Web Worker Daily

Here are a couple of ways to be more efficient when it comes to sharing your photos online from events. Like most web workers, you’re probably on many different social networks. How do you share those great photos from the event with all of your contacts on all of your social networks, without having to log in to each one separately?

Fortunately, there are ways to automate the process of cross-posting photos to many different services at one time.

Flickr

One of the best ways to broadcast your photos is via Flickr. It’s very simple to set up, and the results will save you a great deal of time. You’ll be able to send any photo from your mobile device to your Flickr account via email, and it will then automatically send a link to that photo on Twitter and Facebook at the same time, if you choose to do so. To set up Flickr to automatically share photos with your contacts on Facebook and Twitter: Read the rest of this entry »

Editor’s note:  With this post we wecome Doriano Carta to the WWD team. Doriano, better known as “Paisano” on Twitter and everywhere else online, has written for several blogs including Mashable, SarahLacy.com, PistachioConsulting and Chris Brogan’s Dadomatic.com where he is also the Editor-in-Chief.

How much are you willing to pay for your favorite web apps and services? That’s the key question to which every app developer wants an answer. It seems as if the provider of every once-free service is now pondering ways to make money and extract revenue from their members, which makes sense when you consider that they are, after all, businesses.

Remember that old adage, you get what you pay for? Will we continue to see more of our favorite free services following this model of offering stripped down freemium accounts along with feature-rich premium plans? Will online advertising ever allow these sites to generate enough revenue to avoid going this route?

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I’m dissatisfied with the current crop of “lifestreaming” apps. Overall, I think they’re missing a huge opportunity to help users focus their limited attention to the content that really matters.

Last week, for example, Simon covered the release of skimmer, a desktop client that brings together notifications from Twitter, Facebook, Flickr and other services. Also recently launched is Cosmic Machine’s EventBox, a Mac-only application that similarly mashes together notifications and messages from a range of web services: Twitter, Facebook, Google Reader, Flickr and Reddit, as well as the capability to import raw RSS feeds.

Both skimmer and EventBox are pretty and pull a variety of web services into a single stream of information. But as a heavy user of multiple social networks and web apps, neither provides me with any real ability to manage the stream of information I get from all those web services. As far as I can tell, all they really do is to move noise from several separate sources into a single cacophony of content. There are some limited filters to fish out particular keywords from the stream, but nothing that I couldn’t use an RSS reader -– like Google Reader -– to replicate.

So here’s what I’d love to see from lifestreaming tools: Read the rest of this entry »

If you constantly find yourself flicking between clients and browser windows for the different social networking apps that you use, you might like to try skimmer, a new lifestreaming app that launched into public beta today that aims to streamline your consumption of social media.

skimmer is a cross-platform desktop client, built using Adobe AIR, that gives you a single interface to Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, Youtube and Blogger. Even in beta it works pretty well, and has some nice touches, such as displaying Twitpic images inline so you don’t have to open another browser tab. Think of it as a Tweetdeck-like app that also allows you to keep an eye on what’s happening with your friends on Flickr, Youtube and Blogger. You can also use it to upload photos and video. It is a very elegantly designed application that looks great. Read the rest of this entry »

The other day, I covered a convenient application called CompFight that lets you do flexible searches for photos on Flickr. If you’re looking for another handy tool for use with Flickr, try jUploadr, a photo uploading application for Windows, the Mac and Linux. Kristin covered the Linux version on the OStatic blog today, and I’ve been trying out the Windows version.

One of the best things about this little application is it gets you out of Flickr’s often busy and slow photo uploading process.

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From bloggers to designers to those who work full time with graphics, many web workers need to retrieve and use photos on the web. Flickr has become an increasingly popular source for images (I use images from it all the time), so it’s no surprise that a number of search engines specific to Flickr have cropped up. For a very useful and flexible one that can keep you free from any haggles over rights–if that’s what you’re looking for–consider CompFight. It appears in this Altsearchengines.com piece on Flickr search engines, and is indeed useful for targeted searches.

As AltSearchEngines points out, the problem with searching for huge sets of photos from Google or Yahoo is that the results aren’t sortable in flexible ways (Google just sorts by image size), and you get no information about rights and copyrights beyond the standard warning that copyrights may apply. That’s where CompFight shines.

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Apple MacBook

I’ve been asked to live blog an event for a client and their members. Actually, I’ll be live blogging, podcasting, Twittering, Uttering, and live streaming an event.

I am putting together my equipment, securing accounts with all the online tools and services I need, and reviewing the schedule so I’m prepared. This will be a major undertaking that will include two 12 hour days as well as pre- and post-blogging.

Normally, live blogging a conference is done with a team, but this is a proof-of-concept so I’m on my own.

While I’ve live blogged and live tweeted conferences before, this is the first time I’ll be doing it formally for a client. The conference is not my usual fare – it is about philanthropy instead of Internet or technology. I’ve worked with many nonprofits over the last 15 years – including running a nonprofit in New York City in the mid-90s – so the issues aren’t foreign to me. Still, I’ll have to be on top of my game – with a healthy dose of caffeine – to keep up.

Here’s what I’ve put together so far for my Live Blogging Gear.

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As a former designer who still dabbles in the odd piece of commercial or hobbyist work, I’m sometimes stuck at the inception of a project, trying to discover the initial creative sparks that ignite a design, for those fragments of inspiration that set out the path from a blank Photoshop document to a living design.

Nine years ago as an interactive designer in a multimedia agency, designers would post various items we liked -magazine clippings, flyers, business cards, websites – onto a physical noticeboard that we could glance up at for inspiration. Over time, this grew organically into a wonderful design resource for the studio.

These days, my equivalent is a folder on my MacBook desktop called ‘Design Bin’ – I screenshot or scan a design I think might be inspirational in future and dump it in my design bin. However simple, this resource is growing in volume but diminishing in context – and in a connected era – is strangely unsociable.

Enter Scrnshots, a web-based service that lets designers share their inspirations by posting screenshots of interesting designs to a Flickr-esque web site.

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