by Andy Brudtkuhl on May 19, 2009
OffiSync is a plug-in for Microsoft Office 2003/2007 that integrates the office suite with Google Docs. You can open documents, spreadsheets and presentations already saved in Google Docs, edit them in Microsoft Office and save the files in Google Docs. The add-on creates a new revision of the document when you save it, but there’s no option to automatically save the document periodically.
Note: Despite its name, OffiSync doesn’t actually sync Google Docs with your computer and it doesn’t even show the most current version of a document, assuming that other people edited it after you opened the document in Microsoft Office.
by Andy Brudtkuhl on May 19, 2009
Peashoot is basically a URL shortener with a killer user interface. You can create campaigns based on shortened links and the Peashoot UI tracks where the links are used – on Twitter, blogs, etc. Campaigns have goals similar to web analytics. A simple goal is to have visitors land on a specific page. Custom goals include market reach, number of inbound links, number of tweets, and number of blog posts. Of course this all assumes everyone uses your specific shortened URL.
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by Andy Brudtkuhl on May 14, 2009
When you’ve come to rely on a service like Skynet err Google it becomes a big problem when their entire infrastructure goes down. For a small company like mine we have become completely reliant on “the cloud” using affordable web services to run our company.
Today, Google is having problems. We can’t receive email – both personal or company – because it’s run on Google’s GMail. We have AdSense running on some of our sites – which are timing out – and is causing many of our websites to load improperly. Our main research and information gathering tool – Google Reader – is unavailable. Custom Search that we have built in to some of our sites is failing. Oh – and that search tool we use about 2,000 times a day is extremely slow and unusable.
If “the cloud” is truly the Holy Grail of IT systems architecture we cannot have problems like these. If the enterprise is to adopt such services and really take the cloud mainstream we have to get over this hump. Who cares about Twitter uptime when a service like Google is down – affecting business systems all over the world.
Hopefully it was just a hiccup – but as businesses move further into the cloud, disaster recovery operations and processes still need to be in place. Even though you may have offloaded many of the risks and costs associated with operating your own IT department – you still need a plan in case the cloud fails.
by Andy Brudtkuhl on May 14, 2009
What The Hashtag is a service from the Microblink team that helps track and analyze hashtags on Twitter. Hashtags are denoted by the “#” symbol in front of a word and have become a way for people to track and follow Twitter discussions. The WTH service was born out of the need to have a centralized wiki for people to find out more information about the hashtag.
While improving the layout and design of the site, the team added some great new features. First, they’ve added additional statistics.
We’ve been tracking the number of times a hashtag is being used for awhile, as well tracking the top contributors, but now we also call out the number of uses made by each contributor, and the total number of tweets and unique contributors for a week’s worth of usage.
You can also run transcripts of hashtag usage – which allows you to export all of the tweets from a specific hashtag for any date range. This eliminates the tedious task of scrolling through Twitter search to catch up on missed tweets.
One of my favorite new features they have added is the ability to watch and participate in a hashtag conversation directly on their site. Now you can join the conversation while watching it in real time…
Click the participate link and a box will pop open allowing you to craft your message. You will be greeted by a message box with the familiar character counter and your hashtag already inserted. Just include your username and password and we submit everything to Twitter directly through their API.
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by Andy Brudtkuhl on May 14, 2009
As we go full circle back to search it seems the content industry is going full circle reverting to the walled garden subscription approach.
In order to stem the loss of advertising revenue, the newspaper industry is beginning to revert back to charging for access to content. Rupert Murdoch says his News Corp owned newspaper web sites will begin charging users for access by the end of the year. The Wall Street Journal has been charging for its content for awhile and is now introducing a “micro-payments” model – which only charges readers for what they read. And in just a couple years after dropping TimesSelect, the New York Times is re-examining its subscription business model.
We’ve also seen the reiteration of this model on a much lesser scale as bloggers begin to put up walls to their content and membership models are popping up all over the place where members are granted access to exclusive content – generally in a learning environment.
So with the advertising prices falling and subscription models on the rise the makers of Clicky Web Analytics saw an interesting niche – a win/win situation to help content publishers monetize while creating value for the audience. They say they have built “the anti-ad platform”. Contenture is providing a white label – meaning you can use it on your own site – subscription model available to any content publisher regardless of the platform.
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