopkins

September 21st, 2009 2:21 am

While commenting on someone else’s blog isn’t always god for SEo purposes, it is very good at getting your name and blog URL known and noticed by real people who live in the ‘real’ world (some of us do, any way!). the SEO might not be affected, but getting people to click through is, for some, more important .. these are the people who read!!

Thanks for continued great blogging.

David.

Mike

September 21st, 2009 2:23 am

Thanks again Darren, for great advice and sharing your space with knowledgeable guests.

Michael

September 21st, 2009 2:28 am

Well I just checked my blogs worth and it’s a start
It’s great to see my work paying off
I’m not in the big leagues yet but it’s a start
Thanks as always for a great post

Raju

September 21st, 2009 2:31 am

Most of the posts like this hardly makes sense, but this one is really worth bookmarking

jal hamad

September 21st, 2009 2:52 am

really helpful, thank you! now I’m registering our blog everywhere like a mad man!

I think you could include also aboutus.com, don’t know how it ranks in Google but it is also very useful,

elizof

September 21st, 2009 3:27 am

Good job A! This was informative and I particularly enjoyed the section on blog communities. I will be adding my blog to some those in the coming week.
Cheers!

LVI56

September 21st, 2009 3:35 am

Wow, awesome post. I already had a few of those done but you just gave me so many more options. I’ll be working on this all day. Thanks!

DJ

September 21st, 2009 3:49 am

I only had a couple of the steps completed. I went and registered on some the site valuations and site stats. I just went and opened up a new Twitter account that was relevant to my Website. Thanks Darren, I have learned a lot from you in such a short period of time.

Vicki@collegeparentcentral

September 21st, 2009 3:53 am

This is great advice, and I know what I’ll be spending time on this week!
Thanks for beginning and ending with the “content is king” reminder. All of the other work is fine, but I’m glad we keep remembering that when all that traffic comes, we’d better have something worthwhile to say.

Ades

September 21st, 2009 3:56 am

Hi guys, thanks for all your comments. I am glad that you have found the post useful.

There are many ways to get listed on Google or if you keep blogging you will still get listed eventually. But the purpose of the post was - How to get listed within 24 hours after you launch your blog. And from my experience the above methods are the best way to achieve this.

Please send your comments in, I am sure there are many other ways and tactics to get listed by Google fast.

Ciarán

September 21st, 2009 3:56 am

Meaningless post, sorry. Getting indexed? And? It means nothing if you don’t rank, and many of the tips here will be worthless when it comes to that.

Heather Masson

September 21st, 2009 4:03 am

This is a great list. We all want to get noticed as soon as possible it’s true. I had not know about some of the misc items.

As well - something I am discovering… if you want to get noticed by google. Google Reader is a very valuable tool.

Cheers~

Antti Kokkonen - Zemalf.com

September 21st, 2009 4:07 am

Getting indexed fast has very little effect on it’s own, so of course it’s nice to see your blog and posts there quickly, so you can keep pushing. The key to getting indexed fast is setting up the blog the right way, putting the initial pages up and not blast all content out immediately.

It’s actually quite easy and doesn’t require so many things as covered here (although those help, as like said, getting indexed is not the only thing): Set your blog up with good SEO settings, add a good ping list, set the blog feed at feedburner (activate PingShot), have a XML sitemap and add that sitemap to Google Webmaster tools (+ verify your site there as well while at it). Do this and bookmark your first post at Digg/Delicious and you’re set. It takes 2-6 hours to get blog indexed this way.

As an additional step (not so much for indexing, but because it’ll help in the long run), adding your blog to directories like Ades suggested and registering the domain for max length (e.g. 3 years), help too.

I have tested this many times and it works, in case you’re interested in the topic as much as I am, I have written a 11 step guide about this in my blog, which covers not only getting indexed but getting a good start for your blog in general: http://zemalf.com/blogging/blogging-tips/how-to-get-indexed-by-google/

jennifer888

September 21st, 2009 4:31 am

Wonderful advice for a newbie like me!

I will am going to tweak this advice to help with my new forum/blog!

Gary Mchale

September 21st, 2009 4:37 am

Fantastic, just logged three sites through mybloglog and am getting visitors from them already.
Hope google picks up these sites too.

Carrie

September 21st, 2009 4:50 am

love this post. so many new ideas for how to spread the word about my blog. i love resource dense posts.

Riley

September 21st, 2009 5:10 am

Whoa, octofinder already has had one of my posts on the frontpage.

Also, if you link back to octofinder on the individual post pages they take the nofollow off of your links =)

Great Post and finds!

Mezanul

September 21st, 2009 5:48 am

Well, I try to avoid reading this kind of posts.. But your post is so informative and worthy that I can’t ignore.
Thanks for the nice post :)

Any suggestions about Yahoo and Bing as I have noticed that they are not indexing my site as much as Google is doing?

Ronblogger

September 21st, 2009 6:26 am

I know there are many of them,but those you gave are the most reliable and can really help your site get indexed by google

unemployed chris

September 21st, 2009 6:37 am

This has been very useful–thanks.

Removal Companies

September 21st, 2009 6:40 am

Great post. It shows a great understanding of the search engines and this will help many to get their blogs indexed quicker by all major search engines, not just Google.

Wesley Craig Green

September 21st, 2009 6:43 am

Some solid advice here for not only getting indexed quicker with Google but also for building traffic to your blog.

Wesley Craig Green
The Geek Entrepreneur

Sara Bonds

September 21st, 2009 7:00 am

Great tips and tricks! I was familiar with everything except the links under, “2. Site Valuation & Stats Sites” I have never heard of those. I am off to check them out now.

Patrick Allmond

September 21st, 2009 7:58 am

Wow. These are way too hard.

Install Google Desktop and/or the Google Toolbar. Browse around your site. Done.

Google desktop keeps an eye on where you go and indexes the sites that you visit. Whenever I am working on any of my sites and forums there are always two IPs. My local one and one from Google. It hits every page I hit in my browser.

Don Mak

September 21st, 2009 8:20 am

I don’t have any connections to Seth Godin other than being a fan of his presentations, blog, and books. But the Squidoo mention (and accompanying link) is way outdated. Squidoo ranks just fine now. Pull up some PR on any “lens” or even the homepage and you will see that’s not really true anymore.

Spot on with the rest of the article. Good stuff!

Don Makoviney

Don Mak

September 21st, 2009 8:22 am

Man I scanned the comments to see if anyone had already mentioned what I wrote in my previous comment. I guess I missed Katherine’s. My bad.

Carry on :-)

Don Makoviney

IM Headlines

September 21st, 2009 8:59 am

Nice post and thanks for revealing these useful resources. For all you newbies out there, you can also create one article and submit it to various directories that have a high PR. This will help your ranking on google. And it can get you some traffic aswell

Regards,
Johnny

Ades

September 21st, 2009 9:08 am

Katherine and Don Mak… that particular link about Squidoo was given precisely for the reason to point out the event in the past (2007) about Squidoo being given less importance in Google results. Perhaps linking the words “not so much today” to the old link may have caused the confusion. I hope it’s clear now.

Nevertheless, sorry for the confusion and thanks for your feedbacks!

Jessica

September 21st, 2009 9:20 am

Great post! Lots of super helpful information here. Thanks!!

hokya

September 21st, 2009 10:14 am

how about the ping services?

i think those are also important :-)

clarky

September 21st, 2009 10:35 am

Oh wow, I have never thought of this, I can’t believe you could do that. Usually, it will take me a few days to index my new blogs. I think that is good enough, there is no need to get your blog indexed by Google in just 24 hours.
But in another way, I think this so cool, many people really want to do this. I think that if your pages could also get indexed so fast, that would be great!

Dayo Nurudeen

September 21st, 2009 10:45 am

You made my day, Thanks for the cool tips and links even though I know some of them already but the new once are very useful. I really appreciate.

David ODonnell

September 21st, 2009 11:48 am

Good list, a few new resources to check out (the feed aggregators).

I agree with Antti Kokkonen’s comment above - by creating an xml sitemap, submitting it to and verifying your site with Google webmaster tools, you can get all kids of cool stats about if/when and how many pages Google has indexed from your site.

There are lots of free sites that will create an xml sitemap for you, xml-sitemaps.com for example.

Technology Slice

September 21st, 2009 12:23 pm

Great tips. I’ve done these many times and seen Google index the site fairly quickly.

LindyK

September 21st, 2009 12:32 pm

Just saw your blog’s net worth. Holy Shit! Are you married? :)

Angela F.

September 21st, 2009 12:52 pm

Great tips - I’ve instituted several on your list. Thanks!

Adam

September 21st, 2009 1:12 pm

Awesome and very timely article!

Just completed a wordpress/thesis overhaul for a client and am about to start the promotion process.

Thanks for the tips - am putting them into practise as I type this! :)

Living with Balls

September 21st, 2009 1:20 pm

Most of these I’ve done already. I haven’t visited any of the site valuation sites yet though. I’ll check those out.

Rob Mangiafico

September 21st, 2009 1:55 pm

Very nice list of things to do with your blog to get it noticed and indexed. A few new ones that I was unaware of previously. Thanks!

Rob - LexiConn

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via problogger.net

Fast Flip: Google Launches a New Way to Read the News

2009-09-15T23:59:00.001-07:00

Is reading online news broken? GoogleGoogle
seems to think so as they just launched Google Fast Flip, a Google Labs experiment that’s designed to help you flip through news online as fast as you would if you were holding a print magazine or paper.

Fast Flip is essentially just a funky way to flip through articles from three dozen Google partners including The New York Times, The Washington Post, and Fast Company. Partners share in advertising revenue generated through the labs experiment.

With Fast Flip you can flip through snapshots of the day’s popular news, drill into specific sections and topics, or narrow stories by publisher source. Once you select a story, you can view the article in its totality and use the arrows to flip to the previous or next story.

Fast Flip comes with additional features like the ability to share stories via email, story liking, dynamic content based on your viewing experience, and mobile-friendly versions.

According to Google’s post on the launch, the point is to replicate the magazine or print reading experience and make browsing stories faster. The company writes:

“Fast Flip is a new reading experience that combines the best elements of print and online articles. Like a print magazine, Fast Flip lets you browse sequentially through bundles of recent news, headlines and popular topics, as well as feeds from individual top publishers. As the name suggests, flipping through content is very fast, so you can quickly look through a lot of pages until you find something interesting.”

On first look, Fast Flip feels like a bit flop. While certainly unique, it’s likely to appeal to a very small segment of online news consumers. Sure, the online news reading experience could be improved, but Fast Flip is more of a tangential approach than it is a step in a revolutionary direction.

What’s your take on Fast Flip? Share your thoughts in the comments.

Have a great news!

The Lost Symbol by Dan Brown - Hardcover - Random House

2009-09-15T02:05:00.001-07:00

ABOUT THIS BOOK

Dan Brown's new novel, the eagerly awaited follow-up to his #1 international phenomenon, The Da Vinci Code, which was the bestselling hardcover adult novel of all time with 81 million copies in print worldwide, will be published in the U.S. and Canada by Doubleday on September 15, 2009.
THE LOST SYMBOL will have a first printing of 5 million copies, and it will once again feature Dan Brown's unforgettable protagonist, Robert Langdon. Brown's longtime editor, Jason Kaufman, Vice President and Executive Editor at Doubleday said, "Nothing ever is as it first appears in a Dan Brown novel. This book's narrative takes place in a twelve-hour period, and from the first page, Dan's readers will feel the thrill of discovery as they follow Robert Langdon through a masterful and unexpected new landscape. THE LOST SYMBOL is full of surprises."
Dan Brown's popularity continues to grow. The film of The Da Vinci Code was a #1 box office smash when it was released by Columbia Pictures in May 2006 with Ron Howard directing and Tom Hanks starring as Robert Langdon. Box office receipts were $758 million. The same team will release Angels and Demons theatrically worldwide on May 15, 2009.

RELATED LINKS

> www.TheLostSymbol.com

> The Official Dan Brown Site

bookmark, share & shelve:

(shelve?)

(glue?)

via randomhouse.com

10 Solid Tips to Safeguard Your Facebook Privacy

2009-09-13T21:36:00.001-07:00

10 Solid Tips to Safeguard Your Facebook Privacy

Sep. 13th, 2009 By Mahendra Palsule

Facebook statistics show that it has 250 million active users each with an average 120 friends. More than 1 billion photos are uploaded every month by its users, over 70% of whom use applications like games and quizzes in Facebook. Unfortunately, most users don’t know the implications of entering personal information, making friends, and playing games on Facebook.

This guide will show what you can (and cannot) do to safeguard your Facebook privacy.

1. Organize Friends in Lists

What do you do when your boss, mother-in-law, or a casual web acquaintance sends you a friend request on Facebook? Use Friend Lists. Friend Lists are the foundation of your Facebook privacy settings. Select Friends from the top menu, and use the Create link to create friend lists like Co-workers, Family, College Friends, etc. Your friends can’t see your lists, so you can name them whatever you like.

Tip: On your left sidebar, all your friend lists may not show up by default. Click More to see all of them, and drag and drop those you want above the separator.

2. Customize Profile Privacy

Click Settings > Privacy Settings > Profile. Select which parts of your profile will be seen by whom.

If you choose Customize in the drop down, you can be more specific. This is where the Friend Lists you created before become really useful.

Also go to the Contact Information tab and choose how you want your contact information to be shared on the Internet.

3. Set Facebook Privacy Level of Photo Albums

On the Photos tab of your profile page, click Album Privacy. Here again, you can use your Friend Lists to set the privacy for each photo album.

Note that your profile pictures go into a special album that is always visible to ALL your friends.

4. Restrict Search Visibility

Click Privacy > Search to set your visibility when someone searches Facebook for people. This is an important way to safeguard your Facebook privacy. You can also select what will be visible in the search results.

5. Control Automatic Wall Posts and News Feed Updates

Your actions in Facebook such as comments, likes, appear as highlights on ALL your friends’ home pages. You cannot use friend lists here, only turn them on or off.

Go to Privacy > News Feed and Wall and choose whether you want your boss or ex-girlfriend to know that you’re in a relationship.

6. Set Facebook Wall Privacy

Go to your profile page, click Options > Settings under the status box.

Here you can control whether your friends can post to your Wall, and who can see the posts made by your friends.

7. Avoid Appearing in Advertisements

Facebook has two types of advertisements: third-party and Facebook. Third-party advertisements are currently not allowed to use your pictures, but there is a setting to disallow it if it is allowed in the future. Go to Privacy > News Feed and Wall > Facebook Ads tab to turn this off.

The Facebook ads shown to your friends are about ‘social actions’ like becoming a fan of something. You can turn this off at the bottom of the page.

8. Protect Yourself from Friends’ Applications

Go to Privacy > Applications, and click the Settings tab and uncheck all the boxes. These settings control what information about you is visible to applications installed by your friends. By default, these are set to visible. This means that your religious, sexual, and political preferences, pictures, etc. are readily available to one of the million worldwide Facebook application developers, each time any of your friends takes a quiz, plays a game, or runs any other Facebook app. This is obviously a Facebook privacy issue.

This is the most commonly misunderstood aspect of Facebook privacy. These settings control what applications installed by your friends can see about you, even if you don’t install the application yourself.

Why is this important? Because these settings will not change anything about what you are sharing with the applications you install yourself. For that, go to the next step.

9. Privacy from Your Applications

There is no way to control what applications see about you; it is an all-or-nothing affair. Take this quiz developed by the American Civil Liberties Union to check what anonymous application developers can know about you and your friends each time you take a quiz.

The Burton Group’s Identity Blog features the Facebook Privacy Mirror, an application that you can use to find out what applications know about you and your friends. If you really want to see exactly what profile data of each of your friends is visible to application developers, Privacy Mirror shows it in detail.

The only thing you can do is to authorize only those applications you require and trust. Go to Settings > Application Settings from the top menu. Change the drop-down from Recently Used to Authorized. Here you can see all the applications you have authorized to get access to ALL your profile information. Remove the ones you no longer need.

Also check the list of applications Allowed to Post and Granted Additional Permissions to remove unwanted ones.

10. Quitting Facebook? Delete, Don’t Just De-Activate Your Account

You can easily deactivate your account in Facebook from the Settings page. But deactivation will retain all your profile information within Facebook, including pictures, friends, etc. If you want to permanently delete your Facebook account, click here to submit a deletion request. Note that:

There is an unspecified delay between submitting your delete request and actual deletion.

If you login to Facebook, your deletion request is automatically cancelled.

There doesn’t seem to be any way to confirm that your request was completed.

Even after permanent deletion, Facebook says that copies of your photos may remain on their servers for technical reasons.

Also, note that once in a while, there is news of a Facebook hack or leak that can expose your information on the Internet. It is better to be safe than sorry by avoiding using Facebook for anything that may embarrass you.

I hope this article gives you a better understanding and insight into Facebook’s fragile privacy. Have any questions or concerns? Liked the post? Please tell us in the comments!

More about: Facebook, privacy, safer browsing, security, social media, social networks View all tags

(By) Mahendra tweets as @ScepticGeek and blogs at Skeptic Geek.

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3 Comments Add Comment

2009-09-13 16:16:56

Hammad

great tips….thanks alot. this helped alot.

Reply to this comment

2009-09-13 17:25:38

Alex

hi!
as I can, for example. Published today, a photo for my family, tomorrow, for my colleagues. You can not choose on board, but you can not
?

Reply to this comment

2009-09-13 21:40:33

claire

Thanks, this was very helpful!

Reply to this comment

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BREAKING: Facebook Lite Is Live

2009-09-10T20:47:00.001-07:00

Facebook’s (
) been launching new features today, and it looks like they’re not stopping.

A few weeks ago, we discovered that Facebook was testing Facebook Lite, a stripped-down version of Facebook. It drills Facebook down into its core features, making for a Twitter (
)-like experience.

Now the testing seems to be done. Facebook Lite has launched, at least for U.S. users (our own Pete Cashmore cannot access it yet).

We’ve got screenshots after the jump!

Check out these screenshots:

TweetMixx: A Better Way to Track Twitter Trends and Topics

2009-09-10T20:20:00.001-07:00

New web service TweetMixx is a bit like TweetMeme (
) meets saved Twitter searches meets a web-based Twitter client. It allows you to follow your favorite topics, not just people, and attempts to help cull the best tweets from people you don’t and may not even want to follow.

The focus is on tweets containing links, with the goal of giving you a window into content being shared on your watched topics by people you don’t necessarily follow. Next to each tweet is a short preview from the link it contains, giving you a bit of insight about whether or not it’s worth following the link.

A service from the folks at social news site Mixx (
), TweetMixx lets you log in with your Twitter account via OAuth and add a set of your interests to follow on Twitter. It’s more intelligent than simply a saved search though — it’s unclear what algorithm they use to identify what falls into “tech” or “gaming” for example, but so far the results seem quite accurate for the topics we’ve followed.

You can also get a view of the links being shared by just the people you follow (and a toggle to view all tweets regardless of whether or not they contain links), with the same link preview service displayed in the middle column. Like Facebook and Twitter Search behave, as new updates come in the site will notify you with a message at the top saying “There are more tweets to be read!” and a link to refresh the page.

In the far right column is a textbox for updating your own Twitter status which is standard throughout the “your interests” and “your friends” sections, creating a nice all-in-one dashboard for finding relevant content and sending it back out to your network if you wish.

Top Content and Trends on Twitter

Two other tabs in the horizontal navbar include “top” and “trends,” giving you a window into what content is hot and trending right now on Twitter (
). This is similar of course to what TweetMeme and some other services do, but having this combined with topic following and link previews makes TweetMixx a valuable new contribution to the crowded web-based Twitter interface service field.

Have you had a chance to check out TweetMixx? Do you think following topics is a valuable approach to lowering the Twitter signal to noise ratio? Let us know in the comments.

Chrome extensions arriving in developer version | Deep Tech - CNET News

2009-09-10T02:42:00.001-07:00

Support for extensions to customize Chrome, the top-requested feature for Google's browser, has begun arriving for adventurous users.
Previously, extensions worked only for those who enabled the feature with a command line switch. Now the feature is enabled by default in the developer preview version of Chrome on Windows, Aaron Boodman, the Google engineer who oversees the extensions work, said in a blog post Wednesday.
"We're ready for a few more people to start using extensions--the kind of adventurous people who populate the dev channel," said Boodman, who earlier in his career developed the Greasemonkey tool that permitted extensive customization of Firefox.
Work is already under way for some popular extensions, including Yahoo's Delicious for social bookmarking and Xmarks for bookmark synchronization.
Extensions are enabled by default only for Chrome's Windows users right now. "We've also enlisted some help to get extensions up to speed on Mac and Linux," Boodman said.
The extension-programming interfaces have been changing, and more changes are coming to the user interface. Those who want to start developing extensions should look at the new Chrome extension documentation.
Chrome extensions are written with the same programming technologies as are used for Web pages themselves--HTML, CSS, and the like. Mozilla has a related extension effort called Jetpack under way for Firefox.

via news.cnet.com

Seek or Show: Two Design Paradigms for Lots of Data « Theresa Neil

2009-09-10T02:23:00.000-07:00

Seek or Show: Two Design Paradigms for Lots of Data « Theresa Neil: "
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Mozilla Releases Firefox 3.5.3 with Security and Stability Fixes - Firefox 3.5.3 - Lifehacker

2009-09-09T20:26:00.001-07:00

By Adam Pash, 6:30 PM on Wed Sep 9 2009, 1,676 views

Mozilla pushed Firefox 3.5.3 to servers this afternoon, fixing several security and stability issues. There's nothing terribly exciting in this release, but it's always good to make sure you're using the most stable and secure release, so go to Help -> Check for Updates to upgrade to 3.5.3. If you're really curious, check out the full changelog here. [Mozilla Firefox 3.5.3 Release Notes]

via lifehacker.com

Nice to try

MyTwitFace: TweetDeck Adds Major Facebook and MySpace Features

2009-09-09T02:59:00.001-07:00

TweetDeck (
) is fast becoming the de facto accessory for social media fanatics. The Twitter desktop application is certainly seeing formidable competition, mainly from the likes of Seesmic (
), or web-based alternatives, but their ultimate mission is to become more than just a Twitter (
) app and be a browser for the real-time web.

A new version of TweetDeck (v0.30), which just launched this morning, aims to push the application in that direction. With Twitter still front and center, the new release also embraces a boatload of additional Facebook (
) functionality and adds in MySpace (
) integration. It’s almost everything Conan envisioned for the year 3000.

The consummate Twitter follower will also love that today marks the simultaneous launch of the TweetDeck Directory which features predefined columns for one-click following en masse and instant column addition to your TweetDeck.

Facebook Frenzy

When you open up the spiffy new version of TweetDeck, the biggest improvement you’ll notice is the enhanced Facebook features. Instead of just status updates flying by, you’ll be able to create columns for the full news feed, single out a column for just status updates, photos, videos, or wall posts, and create custom columns for any of the above for specific groupings of your Facebook friends.

Essentially, if you can do it on Facebook, you can now do it via TweetDeck. You can update Facebook Pages, view or add comments and likes, see who’s tagged in photos, watch photo slide shows, and mouse over user avatars for a myriad of additional options like updating the user’s wall, sending the user a message, or translating an update.

Not Your Average Twitter Directory

Another biggie is the new TweetDeck Directory. It’s essentially like other directory apps, expect that TweetDeck has gone ahead and categorized Twitterers into column-friendly lists. Topics and genres span pop culture, entertainment, and sports to include Twitterers who are well known in categories like: Tech News, Hip Hop, Journalists, Comedians, and Football.

Once you see a list you like, you can click to scan the included Twitters, and then select “Add Column” to add it instantly your TweetDeck. In doing so, you’ll also start following the pre-selected Twitterers.

MySpace and More …

Got a MySpace account you still keep an eye on? No need to admit that to us (we have them too), but you can use the new version of TweetDeck to keep an active eye on what your friends on the other social network are doing. You can create a column for your MySpace friends’ activity, your comments, and your friends’ status and mood. Plus, you can use TweetDeck to update your MySpace status/mood.

There’s also a ton of minor and major improvements to the application. Check out the list below for even more feature enhancements:

* Drag and Drop photo sharing – Simply drag a photo to TweetDeck in order to post it on Twitter, Facebook or MySpace.
* TweetPhoto (
) has replaced TwitPic (
) as the default photo sharing service.
* Improved interface – We’ve simplified the UI to group features by service and also simplified the update window so you can simply paste or drag and drop a link into the main space and it’ll automatically be shortened and added to your tweet.
* Minimise to tray – Adding the ability to keep TweetDeck running but minimise it to tray. This is one of our most requested bug fixes.
* Click on a hashtag to create a new search column and see what people are talking about immediately.
* Add your bit.ly account details to use your own account when using bit.ly as a shortener in TweetDeck.
* Quick Profile – Simply enter a Twitter name to view profiles in TweetDeck.
* Better follower management – your follower list will be kept up to date over time (including removing people you no longer follow).
* Open to non Twitter users – Users no longer require a Twitter account to use TweetDeck opening up TweetDeck to all Facebook and MySpace users.

15 Popular Codes For Smiley Faces & Their Meanings

2009-09-09T01:48:00.001-07:00

15 Popular Codes For Smiley Faces & Their Meanings

Sep. 8th, 2009 By Tina

Smileys represent the human face and all its possible expressions that correspond to our various moods. They have been around for decades, but the internet brought them real fame.

Online, smileys are a powerful way to transport emotions. The typographic smileys are generally known as emoticons. Placed with care and read with an eye for detail, they clarify the meaning of a statement and improve interpretation.

Meanwhile, chatters across the globe have developed a huge selection of emoticons and smileys on most instant messengers. If you always want to hit the right nerve and never pick the wrong expression, use our emoticon guide to popular codes for smiley faces.

Western Emoticons

Western emoticons are typically written from left to right. Here are 15 of the most popular ones.

1. Smile

: – )   or :-] or :3 or :> stands for happiness.

2. Grin

: – D expresses great happiness or a victory.

3. Frown

: – (   or :-c represents sadness or disappointment. The latter can also mean great sadness.

4. Wink

; – )   or ,-)   or *-) indicates a joke or double entendre in what was said.

5. Tongue

: – P   or : – p   or :-Þ   or :-b is an emoticon to tease, often used as a joke.

6. Open mouth

:-O   or : – () stands for surprise or shock.

7. Distorted mouth

: – / means skepticism, being annoyed or uneasy.

8. Beaked lips

:-X   or :-*   or :-<> expresses a kiss, love and affection. But careful, this one can be ambiguous.

:-@ or : – ) ~~ ( – :   or : – )~~~~ stand for french kissing.

9. Sealed lips

:-X   or :-# stands for embarrassment. Notice the ambiguity.

10. Halo

0:-) represents an angel or innocence and is often used in a playful manner.

11. Tear

:’-( shows a crying face and expresses sadness.

12. Horns

>:-) or >:-D is used to express evil.

13. Blank

: – | expresses boredom, but can also stand for no comment.

14. Spittle

:-p~~ represents drooling.

15. Arrow

>.>   or <.<   or >_>   or <_< points the way in which to look. Technically, this is an eastern emoticon.

Eastern Emoticons

In contrast to western codes for smiley faces, eastern emoticons can be read without tilting the head. Here is a selection, which does not correspond to the previous one.

1. Smile for happiness

(^_^) or (^.^)

2. Open mouth for laughing or singing

(^o^)

3. Wink for joking

(`_^)   or (^_~)

4. Closed eyes for sadness or sighing

(-_-)

5. Lowered head for bitterness or disappointment

(._.)   or (,_,)

6. Sweat drop for nervousness or embarrassment

(^_^’)

7. Big eyes for wonder (seriously?)

0.o   or O_o

8. Beaked lips for a kiss

(^x^) or (^3^)

9. Blushing for embarrassment

^///^   or   >///<   or   o///o

10. Crossed out eyes for death

(X_X)

11. Tears for sadness and crying

(;_;) or (T_T)

12. Distorted eyes for pain, failure or frustration

(>_<) or (>.<)

13. Closed eyes and zzZ for sleeping

(-_-)zzZ   or   -_-zzZ

14. Headphones for listening to music

d^_^b   or d-_-b

15. Distorted eyes for annoyance

(>_>)

There are many, many more emoticons to express every shade of emotion you can think of. You will find more western emoticons here and here. The latter also includes emoticons that represent celebrities and a list of available MSN and Yahoo! smileys. More eastern emoticons can be found here.

By the way, most chat clients automatically convert codes for text smiley faces to graphics. If you want to prevent this, there is a simple trick: simply type the characters in reverse order, for example (-: instead of : – ).

Do you use emoticons and did you come across different meanings of the ones mentioned above? Please share potential ambiguities with us!

Image credits: jaylopez

More about: chat, emoticons, fun, geeky fun, IM, Interesting View all tags

(By) Tina has been writing for MakeUseOf since late 2007. In her other lifes she is a researcher, scientific writer, senior customer service representative or blogger. Tina is also an experienced host with CouchSurfing.

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12 Comments Add Comment

2009-09-08 10:02:32

FiZ

You’re forgetting the best emoticon for quiet frustration: %lt;^>-_-)

Reply to this comment

2009-09-08 10:04:22

FiZ

whoops, that was supposed to be <^>-_-)

Reply to this comment

2009-09-08 12:07:59

Mt

yeah, same as this one in chinese.

凸(-.-)凸

Reply to this comment

2009-09-08 10:37:10

ncus

d(^_^)b this also can be two thumbs up.

(-_-)/~ bye bye, waving handkerchief.

Reply to this comment

2009-09-08 12:04:34

Doc

I’ve seen almost all of the Western style emoticons…but almost all of them are *more* common *without* the minus sign (hyphen).

Reply to this comment

2009-09-08 13:15:35

gogo

And what is xD ?

Reply to this comment

2009-09-08 13:58:26

Mt

it is the same as LOL.

“X” = eyes are closing.
“D” = mouth.

Reply to this comment

2009-09-08 15:21:29

Joe

dude, no one use the noses XD

Reply to this comment

2009-09-09 01:51:14

Tina

Thanks for mentioning Joe!!!

When I wrote the article I didn’t want to include both versions for each emoticon – with nose and without. So for the sake of completeness I went with including the nose and forgot to point out that it’s optional.

In fact, I don’t use the nose myself.

Reply to this comment

2009-09-09 03:04:45

yuho

No really. _No one_ uses the noses except old people who refer to guides like these. Noses look sarcastic.

(Comments wont nest below this level)

Reply here

2009-09-08 17:15:59

Tobi

The best emoticon I’ve seen is :U
It’s hard to explain what it means, I’ve mostly seen it used when someone does something or says something obviously stupid, but doesn’t catch on for a few seconds. Though is it also somewhat analogous to “shoop da whoop.”

Reply to this comment

2009-09-08 22:33:52

Tandil Ajedrez

^^ is to use in many gamer for “lol” …

Reply to this comment

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My so-called paperless life | Deep Tech - CNET News

2009-09-08T19:35:00.001-07:00

I expected problems from my attempt to rid myself of the paper in my life. What I didn't expect was this complication from my wailing 4-year-old son, Levi:
"Daddy, why did you recycle all my pictures?"
Even though he raised that question in a half-asleep moment in the middle of the night last week, Levi's anxiety illustrated one big complication about the idea of going paperless.
In short, some physical objects have value that doesn't easily transfer to the bits of their electronic representation. There's a great divide between the physical and the virtual.

My son's drawing, 'A Truck Dreaming of Another Truck,' now exists only as a digital photo.
(Credit: Levi Konrad-Shankland)

What led to this situation? Some people have gone paperless with evangelical fervor, but I'm just trying to pare down the amount of paper cluttering my life. Call it going paper-lite.
The formal effort began with an attempt to buy a new house. When we refinanced our mortgage in 2003, the lender insisted on actual physical documents from the actual bank--no printouts of statements downloaded from the bank's Web site, thank you very much. But in 2009, lenders were happy with e-mailed documents in electronic PDF form.
I'd been hoarding statements in an overstuffed, immovable filing cabinet in part because of the painful memory of paying a bank to reissue one missing statement. Freed from that constraint--and facing the imminent necessity to actually move that filing cabinet to a new home--meant the time had come to go digital.
I was surprised how far along I already was. For example, I started photographing my son's artwork long ago and sharing it through a Flickr group, figuring there was no way I could keep all the real versions I wanted. I give his works the "Levi art" tag for easier location later. These aren't high-end drum scans or anything--I just put the paper in good light and snap a photo.
Now I've also begun shucking old bank statements, scanning photos, and culling memorabilia. Here are five things I learned on the way.

1. Go for it

You can get started without going whole hog. Pick a corner of your life and expand from there at a pace that you're comfortable with.
Starting small lets you sort out your preferences and problems before you scrap your analog life. Obviously you should be careful with what you throw away--how many years back can the Internal Revenue Service audit your taxes?
With the most important documents, such as birth certificates, I just added digital versions and kept the original paper copies.
My banks and investment institutions have been needling me to go paperless already for years, so that's a good spot to start. I set up a subfolders on my computer for saving each institution's statements after download. If you're nervous, you can print out copies.
The technology for digitizing what can be digitized is maturing. Serious people get scanners with sheet-feed scanners for bulk digitization, but I decided to just go digital from now on. As the years go by, I'll gradually cull the older paper documents.
Another good place to start is photography. Your new photos are most likely digital, but your old photos are most likely hidden away.
Based on reviews and some recommendations from friends, I sent a giant batch of photos off to ScanCafe to be turned into JPEGs--they scan slides, negatives, and prints for 29 cents apiece, including basic correction for color and scratches, and you can reject up to half the shots without paying.

2. PDF is your friend

Adobe Systems did us all a favor when it invented Portable Document Format and did us another when it handed it over to the ISO for standardization so everything from Apple Preview to Google Docs can make use of them. I've had my complaints with the Adobe Reader software, but overall, PDF's ability to encapsulate graphics and text makes it ideal for the paperless era.
I never had much use for Adobe Acrobat software until wrestling with the oceans of paperwork involved with buying and selling homes. I couldn't go totally paperless, since physical documents had to be signed, but often I could photograph and crop the documents, use Acrobat to package them into PDFs, and e-mail them on their way.
It was cumbersome, but it beat buying a fax machine, and the documents were now stored electronically on my computer.
PDF is the preferred format for bank statements, too. Here, alas, is one of my biggest beefs: the monthly process of retrieving statements from the three banks, two mutual fund companies, and other financial institutions I deal with for 401k, 529, and IRA accounts.
They all send e-mail notifications of new statements, but all this downloading grunt work is a big hassle compared to the pre-paperless days when these statements would arrive in the mail with no effort on my behalf.
So why don't they just send me PDFs by e-mail? The PDF standard includes encryption, and Adobe digital signature technology that can assure a document hasn't been tampered with.
"We're very keen on the idea of banks, institutions, and utilities moving back to a more active delivery of a statement," said John Harris, Adobe's product manager, electronic signatures and security alliances. "The technologies are there and have been there for some time."
When I asked two of my institutions, E*Trade Financial and Vanguard Group, why they couldn't just e-mail me my statements, both said it's because of security. Vanguard is aware of PDF encryption technologies, "but we can't be sure that our shareholders will be able to support working with it on their computers," and the company also has to worry about shared access to a single e-mail account, Vanguard spokeswoman Linda Wolohan said.
E*Trade and Vanguard also keep back records--all of them in the case of E*Trade, and back through 2006 for Vanguard. I still like the idea of having my own copies, though.

3. Physical stuff has a downside, too

Freeing yourself from paper is liberating, even if you're not moving.
Getting rid of reams of documents gave me a feeling of lightness and inspired me to get rid of a lot more--that second-rate spatula, books I'll never reread, those margarita glasses we never used. Do first-world denizens need to have so much stuff?
Moving many heavy boxes of books just lent more impetus to my recent Amazon Kindle-initiated e-book revelation. We won't get rid of all our books, but 95 percent sounds about right.
Of course stuff can be useful. But because the value of paper documents often is just information, digital versions can be just as good. I reduced four drawers in a filing cabinet to one, and if all goes according to plan, I'll eventually be rid of one ugly piece of furniture altogether.
Many folks have already moved their music collections to digital form. When was the last time you needed those CDs? The CD sound fidelity is higher than what you'll get with MP3--but only if you actually listen to the CD.
And of course going paperless has obvious tree-preservation benefits.

4. Back up your data

You've heard it before, and now you're going to hear it again: keep your data safe. The farther down the paperless road you go, the more important that advice gets.
There are a variety of methods, and I recommend more than one. I start with periodic backups on a USB hard drive. For a smaller number of very important documents, burning CDs or DVDs is a good idea; periodically exchanging yours with your friends' gives some protection against disasters such as theft, fire, and flood.
The wave of the future are online services such as Mozy, Backblaze and Carbonite. If you have hundreds of gigabytes of photo files, as I do, expect to saturate your home Internet connection for a very long time.
Finally, there are specific online services that are useful for making some kinds of data much more easily accessible. You can store a JPEG of your passport at Flickr, handy if it's stolen while you're traveling, or a PDF of your tax forms at Google Docs.
But there's always some risk that your account will be breached or that some technical error at the hosting site will lead to inadvertent overshare, so think carefully about the risks as well as the rewards.

5. Save what truly has value

It took me two whole days to cull reams of documents from my filing cabinet, but it was well worth the effort. The hardest decisions were for documents that weren't obviously essential or disposable, and of course most fell into that intermediate category.
I concluded that I probably needed 1 percent of my documents 99 percent of the time and 99 percent of them 1 percent of the time. With physical documents, it's hard to speculate about which of the nearly useless documents might in fact become useful or even essential some day.
With digital documents, the penalty for being a packrat is much lower. Of course, finding that necessary document amid the e-clutter could be difficult. But I'm hopeful that in the long run desktop search will make it easier to locate what I need even if I don't invest a lot of effort in file organization or tagging.
But here's where things get complicated. I love history, I've accumulated plenty of items that, although mundane at the time of their creation, accumulated some historic or sentimental value. The guest book entries (Thomas A. Edison!) at Hermit Creek Camp in the Grand Canyon where my great-grandfather worked, for example, or my grandfather's Depression-era daily expense log.
The big question for me is how close electronic documents will come to holding the same value as their physical counterparts.
My animal brain can latch onto something better when it's accompanied by the texture of paper or the smell of crayon. Someday, perhaps, art museums will feature large electronic displays of paintings, but there's something extra with the original touched by the artist's paintbrush than with a mere copy, no matter high the fidelity.
For the really special stuff, I'm therefore keeping the physical incarnations. So, Levi, rest easy.

via news.cnet.com

How To Turn Gmail Into A Multitasking Machine (Part II)

2009-09-08T10:01:00.001-07:00

How To Turn Gmail Into A Multitasking Machine (Part II)

Sep. 7th, 2009 By Angelina

In How To Turn Gmail Into A Multitasking Machine (Part I), I covered a bit about setting up the tools you’ll need to consolidate your multiple email streams. We went though installing the necessary Greasemonkey script, and configuring the Firefox extension Better Gmail 2. Then, we set up nested labels to categorize your email into, and selected only the most important to be displayed in the sidebar.

We move onto Part Two. Now that we’ve set up our labels, we need to do something with them. We’ll set up the filters in this part, so that labeling email isn’t as painful, and is mostly automated. I find that maintaining is the hardest part of organization, so if there a bit of automated help involved, hopefully that will motivate you to keep up the hard work of sorting through your communication.

4. Filters

Having labels set up is excellent, but that doesn’t accomplish anything in itself, unless you plan on applying labels by hand to every email you receive. However, that would make this system tedious and redundant. That’s why we’ll use filters to automate email labeling.

Click on the Settings link in the upper right hand corner of your screen. In the page that pops up, click the Filters header, and you should be greeted by a list of the filters you currently have. Click Create New Filter.

You don’t need to fill out all of the boxes; it actually is best if you fill out as few of them as necessary, as the more boxes you fill out, the more likely you are to miss emails that should fall under that filter. On the contrary, the less boxes you fill out, the more likely you are to accidentally capture unrelated emails. Thus, it goes without saying that you should only be using very specific key words to set up your filters.

For example, my school job sends out mass emails to their mailing list by addressing all mass emails to “stc-all.” Thus, I created a filter for all the emails that were directed TO: stc-all. If you have more than one keyword for a particular box, you can use AND or OR to append that keyword to the filter as well. In my above example, I could put TO: stc-all AND ucla.edu, and that would filter out emails that are only to both stc-all and ucla.edu. If I had put OR instead of AND, then the filter would single out all of the emails directed to either stc-all or ucla.edu (which, in this case, would be inadvisable, since all of the emails directed to any ucla.edu address would not necessarily be related to my job. Keep in mind though, the separate boxes represent parameters that are added onto your search. If you typed something in both TO: and FROM:, for example, your filter would only catch emails that are directed both TO: keyword 1, and FROM: keyword 2.

From here, you can do a test search to see which emails your filter catches and if the keywords you are using blanket enough of the right emails. Then, if necessary, you can adjust your keywords if they do not filter out the necessary emails. Otherwise, you can move forward and specify what you would like to name your filter and do with the emails.

If you’re applying the “Skip the Inbox” option to any of your emails, you might want to consider unsubscribing from the newsletter or asking the sender to desist. The “Mark As Read” function is great for any emails that you need to check, but don’t want necessarily cluttering your inbox. For example, I use Freecycle, and want to see all the emails sent by its members, but if left alone, I would get ten or twenty some emails from Freecycle every day. Of course, leaving it as is doesn’t impact my workflow too much, but I prefer setting them all as “read” by default so that when I’m done sorting my important emails, I can select “Select: All Read” to quickly clear out my inbox.

We’re almost done! There’s only one part to go before we hit the final bend, and learn how to keep our inboxes tidy and efficient, so we’re not swamped by the influx of emails. Take some time before the next article comes out to play around with your labels and filters, and figure out a system that works for you. Perhaps you’ll only utilize some of the tips that I gave you, and that is definitely fine.

As always, whatever works for you is always the best path to take.

More about: email, email management, Gmail, multitasking, organization, productivity View all tags

Trapped Girls Updated Facebook Status Instead of Calling For Help

2009-09-08T02:27:00.001-07:00

Too much social media can be a bad thing. Two girls lost in a stormwater drain in Adelaide, Australia, updated their FacebookFacebook
status instead of calling emergency services on Sunday night, in a situation authorities called “worrying”.

It’s not clear how much danger the 10- and 12-year old girls were in: Australia’s ABCNews describes them as both “lost” and “trapped”, but it’s possible that they felt no imminent danger. Nonetheless, the Metropolitan Fire Service expressed concern that the youngsters, equipped with phones, would raise the alarm on Facebook rather than calling 000, the Australian equivalent of 911:

The 10- and 12-year-old girls updated a Facebook status to say they were lost in a drain on Honeypot Road at Hackham in Adelaide’s southern suburbs on Sunday night. Glenn Benham from the MFS says it was fortunate a young friend was online at the time and was able to call for help for them.

“It is a worry for us because it causes a delay on us being able to rescue the girls,” he said.

“If they were able to access Facebook from their mobile phones, they could have called 000, so the point being they could have called us directly and we could have got there quicker than relying on someone being online and replying to them and eventually having to call us via 000 anyway.”

It’s not the first time social media has been used in place of an emergency call: in Atlanta, Georgia in May 2009, a councilman was concerned that his cellphone battery would be flat by the time a 911 call connected. Instead, he Tweeted: “Need a paramedic on corner of John Wesley Dobbs and Jackson st. Woman on the ground unconscious. Pls ReTweet”.

Image: Metropolitan Fire Service, courtesy Tarale on Flickr

Could it happen to any of your young girls? Being so-social-media is one thing but being narcissistic is a dangerous attitude.

Any Wordpress blog can be cloud-enabled (Scripting News)

2009-09-08T00:25:00.001-07:00

Home > Archive > 2009 > September > 7

Any Wordpress blog can be cloud-enabled

Monday, September 07, 2009 by Dave Winer.

This is worth a special post.

Wordpress did two things today.

1. They enabled rssCloud support on wordpress.com. This means that any weblog hosted on their server can publish real-time. This is the announcement that got all the attention.

2. But equally important is that you can install the rssCloud plug-in on any Wordpress blog that you host and it adds a cloud element to your feed and handles notifications for subscribers. That's how we got InBerkeley.com to be cloud-enabled. It takes a couple of minutes and you're ready to go.

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/rsscloud/

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William Mougayar 7 minutes ago
It's amazing that rssCloud has already received more market traction in less than 24 hrs than Google's PubSubHubbub did since its intro, despite WordPress also having a PubSubHubbub plug-in. Definitely a Renaissance of RSS in the making!

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Viki 17 minutes ago
Will try out rssCloud out right away. If this works the way I think, its going to invigorate RSS once again, and it will regain its lost crown, which it so rightfully deserves!

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wazoo 35 minutes ago
wow..that was amazingly easy to implement for both of my sites! Thanks Dave!

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junal 1 hour ago
Awesome! im gonna install it...

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Thejesh GN 3 hours ago
That is so cool. I am going to use it.

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AndrewWarner 3 hours ago
All I can say is, congratulations Dave. Thanks!

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figasia 4 hours ago
fantastic, cant wait to install. Thanks Dave!

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cshotton 4 hours ago
This is the tech story of the week, IMO. I don't think people realize yet what sort of huge shift this is in the balance of power from centralized servers running walled gardens to a model that is just as distributed as the Internet, itself. Great job, Dave!

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It seems that everyone is mesmerized by this new functionality of Wordpress. Again, real-time thing is a popular choice!

Ways Filter Information | Using social media to guide and help you connect to social networks: Twitter, Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, YouTube using social media

2009-09-07T01:38:00.001-07:00

6 Ways to Filter Information
Social Media — By Matthew Tommasi on August 30, 2009 at 8:24 pm

Knowing how to filter out the noise when searching for information on the internet can really make a difference.

Filtering out information that you you don’t want, can help you find exactly what you are looking for. Often knowing what you don’t want when performing a search can sometimes be more effective than knowing what you do want.

There are many ways to filter information and it is really very simple once you know how.

Here are six ways that will help you filter information on the internet.

LazyFeed

Lazyfeed is a service that pulls in information from various places around the web, such as twitter, blogs, social networking sites, etc.

Lazyfeed allows you to subscribe to any topics and get live updates. Just save any topic you are interested in, and forget about it.

Lazyfeed will remember and let you know when there’s new content on that topic, just like an instant messenger. Lazyfeed allows you to stay on top of everything you care about, effortlessly.

Check out my guide on how to setup and use Lazyfeed – Lazyfeed: Real-time Content Discovery

Google Alerts

Google Alerts are emails automatically sent to you when there are new Google results for your search terms.

Google Alerts currently offers 6 variations of alerts – News, Web, Blogs, Comprehensive, Video and Groups.

A News alert is an email aggregate of the latest news articles that contain the search terms of your choice and appear in the top ten results of your Google News search

A Web alert is an email aggregate of the latest web pages that contain the search terms of your choice and appear in the top twenty results of your Google Web search

A Blogs alert is an email aggregate of the latest blog posts that contain the search terms of your choice and appear in the top ten results of your Google Blog search

A Comprehensive alert is an aggregate of the latest results from multiple sources (News, Web and Blogs) into a single email to provide maximum coverage on the topic of your choice

A Video alert is an email aggregate of the latest videos that contain the search terms of your choice and appear in the top ten results of your Google Video search

A Groups alert is an email aggregate of new posts that contain the search terms of your choice and appear in the top fifty results of your Google Groups search

Have a look at my guide on how to set them up – How to create Google Alerts

RSS

RSS (Really Simple Syndication) has been around for a long time and is a very easy way to be notified of new content on a website.

There are two ways you can check for new content on a website.

1. Browse directly to that site and see the if there is any new content yourself
2. Subscribe to that site’s RSS feeds and have all new content sent to you

The problem with the first way is if you browse to your favourite site and look for something new and it’s not there, you have wasted valuable time. This is especially so if you have many sites you regularly check.

RSS is a much faster way for you keep up-to-date with new content, where new things from all your favourite sites come to you instead.

Check out my Really Simple RSS Guide on how to setup and use RSS.

Tweetizen

Tweetizen is a simple web-based tool designed to help you filter the daily influx of tweets, and easily find the ones that are relevant to you. Use Tweetizen to create twitter groups, and you’ll be able to stay on top of what’s happening in all your areas of interest.

There is so much information being generated on Twitter every day, with so many different conversations it can be hard to keep up. Tweetizen’s filtering mechanisms will go through the millions of tweets and come up with the pertinent ones by taking tags and keywords into consideration.

My guide Filter tweets and create groups with Tweetizen shows you how to setup and use Tweetizen.

TweetBeep

TweetBeep is a service that allows you to receive Twitter alerts by email. It’s like Google Alerts for Twitter.

Get emailed when someone is twittering about you, your company, your product, or your website.

Check out my guide Tweetbeep – Twitter alerts by email on how to setup and use TweetBeep.

Twitter Hashtags

Hashtags are a way for Twitter users to group tweets associated with a specific topic.

Hashtags bring some order to a user’s published updates and make it easier to follow a topic of interest.

While you can use Twitter’s search function to find other people and messages, the hashtag allows users to sort topics into useful categories to revisit later.

Check out my Twitter Hashtags guide on how to setup and use Twitter Hashtags.

These are just a handful of ways you can filter information.

There are many, many more and I would love to hear what ways you use to filter information.

Tags: filter, Google, guide, how, information, instructions, linkedin, setup, Twitter

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Save Twitter Search results forever with Tweetdoc

2009-09-07T01:07:00.001-07:00

Save Twitter Search results forever with Tweetdoc

Care to comment?
By Martin Bryant on September 7, 2009

Twitter Search is a powerful way of measuring public opinion but it’s currently crippled because you can’t look very far back. At present you can view tweets no older than ten days. Wouldn’t it be good if you could easily save search results to come back to at a later date?

Tweetdoc aims to solve that problem in a beautifully simple way – saving Twitter Search results as a PDF.

Who is this useful for? Imagine you run an event that uses a hashtag – you could keep a permanent record of the what people were saying on Twitter about the event by saving all mentions of your hashtag with Tweetdoc. Businesses could run a daily Twitter search for their brand name using Tweetdoc and use it in marketing reports.

Tweetdoc’s PDFs are well presented, with a title page displaying a user-related description of the search along with the avatars of every Twitter user included in the search. Although the default setting makes your PDF publicly available on the Tweetdoc site, you can set up a user account and set your documents to be private – something I imagine most users will want to do.

The main problem is that PDF generation is currently slow. I mean really slow. You could be waiting the best part of half an hour to receive your finished document. Even when the report is complete, the ‘Processing’ notification continues to display. Refresh the page, though, and you’ll find your finished report.

For a service still in the early stages of its development this can be excused, but it needs improving as many people will just assume the service is broken. In today’s realtime web your rarely have to wait for anything. Maybe a progress bar would help here.

Although originally designed for event organisers, Tweetdoc is beginning to take steps to address the needs of business users. The service’s developer Martin Rue has just added one-click integration with Edocr, a Youtube-style service that allows easy hosting and sharing of documents. This is the first use of Edocr’s new OAuth-based API.

Ideas for the future include charging for premium features like automated daily reports. If Tweetdoc continues to hone its service we could be looking at a highly useful tool here.

Recommend this? [?]

You might be interested in:

Twitter Track returns – but who will use it?
The Search Revolution continues with DailyPerfect’s web voodoo
The future is here: FriendFeed launches realtime search
Facebook rolls out improved Search for all

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Martin Bryant Co-founder, Social Media Café Manchester
Martin Bryant is based in Manchester, UK. A co-founder of the city's monthly Social Media Cafe events and award-winning blogger, he trains young people in broadcast and social media skills and produces digital media in the education sector. His main interests are developments in the social web that relate to the mobile and music industries. Twitter, Blog, FriendFeed

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Penn Olson – Study: 80% of People Use Twitter for Business

2009-09-07T00:38:00.001-07:00

Study: 80% of People Use Twitter for Business

August 27, 2009 | Willis Wee
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According to a new research from Kamaron Research Institute, about 80% of the people use Twitter for business purposes. More than 8 in 10 listed “business” as the reason why they tweet.

This holds true for younger twitter-ers as well. Nearly half of those aged 25 and under gave “business” as the primary reason they tweet.

This Study, “Why Do You Tweet” was conducted online with a respondent group size of 280 Twitter Users.

It is common to see businesses on Twitter. Now that we have statistics to back our intuition, it reaffirms Twitter’s value in the business world.

This Study Came At The Right Time

Just 3 days ago, Biz Stone told Venturebeat that strategic statistic tools for businesses would soon be officially introduced on Twitter. Assuming the findings to be representative of the whole Twitter community, Biz Stone and co can very well expect a great sign up rate upon launch.

It seems like Twitter is doing all the right things to appeal to its users, helping it grow on the right track towards monetization; Stats for Business, Geolocation Tagging, Project Retweet, New Homepage.

Social Media Evolving to a Full Pledge Marketing Media

Social media has rocked the world and it is not hard to understand why. Not having a Facebook account would make you seem like an alien in college or workplace. It is becoming a standard way of life across the globe. With the amount of traffic these sites are generating, social media has certainly caught many businesses’ attention.

Slowly but surely, most social sites would evolve into a media for marketers. This is probably one of the reasons why teens don’t tweet and why Facebook experienced a growth in its age 55+ segment.

Let’s hope all businesses can be as cool and fun as @Mailchimp, @DellOutlet and @Starbucks.

via penn-olson.com

Twitter will be business tool no 1 in the virtual world?

5 Useful Websites For Photographers

2009-09-06T22:41:00.001-07:00

5 Useful Websites For Photographers

Sep. 3rd, 2009 By Dean Sherwin

Photography is a hobby that millions of people partake in every day. For many people, including me, it started out when they were a kid snapping pretend photos with their dad’s empty camera.

Now, with digital SLRs readily available and even the world’s first ever 3D camera now on the scene, the hobby (and indeed profession for many) keeps growing and growing in an era where still images and print was predicted to be obsolete.

The web is the greatest place for photographers to share photos and socialise, with Flickr undoubtedly being the biggest site for photographers to show off their snaps. But how about when it comes to editing their snaps or indeed just getting solid advice?

I have whittled down a list of many photography websites that I found into the five best sites for the amateur and semi-pro photographer.

Photoshop Express

This is a web app owned and run by the well-known Photoshop company – Adobe. It is a watered down version of their software and it allows the user to make basic editing to their photographs online before sharing them.

It’s really easy to use. Down the left hand side of the editing screen you have your basic tools such as ‘Auto-Correct’, ‘Crop’, ‘Touch up’, and ‘Remove Redeye’. These can all be used by clicking and dragging the mouse, which your average PC user, who has used MS Paint once or twice, should have no trouble with.

The list continues with some more advanced tools such as ‘Colour Saturation’, ‘Highlighting’, ‘Tint’ and ‘Focus’. All of these can transform a good shot into something memorable where the eye washes over the picture numerous times taking in all the attention to detail.

Across the top there are some upload tools and a link to your gallery. Photoshop Express lets you have up to 2GB of online storage – more than enough to upload a days worth of photographs waiting to be given a tweak here and there.

You also get you own gallery page under the Photoshop domain, for example, Mygallerypage.photoshop.com.

For more on Photoshop Express visit the MakeUseOf Directory.

PicResize

Pic Resize is a photography website that does pretty much what it says on the domain; it resizes pictures. This is an easy to use tool with some extra features thrown in.

When you get to the home page simply select the file you want by clicking ‘Browse’ and upload it. This will bring you to section two as seen in the screenshot. Here you can crop your picture, select what size you want to make it and add special affects such as ‘Sharpen’, ‘Greyscale’, ‘Rotate’ and ‘Blur’. You can do one or all of these options. Then click ‘Resize’ at the end of the page.

The final page gives you four options to choose from. You can preview the image, save it, publish it to the web or use the ‘Advanced Edit’ tool.

The advanced edit tool doesn’t give much more options but it is good for just giving it that final touch-up after the resize. You can crop, add text, blur, explode, and add a frame along with a few other small options.

Golden Hour

Golden Hour is a web app that tells you the best times to go out on the hunt for a mean shot in a certain area. Any photographer will tell you that they always go snapping at the ‘Golden Hour’ (or ‘Magic Hour’ as it’s sometimes known) because the sun is at the right angle of elevation relevant to the particular landmass selected.

All you have to do is click on where it is on the map that you plan on shooting and the app will tell you what times are the best to go. The hour is highlighted on a chart below the map and when you roll over it gives you some information as to why this is the golden hour for this location. The app will also tell you when there is a full moon coming up for those who want some good night time pictures.

Watermark

So after spending the day snapping like crazy, the photographer comes up against a new problem – copyright. As a freelance writer, I discovered my work stolen by two websites on two separate occasions when playing with CopyScape. The feeling of anger and to be honest, helplessness is awful.

What can you do? It’s the internet and tracking down someone is like looking for a needle in a haystack. However, with photographs the creators can protect them by adding in a watermark that will stop people from stealing their work.

A great (and free) online tool I found that can do this is a photography website called Watermark. This has a good free account option with the ability to upgrade to the premium account if you so wish. The free account does all you would really need. You can mark multiple photos at once and you can customise the watermark with different text, colours, size and effects as seen in the screenshot.

The only bad parts to the free account that you would notice is that a picture cannot be any larger than 0.5Mb which shouldn’t obstruct you much if you’re only posting them online. Also, it doesn’t save your watermark for when you come back later.

Both Karl and Jim have discussed watermarking alternatives here and here.

Fotopedia

Finally when the photograph has been taken, edited, resized and protected there comes the time to publish it. Sure, one could indeed use Flickr or perhaps a personal blog but for me, Fotopedia stands out from the rest.

With Fotopedia, photographs are organised and even voted upon by users as one of the main features to determine which ones should represent each category. Many of the photographs actually come from other web services such as Flickr as seen under them in the photographer’s credit area. You’re assured that you’re getting the best of the best however, as irrelevant or low quality photos are removed from the categories via the user vote system.

Fellow MakeUseOf writer Jim Henderson has done lots of photography-related articles here on MakeUseOf. To see what he has done so far, check out his MakeUseOf writers page.

So what web tools and services do MakeUseOf readers use for their photographs?

More about: image editing, image resizer, photo effects, photography, photos, watermark View all tags

Is Online Education More Effective Than Traditional Learning?

2009-09-06T22:27:00.001-07:00

Is Online Education More Effective Than Traditional Learning?

Written by Guest Author / September 6, 2009 11:00 AM / 4 Comments

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One of the fastest growing uses of technology is for online education. Student enrollment in online university degree programs has increased in recent years, but more interesting is the increase in kindergarten to grade 12 (K-12) students who are foregoing recess and pep rallies to study in virtual classrooms.

K12 is the largest provider of accredited online learning for grades K-12. It offers tuition-free and private supplemental learning, blended online/offline programs, and full-time online programs in the United States and internationally. K12 allows students to learn at their own level and has a strong social community with regularly sponsored events.

Great as all this sounds, the trend towards online learning raises the question of just how effective online education is compared to traditional education. According to a recent study conducted by SRI International for the US Department of Education, online learners perform slightly better than students in traditional face-to-face classrooms. The study analyzed research that compared online and conventional learning at institutions of higher education and in K-12 settings between 1996 and 2008.

A key finding of the report is that students doing partial or all course work online rank, on average, in the 59th percentile, meaning better than 59% of all those who were scored; whereas students in traditional classrooms ranked in the 50th percentile. Though this significant difference doesn't quite mean the end of institutional schools, it will help put an end to the myth that online learning is inferior to traditional learning. It will also help foster greater interest in developing technology geared specifically to education. No doubt, we will see online schools for K-12 pop up everywhere.

Already a giant in online university degrees, Kaplan has begun offering programs for students in grades 6 to 12, tailored to each learner. The company also runs the Kaplan Academy, a tuition-free online public high school available in six states. Kaplan has over 70 years of experience in distance learning and will likely see its numbers soar as more students (supported by their parents) opt for non-traditional schooling, in the hope of improving their chances of being admitted to their college of choice.

With social networks, slidesharing, IM, video and more at their disposal, students are finding it easier to get homework help, attend seminars, and even learn new languages. And educators can connect at a global level to discuss lesson plans and offer seminars.

Although Twitter may not penetrate the classroom just yet, social media help students maintain an active social life beyond the classroom. One of the biggest myths about online education is that students will become socially inept. Instead, learning online allows students to study at their own pace, usually opening up hours for sports, hobbies, volunteer work, and time with friends. Most programs also allow students to study what interests them. Not that learning online is easier. In fact, quite the opposite: students require tremendous discipline and excellent time management skills, two qualities that Insight Schools uses to promote its program. Insight Schools operates a network of tuition-free, accredited, online public high schools. Students receive their own laptop, as well as personalized education tailored to their lifestyle.

One would imagine that high school and college students are more likely to take advantage of online programs, but homeschooling has existed as long as education has, so it's a viable option for those in younger grades as well. Some children have special needs and talents, others have disabilities or simply struggle in the class. Parents looking for an alternative to traditional schooling for their child now have options other than special classes, tutoring and expensive private schools. Online education offers students more one-on-one time with their instructors. And, as a bonus, most K-12 online programs are inexpensive or even tuition-free

via readwriteweb.com