Byte of the Week

Flickr is a great place to save and store pictures. One of the things I really like is that you can post pictures from your Flickr account to another web site easily. Then when you update your pictures in Flickr the update is fed to your web site. You can post all of your pictures or choose just a portion by grouping or tagging them.

You could also update pictures from friends or strangers on Flickr, perhaps based on their tags and assuming that they made their pictures available to the public.

I have looked this up about 42 times so if for no other reason then to save myself time, I am sending the link to you folks:
http://www.flickr.com/badge.gne

If you have a Flickr account, this page will walk you through the process of creating Flickr badge that you can cut and paste into another web site or blog so that pictures in your account automatically appear on that site.

Here’s an example of a Flickr fee I set up for a resort:
http://www.fairhillsresort.com/photo.html

And here’s an example of a Flickr feed created to gather pictures from everyone:
http://techpresident.com/node/32

OK I’ll admit it’s Wednesday night, I’m on the road and I’m tired! So I checked out Google Labs again for a topic. Tonight I found Google Trends (http://www.google.com/trends). It does two fun things:

1. It shows the top terms searched today (or any day). I think this is a great way to keep on top of what’s popular with folks and what current events are capturing attention.
2. You can do a search on a term or terms to track the popularity of a given term over time or to compare terms over time. Sadly, it doesn’t give you hard numbers on how many searches have been done – but it does tell if you a term is gaining or losing popularity. I think this is helpful for anyone tracking marketing terms that people might use to find their product or service.

So there’s a quick take. I hope it’s helpful or fun.

Yesterday a friend of mine (Bill from Mahtomedi) sent me information on a free online video phone service, SightSpeed (www.sightspeed.com). You visit their site, download the software and magic presto you can make video calls to friends who have downloaded the same software. It took only a few minutes.

Admittedly you have to have a camera, mic and speakers – but other than that you don’t need much. Bill and I tried out the service and it was a little echoy – but it worked. You can also make audio-only calls. It’s a great, free way to talk to and see friends around the world.

If you sign up, feel free to list me as a call buddy and we can test out the service.

Sometimes it’s fun to just peruse the Google Labs (http://labs.google.com) to see what they’re looking into these days.

Tonight I tried their Google Voice Local Search (http://labs.google.com/goog411). It’s pretty much like calling 411 only it’s free.

Just dial 1-800-GOOG-411 (1-800-466-4411). You give them city and state. You ask for a business name or category and they start giving you your options. Once/if they name the place you want you say stop (actually you say or press the corresponding number) and then you can get more details, which includes phone number and address or you can get connected. You can also choose to get the details via text message.

I tried it and it worked. I tried looking up residential numbers (not that they claim to offer residential numbers) but the numbers were always wrong.