Stephanie Liu

E-Bestsellers and More From Your Local Library

By Stephanie Liu
January 25, 2009
Social Media,Technology

If you’re like me, you love walking down the aisles of your local bookstore to see what new audiobooks are on the shelves. By the time you’re done walking up and down your favorite aisle, whether it be Business & Marketing, Romance, or Self-Improvement, you look down at your hands and realize you’ve grabbed five audiobooks — each roughly worth $25.00.

You end up purchasing the audiobook that fits within your budget and leave the others to be re-shelved. “Next time,” you tell yourself and the running list of audiobooks you’ve logged in your memory to purchase grows longer.

What if I told you that you could borrow audio best-sellers and other goodies from your local library—for free?

All you need is a library card from your public library. You can browse and search hundreds of great titles and download them to your computer, transfer them to a portable device, or burn onto a CD for your listening pleasure anywhere, anytime.

Imagine my surprise when I logged onto the San Diego County Library site and discovered their large selection of downloadable audiobooks in both WMA and MP3 formats—I literally freaked out. I whipped out my library card and checked out all of the audiobooks I had always wanted.

The process was simple and may differ from your local library so be sure to see what requirements you need in order to take advantage of this opportunity.

Step 1: Download & Install the OverDrive Media Console™ software (FREE)

The OverDrive Media Console is available for both Windows® and Mac® users.

Step 2: Register Free Software

Before you can start the check out process, you’ll need to register the OverDrive Media Console software. Don’t worry, you’ll only need to do this once.

Step 3: Checkout, Download & Enjoy.

Now you can search the library database for your favorite audio books and other downloadable content. When you decide on a title of interest, simply add it to your digital cart to checkout.

You will never accrue late fees with titles you download from this website. At the end of the loan period, titles will expire and be automatically ‘returned’ to the library. At this time, you can delete the expired file(s) from your machine. – San Diego Public Library

So what are you waiting for? Search for libraries using OverDrive’s service here.

(Photo Credit: a glitch)

Lose Weight With Web 2.0

By Stephanie Liu
January 11, 2009
Social Media,Technology

It’s 2009 and you’ve made a couple of New Year’s resolutions. And if you’re like most “resolutioners” – your number one resolution is to lose weight (myself included 🙂 ).

Great — so what social media tools or communities are out there that can help us meet this goal?

Meet TheDailyPlate.com

The Daily Plate (TDP) allows you to search more than 502,000 food items for calorie counts, total carbs, fat, and protein so you can track what you’re eating. What’s great about this search function is that when you search for a certain food, TDP also provides healthy alternatives with fewer calories and reviews made by other members. You can even log what you’ve eaten in a free food diary that you can access online, through their mobile site, or via the LiveStrong iPhone application (my favorite iPhone app) which is available for free for a limited time.

Once you’ve registered at TDP, it’s easy to get started. Simply type a food item in the search box and add the item to your daily plate. TDP will calculate your daily calories automatically. You can even track your daily activites (i.e. running, walk, etc.) and log the calories you burn each day.

So if you’re serious about keeping your resolution to lose weight, check out The Daily Plate and see what they have to offer and don’t forget – it’s FREE.

What other web 2.0 tools are you using to meet your New Year’s resolutions?

Share Scribbles and More On Springpad

By Stephanie Liu
December 3, 2008
Guest Blogger,Online Collaboration

Today’s Guest Blogger is Alana from Good Girl Gone Blog. Alana is a college student and a member of Twenty Something Bloggers. She’s currently interning at a company called Springpad which looks pretty cool but I won’t spill the beans on what they’re all about. I’ll let Alana do that instead. 😉

My name is Alana, but you can call me Good Girl Gone Blog. I’m just a regular college student, stressing about classes, going to parties and doing some major blogging on the side. To tell you the truth, I never even read blogs until this summer, when a mentor of mine told me I couldn’t become a journalist until I started following blogs, and writing one of my own. From then on, I was hooked.

I wouldn’t call myself a social media expert, because I’m definitely still learning. In that way, I’m kind of like Luke Skywalker, a paduan hoping to learn from the Jedi masters. Fortunately for me, I landed a fabulous internship working with a bunch of tech-savvy mac users. I like to think of my boss as my own personal Yoda, minus the

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confusing speech patterns. She’s taught me so much already about sites like Twitter, Delicious, and Bit.ly. Plus, she and her team have developed a really cool new product that I thought I’d share with you, my fellow paduans and social media Jedis. (Perhaps I’ve taken this metaphor a little too far…)

It’s called Springpad and it’s perfect for a busy girl like myself. Imagine a way to organize your entire life in a set of online notebooks! No more lost sticky notes, grocery lists written on the back of receipts or forgotten recipes, with Springpad, you can create the everyday lists with a little extra pizzazz from the Internet.

Check out this demo and see for yourself:

What’s even cooler about Springpad, is that it’s a great tool for bloggers. Suppose I enjoy the most amazing bagel of my life at a restaurant in Boston, and want to share that experience with my readers. With Springpad, I can write my blog post and then pull up a restaurant listing from “Yelp” that my readers can add to their Springpads. What’s even more awesome is that my brand name will appear alongside the restaurant listing. And yes, I did write a blog entry (complete with a SpringIt link, of course) about my favorite bagel.

Here’s a video showing how you can engage your readers by incorporating Springpad into your blog:

There’s a lot more I could tell you about Springpad, but why not check out the Website for yourself? With all the craziness of the holiday season, you could use a little organization in your life! So hey, why not simplify it a bit?

Splitweet Is Perfect For Twitter Power Users

By Stephanie Liu
November 29, 2008
Organization,Social Media,Twitter

Earlier this year, I wrote about Matt, a web application built by the Carsonified team, to solve the problem of posting to multiple Twitter accounts. Matt was useful in that I didn’t have to log into each of my accounts separately. However, if I wanted to view tweets from individuals I was following via both accounts, I would still have to log into each account individually. The same rule applies if I wanted to see who replied to my tweets.

Wouldn’t it be great if you could view all of your friend’s tweets and replies on multiple accounts on just one application?

Will was thinking the same thing as well and asked me earlier this year…

“Out of all the twitter clients I’ve been browsing through, a lot of the same features of being able to post to multiple places at once for example. Nothing that I’ve seen so far does this in combination with being able to see the tweets from multiple accounts; have you come across anything like this yet?”

At the time, I didn’t know of any application that did just that until now. Thanks to Problogger’s tweet this afternoon, I found out about Splitweet. It’s the perfect multi-account Twitter management and brand monitor for Twitter power users.

All your accounts, one place.

All you have to do is create an account then add your Twitter accounts. In a matter of seconds you’ll start to see tweets from the people that you’re following.

Follow your contacts’ tweets easily.

Each tweet is color coded to reflect which account you’re following them under.

Monitorize your brand & reply.

You can even monitor your brand with Splitweet. Simply enter the brand name on your profile settings and hit save, and you’ll start to see mentions of your brand pop up and you can reply directly from the UI.

Overall, it’s a great application for individuals that manage multiple accounts and want more features. It’d be even better if it tracked how many people clicked on a link you twittered like Tweetburner. I wonder how long that will take to develop.

In the meantime, have fun Twittering and don’t forget to add me as a friend if you haven’t done so already.

Avoiding a Business Card Hiccup

By Stephanie Liu
October 19, 2008
Brickfish,Design,Events,Organization

Last week I met up with my old colleagues at a Happy Hour 2.0 in La Jolla. It was the perfect opportunity to catch up with them since I recently started a new job and to mingle with other marketers, developers, and other web people. The only drawback was that I didn’t have my new business cards or any moo cards to hand out. Fortunately, HeyStephanie.com was easy for my new friends to remember and I was able to get by with giving my email address.

Meanwhile, I still don’t have any new business cards so in the interim, I had to find a solution to my business card dilemma. Luckily, I stumbled across MyDropcard.com which lets you easily share your contact info with your phone—for free!

Once you’ve registered and entered all of your contact information at the site, you’re good to go. As if that wasn’t cool enough, you can create two separate profiles; one for business and the other for personal contacts.

When you meet someone new, simply text “drop” and their email address to “41411” and Dropcard will deliver your contact info directly to their email. You can even add your social network profiles on your dropcard (i.e. LinkedIn) or your blog.

Dropcard also has convenient text messaging shortcuts so you don’t have to waste so much time texting. For example, you can replace the “@” symbol when typing your friend’s email address with a space and Dropcard will know what you mean. And if your friend’s email is on Gmail, even better! Text “drop” and their email address without “@gmail.com” and you’re done. For more ways to cut your text time, check out more Dropcard shortcuts here.

Not only is this handy, it sure beats carrying 100+ business cards to hand out at a conference. On top of that, soon they’ll be offering users more features (i.e. personal logo, attachments, statistics, etc.) for $4.99 a month. That might be helpful for the hardcore networkers.

So what about you? Is there a different service that you use to send contact info to colleagues through your phone? What would you do in this type of situation?

This Week’s Highlights

By Stephanie Liu
October 4, 2008
Highlights

My Google reader was flooded with great articles and blog posts this week and there were a few that I knew had to be highlighted and shared with the rest of you. Want more great blogs to read? You can view all of my shared items on Google Reader here.

Also note that I want to try something new and promote upcoming Web 2.0 and marketing events. Feel free to contact me about any upcoming events or social media tools that you’re aware of or find useful.

Posts

10 Prolific Bloggers Share Tips on Generating Conversation on Blogs by Darren Rowse
Five Lessons Learned About Live Blogging by Aliza Sherman
Reading Blogs at Work: Why You Should Do It & How You Can Make It Worthwhile by Marshall Kirkpatrick

Social Media Tools

Add Your Social Network Signature Almost Anywhere with WiseStamp by Doriano “Paisano” Carta
- Also check out WiseStamp on Twitter @wisestamp
Backtype.com —BackType is a service that lets you find, follow and share comments from across the web.
CraigsPal.com —manage your Craiglist searches with this easy to use desktop application.

Brickfish® at Web 2.0 Expo NYC

By Stephanie Liu
October 2, 2008
Brickfish,Events

Special thanks to Ashley Futak for her post on Brickfish at the Web 2.0 Expo that was held in New York City last month. To get more information on where Brickfish will be next, contact Ashley at AshleyFutak@brickfish.com.

The Web 2.0 Expo in New York was filled with firsts for Brickfish. It was the first time, as a company, that we were an exhibitor for an event of this scale. It was my first time attending an Expo, let alone orchestrating the whole thing (you would be surprised how much work goes into putting an exhibit together!). It was also the first time we were able to explain Brickfish to a crowd of people who were intimately familiar with Social Media and all that Brickfish has to offer.

We were surrounded by companies that live and breathe Web 2.0, and engaged with people that truly welcome this “new media” and speak in those terms. We were overwhelmed by the number of companies and people anxious to learn something new, and to apply their learning’s to their

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business models or to their everyday life.

That said…our booth was packed! From the moment the Expo opened until the moment it closed, we were busy sharing the Brickfish experience with anxious listeners! If we weren’t giving demonstrations, we were walking visitors through the Brickfish site, or handing out our new marketing materials.

It was so exciting to watch this start-up company from San Diego emerge onto the playing field with some of the biggest names on the Web today, and to establish ourselves as the leader in Social Media Advertising.

Personalize Your Posts on Twitter

By Stephanie Liu
September 27, 2008
Brands,Brickfish,Twitter

Thanks to the Twitter Photoshop template available at Boinblog, personalizing your Twitter profile to promote your personal brand just got easier. Most tweeps upload a background for their Twitter profile while others take it a step further, like Problogger, and include links to their other social media profiles.

Inspired by Problogger, Boinblog’s easy to use template, and armed with a copy of Adobe Photoshop, I took the leap and updated my Twitter profile. You can follow me at @HeyStephanie.

After getting the hang of editing layers, I offered to help customize backgrounds for my colleagues at Brickfish®—in exchange for Starbucks of course. 🙂

Rachel Kay is the founder of RKPR and is an award-winning public relations expert. Check our her new site when you get a chance.

Ashley Futak who is a part of the Brickfish public relations team and just recently came back from the Web 2.0 Expo in New York (stay tuned for her guest post on Wednesday, October 1, 2008), also let me update her Twitter background. For her avatar I went to PosePrints then used my digital scrapbooking elements from Keri Schueller’s Organica collection.

To view other Twitter backgrounds that I helped co-workers with, check out @mphillips4ku and @ssultar.

Have fun with your backgrounds and feel free to leave your Twitter link here so we can check them out.

College Web Secrets Part 1: Social Media, College, and You

By Stephanie Liu
September 12, 2008
Guest Blogger,Online Collaboration,Social Media

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!)

Part 1: Social Media, College, and You

(Today at Hey Stephanie!)

Search Smart
Notes & Documents
Project Planning
Questions & Answers
Ultimate Interactions
Cheap Textbooks

Part 2: Get Organized: Your Space, Your Time, Your Web

(Monday 9/15 on Crazy Miracle)

Part 3: Your Toolbox of Bookmarks

(Wednesday 9/17 on Crazy Miracle)

Let’s go!!

Search Smart

Mahalo

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.
Delicious is probably the most popular.

I used to enjoy Ma.gnolia but 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:
Google week: 101 tips, tricks & hacks

Google Guide Quick Reference: Google Advanced Operators (Cheat Sheet)
There is also a printable PDF link on the top left.

Professor Sites

Using Google tricks! (above)
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 box site:.edu) Just because you don’t go to a certain school doesn’t mean you can’t use their links!
Example sites: Physiology, Math

Notes & Documents

Note Sharing Sites

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.net has 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.
Fluther – another fun, similar site!

Ultimate Interaction

Ning

Ning is 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 Campusi and BigWords. 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)