May

29

Use Web 2.0 tools to save time and be more productive

Filed Under How to, In the life, Social Media | Leave a Comment

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Someone's Lost Schedule Book
Creative Commons License photo credit: ASurroca

For a while I’ve been using a few 2.0 applications that, on their own, are great, but when when partnered with other 2.0 apps, become superstar efficiency optimizers.

The applications
Consider Jott, IWantSandy, and Twitter.

Jott is a to text . You call a number, say your message, and moments later it’s emailed to you (or a group), turned into a reminder, added to a list, or sent to 2.0 applications (called Jott ).

IWantSandy is a ‘virtual assistant’. She’s able to manage your , build and manage lists, manage groups, and share your lists with others.

is a ’status update’ that allows you to post your status (your to the “What are you doing?”).

Connections are key
Standalone, they’re all good, solid, 2.0 applications. But where they really begin to shine is when you let them talk to each other, and other applications. Here’s a example:

  • Use to have Sandy remind you to backup your blog on the 13th of each month
  • In the window type d s r the blog on June 13, 2008 @monthly
  • which means Direct message to Sandy (s is Sandy’s name), Reminder (r) …(the text Sandy is to remember) on June 13, 2008 (the start date of the reminder) @monthly (a special Sandy tag to make the event repeat.

Depending how you’ve got Sandy set up, you’ll be reminded through , or SMS message to your mobile device (or all three).

AFK? Use Jott When I’m out and about, I use Jott to work with Sandy to get things done. Here’s the same example using Jott:

  • (Dial into local Jott number, Jott answers) Who do you want to Jott?
  • (Me) Sandy.
  • (Jott) Sandy.(repeats to confirm) Is this correct?
  • (Me) Yes.
  • (Jott) Got it. BEEP-TONE-TO-RECORD
  • (Me) Reminder. the Blog on June 13th 2008. Tag Monthly.

Extending further
, Jott and IWantSandy all embrace openness, to varying degrees. Depending how you configure each, they can update your calendar ( Calendar, 30Boxes, etc), your local through CSV or iCal files, really the sky is the limit.

So, what have I missed? How are you using these (or other applications) to make your life easier?

May

14

Engaging in ‘high risk’ activity - moving my blog

Filed Under Blogging, Doing, Web | 2 Comments


Engaging in high risk activity - moving my blog (image: 20562069_7cf1e2aaec_m)I’ve decided to take the plunge and move my blog to a more traditional .com type (rather than the .net that I currently use). I’m going to keep the .net for more esoteric things, private server, etc.

If you’re this on the old blog (blog.bradgrier.net), then please jump over to the new one, bookmark it, and check it out to make sure it works as you expect. You can find it at blog.bradgrier.com.

The dot-com is more , have a standard ‘expectation ‘of a site or blog when it has a .com address. A .net address seems to have a different ‘expectation’. And I felt the need to try out a new provider.

So, this will mean a bit of :

  • feeds - already moved my feedburner redirects so there should be no disruption
  • Incoming - not sure what to do about this yet. Incoming add value to your ranking, so this transition will cost me some of that precious Google Juice
  • Site duplication - some of the articles I’ve been about domains suggest maintaining duplicate sites for a few months. I’m thinking about this. It may work, but I’d customize the so that some sort of ‘ moved’ message is appended to the feeds etc

But, I’m not the expert here, just the guy doing the work. Do you have any thoughts or opinions about domains? What should I watch out for? What should I do differently?

: David Asch

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Aug

1

Linklist - August 1, 2007

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Jul

30

Linklist - July 30, 2007

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theme today:

Jul

29

Linklist - July 29, 2007

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  • It was the week for giving back:

Jul

27

Linklist - July 27, 2007

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Jul

26

Linklist — July 26, 2007

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Jul

24

Listen to me. How to convert your blog post into a podcast.

Filed Under Blogging, Social Media | 9 Comments


Listen to me. How to convert your blog post into a podcast. (image: ) Lately I’ve been exploring a few podcast and text-to-speech services. I’ve found an interesting combination of services that let me make my posts listen-able and downloadable — even set them up to be part of your regular podcast scrape.

This is a great way to your favorite blogger, when you’re not able to have your computer with you (on the morning commute, bus, walking..etc), or you need to convert written posts into spoken ones for with visual impairments or other accessibility issues.

First, sign up for accounts either at Odiogo.com or talkr.com. Both take feeds of your blog and create mp3 / podcast files with your blog being read by an artificially generated . Your quality and accuracy may vary, depending on the type of you do. Highly technical words may be completely massacred, but by having both services available, you’ll increase the chance that your post will be read properly, by at least one of the services.

Then, sign up for an account at PodNova.com. PodNova is an podcast aggregation , which allows you to release your podcast subscriptions from any single computer and keep it accessible on any computer with access.

It also manages your podcast master subscription list, so you really only have to subscribe to the PodNova feed, and all your podcasts will be downloaded by your podcatcher of choice (Juice, iTunes..etc).

You can also listen to individual podcasts through the PodNova subscriptions page. That’s the option I’m using to provide audio to my blog.

What I’ve done is use PodNova to subscribe to both Talkr and Odiogo feeds, and link to the feed pages here:

Now, using those , you can access my recent blog posts and listen to them at your workstation, or through your player of choice.

I’ve also added buttons to my sidebar, though, weirdly, talkr doesn’t have an html page that displays all the the posts in my feed; they assume you’re going to use an reader only. Either I can’t find it or they’re missing the boat on that one, so in my sidebar buttons, I’m linking back to the PodNova Talkr page for my posts. Klunky but it works.

Now, this doesn’t work well for every post. I have a couple of link lists that would just be silly when they’re converted to audio, but for longer, text based posts (like this one), making the audio available simply means that the post could be read, and now heard, by more .

So, have you listened to any of my posts? What do you think? How’s the quality and pronunciation? Does it fit with your regular podcast listening routine?

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