Web Worker Daily

A much-improved version is out of uberVU, a site that helps you track the flow of conversations on the web, whether they’re taking place on Twitter, Digg, Reddit, in the comments sections of blogs, or elsewhere. There are many tools available for searching specific social sites (including lots of them for Twitter), but uberVU is particularly useful for checking on what people are saying all over the social web. In this post, I’ll look at some of the improvements to the app, and what you can get done with it.

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If you’re an iPhone user who needs remote access to one or multiple computers when you’re on the go, the folks at LogMeIn have a new application that will do the trick: LogMeIn Iginition. The application is actually specifically intended for IT personnel who need to monitor, access and provide support solutions on a remote basis, but it’s accessible and usable for any iPhone user with remote access needs.
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Many of us are increasingly working with multimedia online, including video and audio applications for everything from podcasts to video tutorials. While well-known tools such as Audacity and Blender can help you deliver slickly produced online audio and video content, really good producers make use of pre-production tools before they even start recording. Celtx is a free, open-source multimedia pre-production application that is very popular for organizing and scripting everything from screenplays, to audio/visual tutorials, to webcasts. You can download it here for Windows, Mac and Linux, and take advantage of an accompanying online Studios environment to collaborate with others on multimedia pre-production.
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Of the many Firefox extensions that I use on a daily basis, the one that remains the most useful to me is iMacros, which you can see screenshots of and download here. I reviewed it a while back, and you can also find a visual tour of how to use it here. It makes the process of saving and recording multi-step repetitive tasks about as easy as operating a DVD player. You can keep a library of your recorded macros in a Firefox sidebar, or within your bookmarks. The maker of this extension, iOpus, recently supplied a collection of case studies of ways that users are getting productivity benefits from it, and a look at the examples is eye-opening.

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Many of us use Google Docs, and many of us also collaborate with others who speak different languages. As announced on the Google blog, you can now translate documents in Google Docs into 42 different languages. The supported languages include Arabic, Chinese and Japanese, and you can execute the translations almost instantly. Here’s how easy this is is to do.

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Last October, we published a post about Aviary, a suite of graphics-focused online applications that, at the time, consisted of three basic tools. Aviary has expanded since then to become a very popular, award-winning graphics suite — much more than the simple photo editor that it started out as. There are quite a few new modules in the suite. I’ve been using all of the tools recently; it’s one of the best graphics suites you’ll find. It’s also free, although a Pro version is available.

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Some of the biggest hardware efficiency boosts we can get are either completely free, or nearly so. Sure, a maxed-out new laptop would be great to have, but these are tough times. If you spend a little time with the hardware you have or pick up some very inexpensive peripherals, you can immediately start working smarter. In this post, you’ll find five hardware devices and tweaks that you can put to work with good results almost immediately.
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Many of us are consuming video and audio content as part of our working lives; some of us are broadcasting it and encoding it, too. For both types of tasks, one of the best applications that you can get is the free, open-source VLC Media Player. It recently came out in a significantly updated version 1.0, and is now out in a stable version 1.0.1. I’ve been using the new version, and highly recommend it, whether you’re running Windows, Mac OS X or Linux.

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