Two weeks a go I gave a lecture in a social media seminar. Now I’ve translated the presentation I used into English and made it easier to understand without seeing the actual lecture.

The presentation describes 20 social media practices that will help you in your daily life. It includes tools to monitor your web presence, ways to track interesting topics and conversations, methods to find people and to get answers, and more.

It revolves around the following seven categories:

1. People Database
2. Keeping in touch and more
3. Conversation
4. Search
5. Collaborating
6. Monitoring and News
7. Self monitoring

I’ll be glad to get your feedback and thoughts about it.

The Israeli Internet Association (ISOC-IL) is holding a Seminar entitled: ‘Social Media in Day to Day life‘ (more details in Heberew and translated to English via Google Translate).

Lecturers:

• Tomer Lichtash @tomerlichtash
• Me (@eyalsela)
• Miriam Schwab (@miriamschwab)
• Gal Mor (@galm)

The Seminar will take Place on July 15th at Tel-Aviv.

Microsoft Excel has a really cool feature that allows you to import data directly from a website. That feature is called “web query” and you can use it to integrate live information into your spreadsheets or just look at data and analyze it in a different way than it was originally presented on the website.

In this post we’ll learn how to built an excel query in a couple of clicks. As an example, I’ve created a single spreadsheet with the top 1,000 twitters (based on data from Twitterholic), which you can download.

Create an excel web query

1. Open a new Excel workbook.
2. Open a website and Select with your mouse the data to import. Copy it, and paste into the workbook.
3. At the lower right end of the pasted area you will see the “Paste Options” button, which looks like that . Click it and choose “Create Refreshable Web Query”.
4. A new window will open, called “New Web Query” (see image below) . Once it is done loading, little yellow boxes with an arrow inside them will show up. Click the arrow next to the data you which to import.


New Web Query window

Continue reading “Another Thing You Didn’t Know About Excel: Integrate Online data Into Your Spreadsheets”»

A few days ago, 38 information security experts submitted a public letter to Google, asking it to make Gmail more secure. More specifically, they’ve asked Google “[to] protect users’ communications from theft and snooping by enabling industry standard transport encryption technology (HTTPS) for Google Mail, Docs, and Calendar.”

Google responded saying it is “looking into whether it would make sense to turn on HTTPS as the default for all Gmail users”

If you don’t want to wait for Google to take the decision you can change the connection type to the more secure one (HTTPS) by yourself.

Change the connection type to HTTPS

To use always HTTPS connection in Gmail, do as follow:

1. Click ’Settings‘ at the top of any Gmail page.
2. Set ‘Browser Connection‘ to ‘Always use https‘ (see image below)
3. Click ’Save Changes.’

choose ‘always use https‘

Continue reading “Make Gmail More Secure By Setting It to Use HTTPS Connection”»

Bit.ly, the great URL shortening services, has just released an upgrade to its Bookmarklet.

Features of the new version

• Tweet without leaving the page – Tweet directly from the bit.ly sidebar without leaving the page you are 
• Easily share on other platforms – use the direct links to share the page via email, Gmail, or Facebook.
• Clicks Summary - see a summary of the clicks the page has received (both created by you and the total number of clicks).
• Real time conversations report - see what people are Tweeting and Friendfeeding (?) about the page (updates in real time).

Continue reading “New Bit.ly Bookmarklet Released”»

Numerous Collaboration tools and online storage applications offer a variety of collaboration abilities. Online collaborated editing, synchronization across computers, multiple file sharing , and on-the-spot windows and document sharing are just some of them. The following review will help you know and choose the right collaboration tools for your needs.

This is an excerpt of a guest post I wrote on ReadWriteWeb (by now it got more the 210 tweets). To read the full post visit the online collaboration tools guide.