Web Worker Daily

I spend a lot of time each day communicating with colleagues and clients, by phone, email, on social networks, and via the occasional fax. But when I need to have a short conversation and get an answer right away, instant messaging is hard to beat. Unfortunately, there are several IM protocols, and most of them don’t talk to each other. That’s why I use the multi-protocol IM software Adium on the Mac and Pidgin on the PC. I can also use a web-based alternative like Meebo or the new Imo.im.

VoxOx wants to take multi-system communication several steps further. In addition to the various IM protocols, it supports social networks (Facebook, MySpace and Twitter); SMS texting; faxing; private email; file sharing; video conversations; and voice connections. VoxOx also supports Skype messaging, although you have to have the Skype software running, which sort of defeats its purpose. Read the rest of this entry »

I used to use Google Alerts all the time to keep me apprised of what was going on in the world of Apple tech, for another gig I have writing online. It was a great solution, but eventually, Twitter’s real-time information flow became much more useful for me.

But the problem with Twitter is that it’s kind of unwieldy. I follow a lot of people, and even though I have multiple accounts to follow different groups of people, a lot gets lost in the stream. Twitter clients with built-in search help, but at a glance, Google Alert-like results would be ideal. Thankfully, there’s a service that does almost precisely that. It’s called TweetAlert. Read the rest of this entry »

Last Friday, I was attending Portland’s weekly Beer and Blog event, and I stumbled across what later turned out to be an interesting trend. I had two separate, unrelated conversations about an hour apart with people working in the technology industry who once used RSS readers but had mostly abandoned them in favor of using Twitter to find news and interesting blog posts. I talked to a couple of other friends and posted the question on Twitter, which confirmed that many people are using Twitter as an RSS reader replacement. Read the rest of this entry »

It seems to be new Google features discovery week, with new search parameters for searching the web in real time, and now a Labs feature called Fast Flip making an appearance. Fast Flip is a visual browser of online publications, designed to give you a quick snapshot of what’s being blogged and talked about at many major news sources at a glance.

If you’re looking to take the pulse of the web at any given moment (and you don’t want the static or excess sensationalism that goes along with using Twitter), Google Fast Flip is as good a place as any to start. It sort of feels like a concise, pre-filtered Alltop that provides a macro level view of some of the web’s most influential and respectable news sources. Read the rest of this entry »

Generally speaking, when I’m sharing recently discovered web tools, I try to organize them along a common theme, or a goal that they can be used to achieve. This time around, I just wanted to share three somewhat unusual, but genuinely useful, web tools with you. Trying to fit them into a specific theme or goal would only detract from their myriad possible applications, so without further ado, here they are:

printfriendly — Make Any Site Printer-Friendly

Many sites nowadays will have a “printer-friendly” button, which often just strips the web page of any fancy CSS and gives you a bare-bones text document that won’t eat up too much of your precious ink or toner. I know that for all the recent web site work I’ve done for clients, I always make sure to include just such a version. Unfortunately, not everyone does the same. Read the rest of this entry »

In a move that is sure to strike fear in the heart of local news providers such as your newspaper or TV affiliate, Google News has added the ability to see local news based on your location.

Here’s how it works: simply go to Google News, look half way down the page you’ll see a text box allowing you to enter either a zip code or city/state. Do so and Google News will reload with your local city listed as one of the categories of news available for your reading pleasure. Aggregating local news stories from a variety of sources is nothing new for Google News, but this is the first time we have been able to see a specific city’s news items as a news category.

One obvious missing feature is the ability to search the local view. If you do enter a search term, you see the global search results. Additionally, at this point in time the local news feature only works in the United States and only in English.

Read the rest of this entry »