The holidays are just around the corner and soon the malls will be packed with eager shoppers and hopefully a lot of deals. Unfortunately, during this time of year, parking gets rough at the malls and the lines are ridiculous. If you’re not a big fan of the long lines like me, you’ll most likely be shopping online and taking advantage of free shipping from multiple online retailers.
For online shoppers, you can take advantage of TrackThis to receive updates on the location of your package(s) via Twitter, SMS, or email. In the event that your orders are being delivered by multiple delivery services, you can still count on TrackThis to have you covered—TrackThis supports tracking codes for DHL, UPS, USPS, and FedEx.
To start tracking your packages on Twitter follow these simple steps:
1. Go to twitter.com/trackthis and click on the follow button. TrackThis will follow you automatically which will enable you to send direct messages.
2. Send a direct message to TrackThis with your package’s tracking code (must be a tracking code from FedEx/UPS/USPS/DHL) first then a short description or title of your package.
For example: 123456789987 Flip Ultra Video
3. Finally, an update on your package will be sent to you as a direct message within twenty minutes. Afterwards, you’ll continue to receive updates each time the location of your package changes.
Today’s Guest Blogger is Amanda from This Crazy Miracle Called Life where she blogs about all aspects of life and whatever “random fabulosity” that comes to mind. Amanda is currently in college earning her nursing degree, and in her spare time, she enjoys traveling, creating, spending time with family and friends, and planning her upcoming wedding.
Since it’s Back to School time and a lot of us are getting back into college, I figured what better topic for Stephanie’s monthly Social Media Guest Blog than helpful scholarly resources. Now sure, some of you are done with college or chose other plans, but these things can work for many different things as well.
I will admit right off the bat that I had many more favorite sites than I ever thought I did so I’ll focus on the “social media/web 2.0″-geared sites in this post, and rather than go crazy with the world’s longest post, next week, I’ll post two additional posts on my own blog with many more resources. (Plus, as the semester progresses, I have a few more things to share, such as note-taking tricks, research paper hacks, and more!)
With social media overtaking the internet, if we can learn to search smart we will save loads of time. Take Mahalo for example. It’s a “human-powered search engine,” meaning instead of sifting through results that waste your time, everything that comes up is usually relevant to your topic. Mahalo is still in beta, and it doesn’t have a search result page for every topic, so it has its flaws, but for general information, this is my search engine of choice!
Chunk It
Chunk It is brand new, in beta, and it’s totally rocking my world!
If you’re just writing a simple essay where a few Google sources are fine, here’s what it can do:
Are you up against a deadline with an 8-page research paper due in the morning? Working with huge databases and journal articles? Check this out…
Their site has many more examples, but what this can do in PubMed, EBSCOhost, [insert your major's preferred database here] will just amaze you.
Social Bookmarking
This is social media, folks. Social bookmarking, in essence, is where users save their internet bookmarks (or “favorites”) onto a site of choice and “tag” them with keywords to make them easily discoverable both by themselves and friends, the public, groups, etc.
Many of the common sites can now sync with browsers so not only can a user access their bookmarks on the site, but they can also access them traditionally via their browser’s Bookmarks menu.
I used to enjoy Ma.gnoliabut it was too limiting for me so I stopped using it. However, it just went opensource, so it’s definitely something I would keep an eye on!
How can social bookmarking help you? Well organization, for one. Also, it’s a great way to search and discover information for projects, study help, personal learning, etc.
Note: There are other similar sites like StumbleUpon,Reddit, and Furl, but I’ve found that those sites contain more “check out this cool story I found today” vs. the above, “here is my bookmark collection.” Of course, people will use any of those sites either way, but that is just my personal opinion. Try these last three for more news-type articles, or you can always go to Google News.
Learn How to Work Google
Most of us think we’re great at Googling. We use it as a verb, so of course we are! We know what * and + and ” does when we put them in the little Google bar. Well, did you know you can do much more than that to really narrow in your search? Just learning a few more tricks can save hours, I’m sure. I find myself using the same little Google operations in many other search engines as well - these really are imperative to any successful college student’s technological knowledge base. So if you don’t think you’re using Google (or large search engines) as efficiently as you’d like, if you’d like to review, or if you just want to learn a few more advanced tricks like how to search for only a PDF, check out these useful links:
Oh, I cringe to talk about Google again… But if you don’t mind (usually) ugly websites and sometimes what can amount to pretty deep digging, many professors have too much time on their hands and build extravagant websites dedicated to the subjects of their greatest adoration. There’s a couple ways to go about finding these sites that are usually information and link-packed.
Search for your course (Try chemistry not Introduction to Chemistry for Nursing Students if your college has weird course names) If you’re in college, don’t forget that a lot of basic college courses are called the same things as things you took in 10th grade. Remember our Google tricks? This is where typing +college +chemistry helps. That is still pretty vague though, so sometimes, I’ll type in the author of my textbook so I know I’m getting a better, closer match. Sometimes you have to dig, and creativity never hurts in your search term selection either.
Try running an .edu site-only search. (reminder: type this in the boxsite:.edu) Just because you don’t go to a certain school doesn’t mean you can’t use their links!
Two pretty similar sites, Scribd and DocStoc both serve the same purpose - hosting documents (many filetypes supported) that you can share (or make private) with friends or the entire world (via the sites or neat tools like embedding). The sites even look similar, so you can browse both. You can find all kinds of things like course notes, articles and papers on huge ranges of topics, scanned copyrighted documents (SparkCharts, scanned textbooks and study guides), and so much more. I’ll kind of leave this one at that, but I do want to warn you to use your own personal moral/legal judgment with the scans, and use extreme care as far as plagiarism goes. Just because someone posts a paper on Scribd doesn’t mean you can download it, turn it in, and your professor will be sure you wrote it.
FYI, SearchDocs.nethas the ability to search both sites as well as others, but that’s all it does.
I’m keeping an eye on sites like ShareNotes and Incredicampus. They have a lot of growing to do, but you might be able to find something, and ShareNotes especially seems to have a lot of potential.
Project Planning
Notefish
Notefish is a lot of fun. In Internet Explorer or Firefox, you just a need a little browser addon, and while you research your project or paper or whatever it is you’re working on, you can clip bits and pieces to add to the page. You can move things around, organize them, and basically, make your own little scrapbook of plans. You can share it, too! Check out this public page for a good example: Trip to NYC Notefish
Questions & Answers
Yahoo Answers
Clueless on that last trig problem? Confused on a topic and you’d like to talk to a few professionals (or self-proclaimed “professionals”…. hey, we’re talking free here, people!)? Or feeling wise with your new scholarly knowledge and want to help others out? Yahoo Answers is the place. You can’t show up and post your entire chemistry worksheet and hope for someone to do it for you. You can, however, jump right in and search past questions, ask questions of your own, and use this site to explore, get help with specific things, ask for clarification perhaps on a math concept you don’t understand (maybe with an example problem), etc. Make sure you help back though - you lose “points” for asking questions and gain points for answering questions. Note that this is not a homework-help site - it’s a site for asking any question about anything, and a lot of the people there are really great about helping with educational/career/project questions.
Ningis the site where anyone can start their own social network for any topic! This has several applications for us:
Start a course Ning for all the members in your class to share notes, discuss, etc. Many professors are starting to do this as well.
Search for non-private course Nings already open. There are several professor-headed networks for people who need help in certain subjects or for students passionate about specialized majors. Also, there are several major-specific networks to join where you can make friends, share tips, blog, have discussions, post pictures, videos, etc. (Nursing major? We have almost 1200 nurses on Ning at NursesConnect) The bigger the groups, the more fun they are! (And Ning is definitely not just for school - run a few searches and you’ll find a group for just about anything!)
Cheap Textbooks
Textbook Revolt
Sick of paying too much for books? Well we all know there’s power in numbers and our generation kind of rocks. So, why not boycott the textbook companies and start using sites like Textbook Revolt? I have yet to complete a successful “transaction” on this site, but I’ve heard many success stories, they just got a new owner, and the more students that join, the more the site will help us all!
Price Comparison Sites
Two of my favorites are CampusiandBigWords. I never buy from campus bookstores anymore and I lost track of how many hundreds of dollars I’ve saved. Seriously.
That’s all for Part 1!
I hope you enjoyed it. Don’t forget to check my blog next week (Monday and Wednesday) for the rest. I have more links and surprises that you will not want to miss!
Thanks to Stephanie for letting me share my expertise, and thanks, readers, for listening! Feel free to comment with your favorite sites, and if you are struggling with anything college-related that you think the internet may be able to solve, go ahead and post and I’ll see what I can do to address it next week.
(Images from free stock photo site, http://www.sxc.hu)
As an undergrad, I played video games during the day, partied hard all night, and just barely had enough time for my classes. My future career was the last thing on my mind. I figured that if I got straight A’s, I’ll eventually find a job that I like and that pays well. If this is you, boy are you mistaken.
The time to think about your career is now. Monster.com and your career center help you apply for jobs. Vault.com helps you research companies. But there’s nothing out there that helps you find out what you want to do career-wise or that helps you get there. Furthermore, most career sites are so boring that you would rather go back to work or homework than to spend time on the site. That’s why we created FD Career.
Our career approach is simple, yet unique - live your life as if it were a video game. Think about the last video game you played. Did you just sit around idly waiting for things to come to you, or did you explore the map, slay demons, and gain new abilities and features? There is a direct relation to real life. Think about what you did last week? Did you sit around, watch TV, and play video games, or are you a go-getter who constantly meets new people, reads articles and books, and looks for every way to develop yourself personally and professionally?
In FD Career, every time you gain an internship, get a high GPA, or become a leader of an organization, you gain experience points and level-up. As you increase in level, you gain prestige, get new abilities and features, get access to new areas of the site, and are able to recruit with more prestigious firms. This is what we call the FD RPG.
What do you want to do with your career? If you want to be a Consultant, you can go on FD Career and choose the Path of Business. From there, you can take Quests to level-up in 5 different personal qualities:
Education - Knowledge in your field
Experience - Your ability to execute your knowledge
Leadership - Leading teams
Social - Your overall social influence
Initiative - Your motivation and drive to develop yourself
For example, an Experience Quest for a Consultant could be a business analysis quest. The user would have to solve a profitability problem that a company is having and submit their solutions online on our website. Our panel will judge your recommendations and give you experience points accordingly. A Social Quest could be to increase your social status and influence using Twitter. The quest could be to increase your number of followers to 100.
We plan on launching our first nation-wide competition this October. The competition will be to create a market penetration and product development strategy for a real life company. The winning team will be featured on our website and could be funded the money to execute their business plan.
The next time you’re watching TV or playing video games, ask yourself, “Isn’t there something more fun than this?” There is, and we have it at FD Career.
There are several reasons why people have multiple Twitter accounts. Some people use one account to keep their friends up to date on events privately and automate their other account as an RSS feed.
I have two Twitter accounts that I maintain. @HeyStephanie is for personal use and @Brickfish is geared towards highlighting new and exciting Brickfish campaigns.
Thanks to the Carsonified team, I no longer have to sign in to each account individually to make updates and neither do you! In four days, the Carsonified team built a web application called Matt to simplify ‘multiple account Twitter tweeting’ (say that five time fast!). And boy does it make managing multiple Twitter accounts easy.
Step 1: Simply login at Matt with your Twitter username and password and this will generate your first Twitter account.
Step 2: Next you’ll need to click on the “Click here to add a new account” link and enter the username and password of your second account.
Step 3: If you have more than two Twitter accounts and would like to add more, repeat Step 2.
Step 4: Once you’re done setting up your accounts, you’re good to go! Type in your 140 character tweet and check off the accounts that you want Matt to update for you and click on “go go go” - it’s that easy!
Have fun Twittering and don’t forget to add me as a friendif you haven’t already.
The Admins want you to create a one of a kind header to represent our social network. You can start from scratch, use Wordle as a background, or incorporate the 20SB badge in your design. Headers must be 955×200 pixels.
Each 20SB member can submit up to 5 entries but don’t forget, the contest ends August 3, 2008 and all entries must be submitted to the 20SB Header Contest Flickr Group.
While the prize for the winner is still to be determined, I think bragging rights is sufficient. For complete details of the contest, visit the 20SB blog and to spark your creativity, here’s my submission to the contest:
If you’re not already a member of 20SB, it’s not too late to sign-up.
20SB is a great community of active bloggers that are all approaching, in the middle, or just past their quarter life crisis. WIth over 1900 members and more than 100 groups, you’ll find a diverse community and plenty of reading material to get your creative juices flowing for your next blog post.
In fact, 20SB is full of activities with blogger meetups, blog swaps, and is currently in the process of rolling out category specific RSS feeds for everyone. Click here for more information about the RSS feeds.
What I like most about 20SB is the active forum, the friendly folks, and the fact that anyone can nominate a member to be a featured blogger on the homepage. Even more exciting is the fact that the group has recently been added to Alltop and thanks to Zakstar, a 20SB group has been added to LinkedIn.
Wordle lets you create “word clouds” from an RSS feed, a del.ici.ous username, or you can paste in a bunch of text to generate you word cloud.
Once you have the text all set, you can tweak your word cloud with different layouts, fonts, and color schemes. And because images created by the Wordle application are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license, you can use your Wordle on anything from book covers to T-shirts. I added my Wordle to my new Contact page.
Just remember to let people know how you created your Wordle. If you took an image from the Wordle gallery, don’t forget to mention where you got it from.
Thanks to Andrew, author of The Working Title, for highlighting Wordle in his blog. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have found out about this awesome site. And kudos to Jonathan Feinberg for creating Wordle, I absolutely love it.
It’s that time again! It’s time to share the standout blog posts, websites, and social media tools that I discovered this week and would like to share with you.
MyToons.com - the world’s greatest online animation community – now in HD!
Comic-Con.org- okay, so I didn’t just discover this website this week. In fact, I’ve been going to Comic-Con for the last 5 years and plan on attending this year as well. I just wanted to add it to the list because I just bought my tickets this week which was a major highlight to me.
Social Media Tools
BatchBook.com - the ultimate contact management web application. They have awesome customer service too!
Tablefy.com - find the data you need, compare the results, and share it with colleagues and friends
Organizing my emails in Outlook is simple. Every client has a separate folder and I use the Outlook wizard to create rules so important emails don’t get caught in a spam filter or get neglected. This helps to keep my inbox free from clutter and more manageable.
What isn’t simple, is trying to organize my contacts. In fact, I’ve been searching for a contact management software that would enable me to do these three things:
Utilize tags to organize contacts
Create targeted email lists
Track conversations easily
Friends and colleagues suggested that I create an excel database or create groups in my Gmail account. Unfortunately, both suggestions wouldn’t allow me to use tags to group contacts together. Plus, tracking conversations in excel is tedious.
Fortunately, I came across Chris Brogan’s post on BatchBook.com and was floored with his review. The BatchBook features met all of my needs. I could organize contacts with tags, generate instant email lists, and track conversations instantly. My favorite features were the ability to add photos and create custom contact fields. Their plans were affordable too. In fact, I signed up for the Baby Blue account to test the waters. If I decide that I need to increase the amount of storage, users, contacts, or SuperTags - I can always upgrade later.
In the end, BatchBook was the solution to my problem. If you’re looking for a robust contact management application, I suggest you take a look at BatchBook. Below is a full breakout of features that they have to offer.
I have 32 subscriptions to blogs and 1000+ items in my Google Reader that’s waiting to be read. While I filter through these unread items and take steps to simplify and organize my RSS feeds, here are a couple of standout posts, websites, and tools that I found worthy to be highlighted this week.
Ping.fm is the most effective way to update your status on multiple social networks. A single post to Ping.fm can update 16 popular social services at the same time so you don’t have to sign into each account individually. You can post a status update, a blog, or micro-blog through one platform and posting a link won’t be a problem at all - Ping.fm will automatically convert it to a shorter link before posting to your services.
This week my status updates to Facebook, LinkedIn, Mashable, Myspace, Plaxo Pulse, Plurk, and Twitter and took less than a minute to complete. If I signed into each account individually, it would have taken me even longer.
Since the fire was just off the freeway, employees that usually take the I-805 southbound, left the office because we knew that the brush fire would effect traffic. As I got onto the onramp, the rubbernecking had already began. Speeds were less than 10 mph and drivers were noticeably pulling out their camera phones to take a snap. Fortunately, traffic let up after Clairemont Mesa boulevard and I was able to get home at a decent hour.
Today’s event reminded me of last year’s firestorm.Our home was threatened by the Harris fire and the city issued a voluntary evacuation for our area (see photo below). Instead of driving to Qualcomm, we flew out of San Diego to Scottsdale, Arizona. Having been through previous fire seasons, we knew that the air quality would be poor and polluted in San Diego. (I honestly hope that history doesn’t repeat itself any time soon.)
It’s interesting to note that during last year’s firestorm our relatives and friends were scattered all over San Diego. We couldn’t use our cell phones to contact each other so we had to find another means of communication. Interestingly enough, every one of our family members and friends were connected on Myspace. To update our family and friends, we used my Myspace account to send bulletins to everyone ensuring our safety.
When we arrived in Arizona, we kept a close eye on the news and found a blog called Wildifires 2007 by SignOnSanDiego.com. They kept us up to date on the status of the fires and had links to evacuation centers. Several posts received comments and questions by subscribers and everyone pulled together to share information on where to find help and shelter.
Simply put, social media helped us communicate with our family, friends, and neighbors and proved to be an effective means of communication.
I stumbled across Kristen Nicole’s article on Mashable titled, “Use Flickr for Custom Capital One Cards” and thought it was a great campaign for several personal reasons.
First, Capital One makes it simple to create a personalized credit card. I already have a Capital One card but now I can select a photo that’s already hosted on my Flickr account or simply upload a jpeg from my PC and make it more fun. See upload guidelines here.
Second, by using a personal photo I’m creating an emotional attachment with my credit card. When I’m in the middle of a transaction, do I whip out my boring debit card or use my fancy customized Capital One card? Chances are, I’m going to whip out the Capital One card then chat with the clerk on how fun it was customizing my credit card and tell her where she can go online to create her own!
It would have also been interesting to see what would happen if the Capital One Image Card promotion ran a user-generated contest around the campaign. Let people create their custom Capital One card with their favorite photo then offer a prize (i.e. a $150 Capital One Gas Card) for the best design in a photo category (i.e. Family, Best Friends, Graduation, etc.).
People can engage longer with the promotion and check out what other people have designed and leave comments if they want to. And if they’re not interested in other people’s creations, they can still order their new card. That’s a great way of building brand awareness in my opinion, what do you think?
June 17, 2008 was dubbed Firefox 3 Download Day. The goal, to set a Guinness World Record for Most Software Downloaded in 24 Hours. When I heard of the event, I signed up for a reminder on FF’s download page so I wouldn’t forget. And just as I had predicted, June 17th was a very hectic day. I came down with the stomach flu and was ‘unplugged’ from everyone and anything Internet related. So this morning, when I checked my email, there was my FF reminder and I made it within the allotted 24 hours.
I checked in this afternoon to see the results and it looks like Firefox 3 was downloaded more than 8 million times. The results still need to be verified by the good people at Guinness. In the meantime, feel free to download your very own personalized Firefox 3 Download Day certificate.
I thought it would be ifun to create my very own Social Map. It’s a break out of websites, forums, online communities, and other social networking platforms that I’m a part of and have contributed to (i.e. LinkedIn, Myspace, Ning, etc.).
You can even see which online services I’ve switched from and to. For example, I used to blog on Xanga and Vox but now I’m on Wordpress. I even switched from Photobucket to Flickr because it was easier for me to share photos with friends.
Much like the Brands in a Day Portrait, I’m sure I’ve left out a couple of items but it’s still fascinating to look at.
It’ll be interesting to see how this map grows in a year’s time. A few questions that come into mind are:
I was excited when I saw the question above on LinkedIn because I’m always interested to find out what other people are using to make their life easier at work. I’m glad I checked in on this otherwise I wouldn’t have found out about JingProject.com.
Jing allows you to capture any image on your desktop (includes adding text and arrows) and gives you the option of creating videos. Jing then gives you a link that you can share with your co-workers so they can see exactly what you see.
Now you can avoid lengthy and drawn out text tutorials with Jing. This is absolutely what I needed in the office.
Here’s a video about Jing:
So what about you? What Web 2.0 tools do you find most useful for businesses?
I know shameless plug… but I’m seriously floored by the quality of entries in Mr. X’s Design Challenge. Who knew so many people were into vintage rock posters? This is the second design challenge sponsored by Mr. X and he has 7 more challenges lined up until January 2009. Check out his other campaigns here.
Tonight my colleagues and I will be attending the iMarketers event, Widgets: Strategies and Effectiveness, at the University of San Diego. The event will bring together interactive marketers and companies in San Diego to uncover how widgets work and how companies can optimize their marketing efforts through web, mobile, and desktop widgets.
Speakers:
Alex Funk, digital-telepathy, Part I Widget 101
Larry Marine, Intuitive Design, Part II Which Widgets Work
I’m looking forward to understanding what people understand and don’t understand about widgets as well as getting to know my peers in SD. Hope to see you there.
I received a lot of questions from friends about Polyvore (see previous post here). They didn’t understand the concept or how to create a set with Polyvore.
So instead of making you read, I’m going to share two videos that show you how to use Polyvore. I found these videos on Polyvore’s site here and here.
Watch how you can create sets composed of individual images using an easy to use, drag and drop editor. After you have created a set, you can publish and share it with your friends and the Polyvore community.
The Clipper easily lets you import items from other websites into Polyvore.
I hope this helps - if you have any other questions, please leave a comment.
The opinions blogged herein represent only those of Stephanie Gulley and do not reflect those of her employer, persons or companies mentioned herein, or anyone else.
The holidays are just around the corner and soon the malls will be packed with eager shoppers and hopefully a lot of deals. Unfortunately, during this time of year, parking gets rough at the malls and the lines are ridiculous. If you’re not a big fan of the long lines like me, you’ll most likely be shopping online and taking advantage of free shipping from multiple online retailers.
Tonight my colleagues and I will be attending the iMarketers event, 