Category Archives: Internet Tools

FriendFeed rooms have been a major hit on the lifestream aggregate service, but being part of too many rooms just adds to the noise. If you want to focus, choose FriendFeed rooms that have the ability to help your productivity or even land you a job. Thus below are six rooms I believe are hugely beneficial for productivity.

1) Invites - Invites is a room for sharing and exchanging invites for new Web 2.0 services, services that are simply private, or ones inextended beta. Socialthing, jaiku, lifestream.fm are all traded on a daily basis. Even if you aren’t looking to add to the services you use, it’s a great place to track emerging companies and trends. Learn about new services before they become hot and prosper.

2) ProBlogger Room - Regardless of whether or not you read ProBlogger, the community within the ProBlogger room is great for those who have questions about blogging. Want to know about WordPress themes, advertising, user or user experience? The ProBlogger Room is a great place to start.

3) AnswerFeed - I am biased as I am AnswerFeed’s administrator (anyone want to join me in that role?), but AnswerFeed is a great place to get insight on any topic that you have questions about. Need opinions on computer monitors, finding jobs online, or even hacking and code? You can leave your question in AnswerFeed and expect answers and even a conversation around the topic.

4) LinkedIn - This room is not just about LinkedIn as a service, but about your professional profiles and optimizing them. You can post your profile and have members of the room give their opinions and advice on it. It’s also a great place for some networking.

5) All Things Productivity - This room is exactly as the title states – about articles and discussions related to improving your productivity. This room isn’t as active as some other rooms, but there is some incredible content and links to great articles that will help you work faster and work happier.

6) Web 2.0 Jobs - Finally, I have saved the best for last. Web 2.0 Jobs, created by Andrew Wise, is about helping recruiters, businesses, and job seekers get together in a Web 2.0 setting to find jobs in the Web 2.0 world. People have found jobs on the board and that trend will probably continue. If you’re looking for a unique job in social media or with tech start-ups, I suggest taking a stroll through the Web 2.0 board.

Do you have any other rooms to add to this list? Then add them to the comments (or comment on FriendFeed – Your comments there will appear on this blog as well!)

Like this post? Then start following me on FriendFeed. And stay tuned – I’ve begun a blog redesign and rebranding work as I move my writing onto the upcoming TechThrill blog/online show/podcast.

I’m going to go a little off topic, but I felt compelled to post this. My friend Jeff Brenman created this incredibly visual presentation on our water crisis. We worry about energy and oil, but the most vital resource to life is dwindling down at the same time.

Take a look. I’ve got some notes on effective presentations below.

| View | Upload your own

Some things to learn from his presentation:

• Don’t overwhelm your audience with text. People can only process so much – be sure to keep your slides short and simple
• Always use visuals! Visuals add to the experience and understanding of any presentation. People remember Jeff’s presentations because of the emotions they evoke and their simple, clear message.
• But visuals are only effective if they’re relevant. Don’t put an image in for its own sake – put it in because it adds or reinforces a key point.
• Be consistent He uses the same font and keeps things like emphasis and imagery consistent. Too inconsistent and you lose your audience.
• Pick a single message or theme and stick with it. The worst presentation is one that doesn’t lead to one clear and distinct conclusion or call to action.

There is a reason Jeff Brenman won The World’s Best Presentation Contest last year. And if you loved this presentation anywhere near as much as I did, vote up his submission for the 2008 World’s Best Presentation Contest

Update: The results do not replicate anymore, but I still had the tab with the results open. So here is a full screenshot of the Google Results I had. Compare it to what we have now if you’d like.

I don’t think I really have to say much more than that. Facebook’s platform, its Login page, signing up for Facebook…somehow none of these beat Obama’s Facebook Profile. Clearly Obama’s Internet popularity translates across all facets of the social media sphere. You’ll find his Twitter and his MySpace fairly quickly in searches of the presumptive Democratic nominee.

Is this simply a reflection of Obama’s Internet popularity? Did Facebook do anything intentional to bump up his search engine ranking?

I wonder.

Try this out: Search “USA” in Google. What results do you expect to be at the top? Probably a Wikipedia article and the United States government website. And indeed you get those as top results. Go visit the US Government’s website. What’s your first impression? Okay, sure, it’s not really advanced nor is it Web 2.0, but it is clean, it does have RSS feeds, and it is easy to navigate.

Now search “Zimbabwe” in Google. This time, try to find the Zimbabwe government’s website. You’ve got to go all the way to the 10th result to find the Zimbabwe website.

If you clicked that last link before reading this warning, I’m sorry. If you’re still reading this article, shield your eyes before visiting Zimbabwe’s website.

Just look at the horribly clashing graphics and backgrounds, outdated information, and HTML frames. Yes, HTML framed websites still exist.

What’s worse, the website is copyrighted in 2004 and last revised June 30th of THIS YEAR. Many African nations don’t even have websites or their embassies rank higher in Google.

I really can’t blame the website for being so out of date. Contested elections, human rights abuses, famine, and poverty are more important issues than a nation’s website. But it does illustrate just how far behind the rest of the world is in terms of technological development.

Please never take for granted what you have here in the developed world. And if you’re reading this from Zimbabwe, I can only wish you a better future. Unless you’re President Mugabe, in which case the only thing you deserve is an 8×8 cell.

Through FriendFeed, I found out about Social Poster, a tool that allows you to send a web page to 80+ social media websites. Thanks to SocialWebTools too for informing me about this. Note: It’s a tool that’s been around for a while. I’m a bit shocked that I hadn’t heard about it before, though I have heard of others (including $150+ software) that does this sort of thing.

Basically, with one or two clicks and some typing, you can send a link to Digg, StumbleUpon, Mixx, Blogger, Technorati, and all of the other social media websites (including several I have NEVER heard of) in one swift motion.

After finding this, I had two immediate thoughts -

• 1) Does this actually work at spreading a webpage?
• 2) This is a new era in social media spam.

80 sites at once? Damn that saves a lot of time, but there’s also insanity involved in it. D I had a few questions when I tried it out – Does it actually get people to visit a webpage, or does it just die like most submissions on social media websites?What accounts do they use at these social website to submit articles? Do they have multiple ones? Are those accounts marked as spam?

The bigger thought, though, was the effect of this tool on social media spam. Spam is relatively quiet on most social services – Twitter has spammers, but you have to subscribe to them to get most of the spam. FriendFeed also has great spam controls and now has the ability to block users. Even MySpace is fighting back with some recent success against spammers.

But this could create a flood of crap submissions everywhere. Maybe they won’t ever get to the front page of Digg, but they’ll clog up tons of services with Viagra ads if the spammers get social media-saavy.

Here’s another possibility – Your detractors could submit EVERYTHING on your site and make people simply hate it because of how far it gets spammed.

I had a friend submit something of mine (I’m not saying whether it’s an article or even if it’s on this site) to test this internet tool for two reasons.

• I can actually track the results and statistics of the effectiveness of this tool.
• It brings more traffic.

Yes, a bit low, but for the purposes of this research project, I needed to be able to track the traffic and referral links and see whether it was actually effective, so I had to own the content

Immediately though, we realized that this tool isn’t effective, because it only creates the text and information for you. It does not create the accounts and it does not automatically submit, it just makes it easier. Apparently, you need to pay for their related $150 software to do that. And I’m not about to give them any kind of money.
When I do find a tool that does that that’s free, I’ll test it out and tell you about it.
- Ben

I’ve begun to dig through the net as part of my Internet Tools Wiki project for the most useful articles on specific Internet Tools. Every once in a while, I will post collection updates on the blog.

And you guessed it, today’s tool is LinkedIn, the business social network service.

The collection includes recent and older articles that are directly relevant to helping you better utilize LinkedIn as a networking and business tool. You can find the latest article collection and community advice for LinkedIn on the Internet Tools Wiki.

• Can LinkedIn Increase your Sales? (Jill Konrath) – A free 14 page ebook detailing, yes, how to use LinkedIn to increase your sales. If you’re in sales or promoting a product as a startup, this is absolutely worth a read.
• Getting Started Building Your LinkedIn Network – A step-by-step guide if you’re completely new to LinkedIn on getting yourself set up for networking through the service.
• LinkedIn Best Practices (Mark Davis) – Six quick tweaks to improve your visibility on and browsing of LinkedIn.
• 5 Step Guide to Using LinkedIn and Facebook (Anshu Sharma) – Focused on when to accept contacts and when LinkedIn is needed for business. I’m advocate a more liberal approach to accepting business contacts on LinkedIn, but useful regardless.
• LinkedIn as Headhunting Tool (Bernard Lunn) – A favorite article of mine.
• How to use LinkedIn for Job Searching (Laura Schneider) – Title explains it all
• LinkedIn Tips and Tweaks: Do More with your LinkedIn Account (Amit Agarwal) – 7 Simple Tips
• Gigantic Tips Guide for Finding Jobs With LinkedIn – There’s at least 50 tips in this article.
• Etiquette for LinkedIn (Penelope Trunk) – 7 Etiquette tips
• Ten Ways to Use LinkedIn (Guy Kawasaki) – An older article by respected Entrepreneur Guy Kawasaki.

What service are you anxiously awaiting FriendFeed to add? Well, let’s see if we can’t find out. Vote on any of the options in this poll or add your own option. Hopefully this poll will give us a better gauge of what users want.

For those of you who don’t know about FriendFeed, see the Internet Tools Wiki description.

Yes, I did not include a fill-in option in order to combat spam and false answers. These options were taken from a previous FriendFeed conversation.

This poll will close on Sunday, June 22nd at 11:59 PM.

If you want to put this poll on your website, this link contains the raw javascript code. Help get as many votes as possible for this poll – That way everyone has a better idea of what users want.