Whether you’re diving into social media this summer or still looking for the productivity benefit of all these online social apps, there’s a service I’ve been using the last few weeks that is worthy of you attention: SecondBrain.
What SecondBrain does very, very well is combine the content you create in 20 major social networking apps into searchable, well-organized collections. Everything from Twitter and del.icio.us, WordPress (.com and self-hosted), YouTube and Vimeo and more are grist for this Web 2.0 mill.
While is very handy to see all of your content in one place under one tag cloud, the fun starts when searching for information in other people’s collections and content that span all those social networking apps. By way of example, digging into Ruby on Rails and traditional search engines like Google turn up too much old, moldy information.
With SecondBrain, I’m able to find not just what I could have found searching del.icio.use, digg, and YouTube individually, but the best gleamings from 17 other social venues. And I can add the juiciest bits to my Rails Collection with one click in SecondBrain or my own finds via the handy SecondBrain bookmarklet.
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Yesterday I learned a brand new trick to teach my iPod that I’ll get to in a moment; what I found interesting was where and how I learned it: at videojug.com.
Now I could explain the trick – adding items to my iPod’s top menu – in a couple hundred words or so, but why when I can point you to a 90 second video on this site and it can teach you better than I can? Not to mention some 16 pages more (approximately 136 videos) of things you can do with your iPod that maybe you didn’t know about.
Just how many of these how to videos does videojug have, I asked Doug Kamin, Senior VP for Marketing at VideoJug? Try 50,000 (!)
“As of now, we have 45,000 unique videos that we’ve created,” Kamin replied. And these videos that range through 22 major topics such as Jobs and Careers (how to ace an job interview, how to interview someone), Technology (all your electronic toys and then some) to Love and Sex (you’ll have to look at this yourself) were produced by VideoJug since it began in August 2006, with another 5,000 or so carefully vetted community-created videos to boot.”
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It used to be if you wanted business intelligence software for your company, you’d just write a check for $100,000 to Oracle, SAP or IBM, wait for the 18 cubic feet of paper documentation to arrive, then assign a few dozen programmers you had handy to the task and check back in oh say, 2 years when they had a beta ready.
That was then, this is now. Software that will let you comprehensively control your business data can be had for pennies on those old, pre-Web 2.0 dollars. Whether you’re working for a company that can’t figure out how it really makes money, or you’re the infrastructure nerd (or nerdette) at a brand spanking new online company, “enterprise business intelligence” is a new toy you can now play with.
Jaspersoft makes software for crunching, associating, storing and reporting your firm’s manifold kinds of sales, website and other data in two popular flavors: Open Source Free and Professional. A full helping of professional BI starts around $10K, not $100K, according to Jaspersoft’s CEO Brian Gentile. And if you or your CEO are comfortable with Open Source licenses, you can get into the game for zero dollars.
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The next time you get one of those whiny alumni spam pitches for money, pause for a minute before tossing it. It just might be hiding a slick social network-powered backchannel to get your next job.
Affinity Circles provides white-label social network sites for over 140 universities and various professional and fraternal organizations. It’s an effective way to layer an online social network onto one of the most ubiquitous traditional offline social networks – alumni associations.
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One of the things “real” offices have that virtual web worker offices don’t is the break room bulletin board. That’s that shared space you stare at while your coffee is brewing. It’s where the people you work with stick photos of their new babies, garage sale notices, maps to the best lunch spots, bad doodles and other bits.
While I’m sure that the people behind notaland.com had loftier uses in mind, I’m finding this visual/video wiki makes an excellent break room board. And while it’s now public beta and has a rough edge or two, so far I’ve found it extremely stable.
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I’m in Tokyo right now and having recently let my .mac account lapse, I’m trying out several different ways of giving my family and friends back home a glimpse of what I’m seeing. Kinverge is a social network designed for just this task.
Unlike most social networks, Kinverge is all about the people you physically know and trust – your family and friends. You invite the people you want in, they can see and comment on your photos, post messages, add/laugh at things you want on your gift list and track your calendar. Read the rest of this entry »
just before a big holiday weekend and an overseas trip my web hosting company’s server for my main email account imploded. For the past day, no email.
While that company will go nameless for now (out of respect for three years of great service), I’m definitely thinking of jumping ship. Regardless of all the IM and social networking I do, email is my digital lifeblood and having gone through this a few years back with another web hosting company, the signs are not good.
So how does a web-worker today find a better web hosting provider?
Today being the operative word because a) The quality of these companies wax and wane and who was hot is soon not. b) The industry has become so commoditized it resembles a locked room of starving river rats, c) Said industry knows you will search for terms like “web hosting rating”, “web hosting buzz” and “web hosting top 10″ and SEO stuff those result pages, let alone spiking the punch with “impartial rating services” that somehow always recommend the same firms.
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There’s one big downside to dragging all your web-worker gear from venue to venue, Starbucks to client site: you lose things. A mini iPod here, a cell phone there – besides the trauma, drama and cost, you just know you’re never going to see that physical bit of your nomadic persona again. Even if you’re old trusty cell phone isn’t worth fencing – few people want to bother with the hassle or deal with a stranger under these awkward circumstances.
The people at ImHONEST think they’ve come up with a solution – a Web 2.0 version of Lost and Found that makes it easy and rewarding for strangers to reunite you with your stuff, but still protects your identity. The process starts with small stickers uniquely numbered ($14.95 per six) you affix to the stuff you haul around – from laptops to handheld scanners, MP3 players to portable hard drives.
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