Leave that bulky desktop battery charger at home - flip the lid on these clever AA batteries and charge over USB using the in-built, standard USB port! A must-have for digital cameras and other devices still using AA cells.
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So you wanna be a digital worker? Here’s what you need to know:
Search Engines - Know your search engines and what they’re good for. Google, Yahoo, Live(MSN), Answers.com, A9, Technorati, and delicious all search in different ways and in some cases search a very specific catalogue of information. Try doing the same search on each of them and you’ll notice that the responses you get aren’t all the same. Know what their strengths and weaknesses are, how to use the advanced search like searching in a specific language, removing or requiring keywords, and searching over a period of time. A9 is meant for the text of books, Technorati for blogs, and delicious for user ranked results.
Blogs - Blogs are your your doorway into the minds of experts and amateurs alike. You should know how to find them, and have at least a few blogs a day that you read related to your sector. Really Simple Syndication (RSS) is a technology that allows you to be notified anytime there’s a new entry from your blogroll. Use RSS aggregators (nothing to do with alligators) to easily read all of your blogs from one place, less clicking around makes more effective use of your time. I really like NetVibes (which does a whole lot more than RSS including my podcast!) as an all in one website, or Sage as a Mozilla Firefox extension. If you’re still using Internet Explorer all the time, you consider your free time worthless and your friends are probably just not that into you anymore.
Tagging - The World Wide Web according to you. With certain tools like del.icio.us and diigo you can apply certain keywords, or tags, to pages that you visit. That way next time you want to find the page, you can search by the tags that you labeled it with. If you find several pages that would work well for a certain client, you could tag them with the client’s name. Have pages you want to share with certain friends, tag pages with their names. Both sites keep track of all your searches, and they also let you share your pages with friends. I recommend using diigo because you can highlight and comment certain parts of web pages… you’ll see later.
Remember that there’s a lot of crap on the net in the form of pornography, rants, and people who think they are worth looking at. They’re not, and you’re probably wishing that you hadn’t clicked on that pornography link right now aren’t you. It’s easy to get distracted is my point. Like a newspaper editor, you’ve got to keep in mind several principles to make sure that you get the information that’s best suited to your audience whether that’s your boss, your client, or your spouse. Always keep these in mind when searching for info: timeliness, impact, proximity, trends, and audience.
So now that you have this huge wealth of information at your fingertips, how are you going to get it all together to make your point? Well if you’re using diigo, you can highlight and comment on web pages, a technique called social annotation. Even your highlights can have notes attached to them. You can also forward your annotations onto other people via e-mail. Your other option is a tool called Wizlite, but this name reminds of a rhyme about staying away from electric fences - besides wouldn’t you rather one tool to do it all? Your other other option is to copy and paste into Word. Sissy.
That’s a good primer on what tools you should have and use on a frequent basis. If you’ve got questions or want to suggest something else feel free to e-mail me at ME at ACADEMIK.ORG
Today in my usual perusing (watch) of tech blogs I’ve run into a number of networking tutorials which I think are really important. In addition I’ve also found several resources for utilizing Linked In including a blog dedicated to just that. Take some time to read Networking 101 which I think can make a big difference for anyone.
Networking 101 – A blog post by Seth Levine, a venture capitalist, that will be a great tool for meetings both with clients and contacts.
1) Left to their own devices, people tend to ramble . . . ramble . . . ramble. The conversation lacks focus, direction and purpose. Sometimes this is fun; most of the time it’s a waste of time.
2) ) Most people don’t seem to know what they want to get out of meetings like these. This clearly contributes to the rambling – there’s no focus because there’s no clear end point or goal.
To speed things along a bit, I’ve been starting these meetings of late with a simple question: “What do you want to get out of this meeting”
At the bottom of his post, please make sure to read his previous post – Networking 101 (the original).
LinkedIn – Richard Upton is a senior applicatons manager at Sony who seems to live by Linked In. He has a few beginning tips here as well as an entire blog dedicated to utilizing the service! There is also a Linked In Power User Forum that I have not had a chance to look through, but seems like it could be a good resource.
I just found this really cool site called Farecast which tracks the prices for airline tickets to and from particular cities. It tells you when is the best time to buy and gives you a great number of options on selecting flights. Check it out http://www.farecast.com/
Track50 is a new way to keep tabs on the live music you want to see. You enter your favorite bands, and they’ll notify you when they are playing in town. They search multiple music sources, so you can enter both local bands and big mainstream names. Only the bands that you specify are tracked, so you won’t receive SPAM Newsletters profiling random bands like on MySpace. Check it out - www.track50.com
So last night we finally had our networking event, Tech Connection 3, at work. The event is for start-up tech companies to demo their products. We’ve been working on the event for at least a month - finding a location, looking for sponsors, organizing the companies, and marketing the event to a number of different groups. So it took place and it rocked!
We had it at a cool bar in SF called BOCA - the Bar of Contemporary Arts. Apart from a loud crowd and perhaps music that was too loud, it went off without a hitch. We had 5 start-ups demoing their products including Soonr, 411Sync, 4Info, Vpod.tv, and Plum. Soonr won a bottle of champagne for being the best demo, and a new friend of mine won a raffle for a free membership to Flexcar and a bottle of Riesling.
FlexCar and a couple other companies offer this awesome service called ride sharing - basically you pay a monthly or annual fee and you have really cheap access for as little as an hour or as long as a week. PLUS THEY PAY FOR GAS! It’s $9 / hr for hourly use and you can find them for $140 for a weekend! I’m signing up today. This is great for large cities where it’s expensive and annoying to own a car. However you can’t always get everything home on the bus from Ikea or the grocery store. Plus the cars that you get are recent, and many of them are hybrids. Did I mention you get free gas? $140 / weekend - unlimited miles - unlimited gas! Sign me up!
The Swedish Pirate Party has launched a commercial, high-capacity darknet, on an unprecedented scale and bandwidth. This service lets anybody send and receive files anonymously without being tracked or traced, and can pump data well over 10 megabits per second.
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