Happy Holidays!!
I’m totally cheating this week with the Byte. I wrote a fun article for the Blandin Foundation this month so I thought I’d share it. I’ll give you the first 4 cool tools here – but you’ll have to go to the Blandin site to see the rest:
http://tinyurl.com/c9ded5
1. Twitter (http://www.twitter.com) – a real time, text-based chat service. Members can read and send message through the web, cell phone or other handheld device. It’s not new, but it is reaching more and more people every day.
2. Midomi (http://www.midomi.com/) – a musical search engine where you can sing or hum a song to perform a search. Hum a tune and it will get more information for you.
3. Layar (http://layar.com/) – a cell phone application that shows real time geographic digital information through the camera of your mobile phone. Use it when you visit a new town; point your phone’s camera down a street and laid over a digital map will be information such as street names, building names, names and details of local businesses and even reviews from sites such as Yelp (http://www.yelp.com), when available.
4. Square (https://squareup.com/) – a gadget that allows you to accept credit card payments through any device with an audio input jack. It’s a great soon to small businesses; imagine the artist at a craft fair now able to accept payments quickly, easily and cost effectively.
I’m hoping to check out some of the tools in greater detail in the next few months. I’ll let you know how it goes.
Thanks and have a great holiday!
Google now hosts template-based sites: https://sites.google.com/site/sites/ I set one up: https://sites.google.com/site/pelicancruises/
The good news:
• the site looks very OK
• it only took about an hour for me to setup
• I feel like it could look good with another hour or so work
• I could point a domain name to it
• I suspect it ought to do well with Google
There are definitely some things I don’t love about the site. I’d like to be able to make more changes to the templates. I think it’s easy to plug in Picasa pictures and slideshows.
So while I don’t think you’ll find Fortune 400 businesses moving to this anytime soon, I think this is a great starter web site.
I know I’ve talked about Good Search before – but this is such a good time of year for a reminder of Good Search. Here’s the quick take:
Use Good Search as your search engine http://www.goodsearch.com and your favorite charity will get a penny. You have to specify your charity; you can get a list here: http://www.goodsearch.com/charitylist.aspx. If you are/have a charity to add you can look here: http://www.goodsearch.com/addcharity.aspx
Also they have coupons on their site. If you use one your charity gets a bonus.
My friend reminded me of Good Search because the school where she teaches just joined two days ago. Already they’ve earned more than $5. So it’s a get rich slow plan – but an easy plan. (f you want to just test it out you could designate her school as your charity: Sobriety High Charter School St Paul MN.)
Jay in Minneapolis asked me about affordable and/or free online chat options, such as Private Chat from the Online Institute (http://www.onlineinstitute.com/chat/). Private Chat allows you to chat with one or more people (text chat) as well as post documents, including video in a shared space. The cost is a $10 setup fee and $10 per month. One of the nice things is that Private Chat is that it doesn’t require a software download.
So I have to admit that I wasn’t able to look personally into a lot of options, but I was able to check out ThinkofIt http://thinkofit.com/webconf/index.htm, a (Minnesota-based) guide to web conferencing and online chat tools. They mention Online Institute – and several others.
Sorry Jay that’s the best I can do but ThinkofIt lists several similar tools (http://thinkofit.com/webconf/hostsites.htm#cheapbbs) with good, concise descriptions and some of the tools are free.
I hope that helps!
