Argh! What was that video called? Was that on Twitter or Facebook? Where did I save that article? Who was it who made that joke about the Edsel? Do you find yourself asking these questions often? As we get wrapped up in more and more Web services, things tend to get disorganized.
We've got inboxes over here, inboxes over there, boards here, there, tweets, docs, posts and shares. It's almost too much to keep straight. Fortunately, there are little helpers out there. I've found two I love, and I'll show you how to use them. One is free, the other is in closed beta, but there are invites below! If you've got other suggestions, please feel free to share them in the comments.
If you need a lawyer and you can't afford one and live in Tennessee, you might want to take a gander over at this website started by the state's Supreme Court called JusticeForAllTN.org. "The court realizes that sometimes people cannot get help from a lawyer because they cannot afford one or they decide they want to represent themselves." That and some plain-English initiatives started by the court can go a long way towards reducing legal costs for many common activities such as divorce, mediation and parental rights.
Wait a minute. Plain English legal language? Started by a court? For free? Yes, this is for real. And the site is nicely designed and easy to use too. It is about time, and shall we say sets a new high bar for similar kinds of public information sites from their government.
This week, Google+ enabled up to 50 people at a time to manage Google+ brand pages. Pages were a long-awaited feature after launch, but they only allowed individual administrators when they arrived. Since brand pages are how organizations manage their presence on Google+, many page owners need to give multiple team members the ability to edit and moderate.
Yesterday's update not only allows a large team to control the page, it allows transfer of ownership. So if one person created your page but someone else needs to be in charge of it, the creator can transfer that power. The Google+ interface is a little busy, so here's a step-by-step guide for how to change managers of a Google+ page.
Is someone sitting on the Twitter handle you want? Is it someone with 0 followers who registered in 2008 and never tweeted once? Yeah, that was me, too. At least, it was yesterday. This morning, Twitter Trust & Safety turned over to me the account I've been after for years.
The trick is to file an impersonation claim. That's the only one Twitter responds to in a timely fashion. This means you have to make a credible case that you or your brand is being impersonated, and the account has to have violated Twitter's inactive account policy. But if you have your ducks in a row, you can have that account in your hands in under a week. Here's how.
I just fell in love with Calepin. It's a blogging tool that gives you an instant, minimal website using two of geeks' favorite little helpers: Dropbox and Markdown. It is nerdy, but only a little bit, and I'll talk you through the whole thing. By the end of this short tutorial, I bet you'll want one.
First, you need an account. Go to Calepin.co and register your user name. It's early; you can probably get whatever you want. Next, log in with Dropbox. Calepin will create a folder in your Dropbox that it will watch for text files written in Markdown. When you click the big 'Publish' button on the Calepin site, it will publish all the documents as a blog at [user name].calepin.co. Here's mine, for example. The blog's appearance is spare and relaxing. It's a great place to just stick your thoughts up on the Web. Don't know what a Dropbox or a Markdown is? Don't worry. You'll quickly get the gist.
This weird, wired century makes it difficult to let go of business and be present for the holidays. So many of us have powerful computers in our pockets, making it hard to resist checking our various Web thingies under the Thanksgiving dinner table. It's important to have a strategy for managing and prioritizing work over the holidays, so we can plan ahead and stop worrying about it. In an always-on world, it's all we can do.
With us in mind, Google sent along a list of free Web services it offers to help us manage our holiday workload. As a Google Apps team ourselves, we at RWW will certainly be using some of these strategies. Here are a few suggestions of how you can use Google's vast toolbox of free Web gizmos to manage your workload and make your holidays more relaxing.
Last week, the Google Reader team caused quite a stir among many users when it launched a redesigned version of the popular RSS feed reading service. The relaunch not only gave Google Reader a new design, but removed the service's content-sharing and social features in an attempt to streamline the product and drive more people toward Google+. While the company did add a "Share" button of its own to Reader today, it still pushes posts to Google+ and doesn't quite restore the way the product used to work.
One of those disappointed users was Web developer Emmanuel Pire. Not content to see the beloved sharing feature go away, Pire built a replica of it on his own server and wrote a script that adds a "Share" button to the new Google Reader interface. This workaround doesn't restore the functionality 100%, but it comes pretty close.
If you haven't yet enrolled in the Introduction to Artificial Intelligence class at Stanford University that we mentioned earlier this summer, you still have time to participate in what is being billed as the largest Google+ hangout tomorrow morning. At 8 am PT tomorrow, the two professors teaching the class, Peter Norvig and Sebastian Thrun, will hold "office hours" and answer the most popular questions from the class.
Since they have tens of thousands of followers, it "would be hard to fit everyone into their actual offices," says the intro video. It is an intriguing use of the Hangout feature. You don't have to be a Stanford student, or even enrolled in the class, or even know something about AI. All you have to do is add Norvig to your Google+ circle, ask your question on their YouTube channel now and tune in tomorrow.
Tomorrow marks day one of National Novel Writing Month, a 30-day, Web-enhanced festival of writing in which thousands of people force themselves (and encourage each other) to finally write that novel they've always had in the back of their brain. The NaNoWriMo website gives participants analytics to track the goal of writing 50,000 words in 30 days, and anyone who finishes is a winner.
We're longtime fans of NaNoWriMo here at RWW. Editor-in-Chief Richard MacManus documented his NaNoWriMo experience back in 2003, at the dawn of our site, and we checked back in after NaNoWriMo 2008 for its 10th anniversary. With the fun starting tomorrow (surprise!), Google Docs has offered some tips about how its free, cloud-based document suite can help us all win at NaNoWriMo.
I want to tell you about one of my favorite things on the Internet. Storify is the best way to gather tweets, comments, snippets and images from all around the Web and put them into one post. It's a new way of blogging that lets all your Internet friends participate.
Storify.com on the desktop is the place to start. You can use Storify to capture a momentous event online, or you can ask a question and curate the best answers. Its uses are almost limitless. I've gotten so much out of it as a blogging tool, and I know you will, too.
