Pilgrim Notes

Reflections along the way.

Tag: Tools (page 2 of 3)

Everybody wants on my phone

Apple and Yahoo are both making big announcments about mobile phone. NYT reports that Yahoo is partnering with Motorola to introduce Go for Mobile 2.0, making it easier to search weather, news, stock, and sports scores. And Apple is set to make an announcement later today that supposedly will set off a “nuclear war” in the 4th screen world.

My Gmail inbox finally has only spam

Email started feeling like a task, a drain, a distraction. After drowning in hundreds of unread emails, I decided that I couldn’t handle it anymore. I decided I’d start using the gmail labels. By thinking of the labels like tags, I just started creating tags for everything I could think of.

Creating filters in Gmail are much simpler than the exhausting Outlook process. You can create a new filter in a matter of seconds using from, to, subject, and keywords. Then you can choose to bypass the inbox and immediately archive it or delete it. At the same, you can set up a rule to immediately tag it. Plus, when you enter the filter criteria (to, from, subject, keyword), it immediately pulls of all emails with that criteria (like a search). So you can choose to apply rule to all those emails instantly.

Now everytime a new mail comes to the inbox, I either mark as spam, create filter, or read and respond if I don’t want a filter. This has reduced my time in the email box while helping me bringing important emails to the surface faster. Now I use Jeremy’s blog read concept by choosing what tags deserve daily attention, weekly attention or monthly attention.

Easy Bake Make Your Own Mashup

if you’re like me, you’d rather leech onto someone else’s brainpower, than try to do too much figuring out yourself. Some when it comes to technology that allows me to create quite painlessly (from a mental sense), I’m on board! Like ning, openkracow is a open source site that shares code and make creating applications fairly simply. This site is focused on craiting masup. Pretty cool.

Another Twist on Social Searching

I’ve explored a few different social searching sites, but nothing really grabbed me or made me feel like I was missing something if I didn’t use them. Not sure if this one will be any different, but it has some interesting features. Searchles allows you to connect with other folks who are doing similar search and post those searches to a common pool. Sort of a social my delicious I guess. You can search tags and groups to find like minded searchers. And the idea behind it is that people may find potential networking parnters for business, creative projects, etc. I notice several business groups on their, so this might have some interesting possiblitites. Time will tell.

MP3 Search Engine

Spent a little time this morning tracking some of the new Web 2.0 sites, and I put a few posts of the one that sound interesting to me. First, MP3 Realm, a music search engine. You can search audio files and lyrics, create playlists, download files, save searches and more. It could be interesting. While it’s a different princicple than Pandora, ultimately the playlist stirs me to comparison. I think it would be interesting to mash the search capabilities with the music  genome concept of Pandora.

Great map resource for city information

Going to a new city? Lost in your own city? TechCrunch just reviewed the newly revamped Ask City, and they’ve made me a believer!

Ask City is  a cool tool for looking up restaurants, movies, events, dog parades, and more. It combines maps, reviews, and a variety of customization like saving snapshots while I search, integration with other sites and services, notes on maps, and e-mailable permalinks of my searches. Ask City may become my new first stop for finding out about where in the world I live.

blip.tv rules the video sharing world!

I know all the talk over the last year has been about YouTube, and I’ve spent my fair share of time browsing and uploading. But today I tested blip.tv, and I must say: it rocks!

This video sharing service offers RSS feeds for your videos, automatic blogging and cross-posting options, multiple formats and even multiple uploading options. And this is just the start. If you are serious about videos or setting up an online channel. Use blip.tv!! I love it!!

Avoid Spam – Get A Vanishing Email

Christopher Null posted an interesting new concept in e-mails yesterday: 10-minute emails. When a site requests an email, you can use this instead of creating a new account or inviting the spam piranhas to your current account. It’s easy and fast:

There’s no registration, no verification. Just click over to the site and hit “Get my 10 Minute Mail e-mail address.” You’ll instantly be given an address that ceases to exist after 10 minutes. You can then use this address in filling out web forms or whatnot, and a very simple web-based interface gives you full access to any mail the account receives. You can reply to any messages, but you can’t send mail to an account that hasn’t already emailed you. If you can’t get the job done in 10 minutes, you can reset the timer to 10 minutes at any time. There’s no need to login, no password to remember.

Pretty whack. Sounds like disappearing ink. Just sign the contract and walk away baby. Get your evaportating e-mail here.

E-Commerce Shopping Sites

Not that I’m encouraging anyone to spend more money this season, but if you’re interested, Larry Chase sent out a list of interesting of shopping sites that you might want to check out. I think I’ve written about some of this before, but here are the highlights:

FruCall –  One quick call tells you if an online price beats the store price. “Frucall not only reads back the best online prices to you, but it also allows you to buy items directly from online merchants while you’re on the phone!”

CyberMonday – Shop.org set up this site to show all the various deals online today.

Dealcatcher – Comprehensive list of online and offline deals.

Like.com – A shopping search engine.  This is an interesting concept that captures photos of celebrities and allows you to search fashion items they are wearing and find similar items for sale.

Shop Local – Find all the deals in your neck o’ the woods.

Pronto – Named “”Best Online Price Comparison Site” in 2006 by Kiplinger’s, this site searches product reviews to create an overall product rating and then it connects you to various online merchants.

ThisNext – This a social shopping site that lets you connect with like-minded to find their recommendations on specific products.

Kaboodle – Another social shopping site that lets you organize your wish lists from various sites on the web.

Bidnearby – Find the closest ebay auctions to your zip code area and save or avoid shipping.

Google Checkout – It’s growing.

Adding Chat to your Website

Plugoo gives your website visitors the ability to chat with you using a widget embedded directly in your site. This might be interesting. I’m not a big chatter (or a big phone person) but some folks might rock on this, and I could see some cool applications.

via Solution Watch

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