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Category Archives: Apps & Tools
Canadian Cloud Computing Conference Day 1
I am taking a break at the first Canadian Cloud Council conference in Edmonton that runs March 12-13. I was a big part of organizing this, along with 4 other members of a somewhat grassroots effort to create a vendor-neutral forum for cloud providers and users from a Canadian perspective for mutual benefit. cCc web site is www.candiancloudcouncil.ca
I used a lot of cloud-based tools to help me organize this distributed team.
RegOnline – is a Software as a Service program that supports online conference registrations and credit card payments, and badge printing and email followups and surveys. I would not want to do a conference without this.
Google Docs – we shared some checklists and informtion using Google spreadsheets and some uploads. We did not use this a lot.
Dropbox – for some big graphics files for the printers, we used DropBox.
Salesforce – we had access to a 10-person version of this, but have not set it up to use it for anything yet.
We are forming a national not-for-profit and will create a cloud-supported virtual organization.
Email – the great consolidator
Email is still the standard communications channel for most people I know.
I’ve ranted about this elsewhere recently in a discussion on collaborative tools. It seems to me that despite the proliferation of social media and collaboration tools, a lot of communications are done via email. Whether it is blog or discussion summaries, or sharing files, many people say, “send it to me by email”. At least this is what I experience.
But my 18 year old son, is not so email-centric. His communication channel of choice is SMS from his phone or online texting, I think, not talking on the phone or composing or reading emails or blogs. I should ask him what he thinks about email.
That is sort of why I started this SoManySites blog in the first place – there were so many sites that I had to visit every day. I started looking for a “site consolidator” See the post https://somanysites.com/2012/02/16/14-personalized-homepages-compared-feature-by-feature/ but still, none of them do what I want, which is to collect all of my communications in one place.
Email seems to be the great consolidator – most people’s main channel for information.
So, for those of you who want to follow my blog by email, just click on “Follow” on the top of the WordPress menu bar at the top of the blog. But I’m not sure that anyone wants a feed of my wanderings through cyberspace…. so you can also set the Email Delivery Settings to only get a summary daily or weekly.
Avatars Blavatars Favicons
So I once was a techie but am now mostly a manger. But I really like the challenge of figuring things out technically. That’s partly why I have this blog, so I can learn WordPress and other interesting tools.
WordPress is the most popular tool for creating web sites. It’s free for a yourblognamehere.wordpress.com blogging site and is *fairly* easy to get started for a person with some computing or word processing or html background, I think – what do you think? How techie do you have to be to set up your own wordpress blog site? Anyways, I digress (a lot (sometimes very far from where I started) (where were we?) oh, I remember). It is not easy to customize much, though, unless you are really a techie. And I’m not so much.
But, some things can be done fairly easily, like changing your favicon which is the little picture that shows up on you browser tab beside the name of the site. Hey – I even created a transparent favicon for my grokiam.com site – that was a nice little piece of techier geekdom on my part IIDSSM IMHO.
So, if you want to know how to change your favicon in WordPress, go here Blavatars.
Friendsheet
This is my Friendsheet. What on earth is that, you ask? You did ask, didn’t you? I don’t know, I reply, but it’s something like pinterest, OK? Got it? My friendsheet just generated a page of photos that are somehow related to my Facebook likes and friends – at I think least that’s what I think it just did. Like Stumbleupon in a certain imag-inary way (ha ha my pun my bad). Plug for Stumbleupon which is a Calgary company that started many years ago and was bought up for $75M by Ebay but then resold back to the original owners for less. Good deal if you can get it *Smile*
Zuckerberg ‘Likes’ App That Turns Facebook Into Pinterest
So now there are Pinterest clones. It seems to me that Pinterest just came out like last week? Well probably not, though I just found out about it recently, it must have been around for a little while at least. I read that they had raised I think $27M in Venture Capital in the last quarter VC report that I read, so that would probably be Oct – Dec 2011. I dunknow, what do I do with it. It just lets me pin photos that I find lying around the web. Not sure what that’s good for? Do you?
My Twitter Home
This Twitter / Home is my Twitter home page. I am @Grokiam. My personal home page is grokiam.com.
Why use Twitter? LinkedIn? Facebook? GoogleApps? Each has its own purpose.
Twitter is great for sharing up-to-the-minute happenings and following the interesting tidbits that are posted by your “colleagues”. I follow some humorous twits, like the fake Queen of England, some writers, some science geeks. It keeps me up to date. It’s interesting sometimes to see what’s trending.
LinkedIn has some interesting groups with good discussions. It’s a bit like a constant professional promotion, but it does lead to some good discussions and sharing of information.
Facebook now is mostly for playing games and sharing photos and videos with personal friends.
Google apps and docs are great for sharing files and calendars with small groups. It’s now being used by bigger groups – I wonder how well it scales?
What online tools do you use?
I use Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter daily. Try to update my blogs (one on blogger, one on WordPress) regularly (daily/monthly as appropriate). Get around 100 emails/day. Send around 20 emails/day. Have 2 active and 3 lightly used email accounts. Use Meetup for casual meetings, just joined FourSquare. Have probably 50 other social media or SaaS accounts.
Question is, which are the best tools for me or for you?
HootSuite – Social Media Dashboard for Teams using Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin
Another one I should probably know what it is good for, who the target audience is. So many sites… so little time. It’s not really just sites that are proliferating, it’s social media tools/applications/platforms. Common twitter hashtag is #socmed
HootSuite – Social Media Dashboard for Teams using Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin.
14 Personalized Homepages Compared, Feature by Feature
Personalized Home Pages
This (very old link from 2007) link 14 Personalized Homepages Compared, Feature by Feature compares 14 different personalized home pages:
- Netvibes
- Pageflakes
- iGoogle
- MyYahoo
- Yourminis
- WebWag
- Schmedley
- Eskobo
- Windows Live
- Favoor
- Gritwire
- Inbox
- Protopage
- It’aAStart
and then the comments mention more (the below are just some of them):
- Tizit
- ClutterMe
- myAOL
- Nowsy
- Krackle
- myway
- itsmynew
- wirel
- bridox
- awesomestart
- shinysearch
- dronggo
And then here’s a more up to date review
http://venturebeatprofiles.com/company/profile/netvibes/competitors
I’ve used iGoogle a bit and am now using netvibes but I mostly use them as a RSS feed collector and only look at them when I have some spare time. How are we supposed to use them?
So Many Sites 