I took this video of Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, at a GarageGeeks meetup. The image is bad but the sound is good. Enjoy.

Jimmy Wales speaks at GarageGeeks – October 2009 from Eyal Sela on Vimeo.

This is a guest post by Ann Smarty, a social media and search blogger and online entrepreneur.

Real-time search is the latest achievement of web 2.0. Never before was it so easy to speak to the whole world and to be instantly heard. This post overviews the 4 most popular search engines capable of generating fresh results.

It is hard to compare them to choose the best one: there are no winners in this game. They all have some benefits and should be used in particular cases:

Real-time search engine Data source How old are the results? Most important benefit
Twitter Twitter discussions Instant The huge service popularity and thus a large index of data
Facebook Facebook discussions Instant The huge service popularity and thus a large index of data
Google Google web index One hour old Plenty of search opportunities
Friendfeed Most social networks + all user-added feeds Instant Multiple data sources combined

…Read the rest of How to Search the Web Real-Time » ‎ ‎

Google Reader logoGoogle reader is probably the best RSS reader available today. Here are some tips and practices for power users (hopefully, you) to help you better manage your RSS reading time and leverage it, tweak Google Reader to use first and second level categorization, and optimize you RSS subscription list.

Use folders to prioritize your reading

At a certain point you’ve probably realize that it is just not possible to read all of the new items you get. One possible solution is to use folders to categorize your feeds. Once you categorized all your feeds, you can read prioritize your reading by urgency level.

For example, I use a folder called ‘Immediate‘ where I put feeds that I want to read the moment they publish something new because it is important for me to know about them as soon as possible. These could be work related or new trends, usually things that if no read within day or two (sometimes less), they became irrelevant.

Other folders I use are ‘friends‘, ‘Podcasts‘, ‘Premier Blogs‘, and some more. I also use a ‘must read‘ folder for things that I want to read sometime, but it doesn’t really matter when (such as family blogs or new WordPress plugins).

Use folders to prioritize your reading

…Read the rest of Google Reader Tips and Practices for Power Users » ‎ ‎

Aardvark LogoI’ve recently added a new tool to my information searching arsenal – Aardvark. I use Google, Google Reader, Twitter, my chat friends and other tools to find information. But Aardvark fills a gap these tools leave open.

Aard what?

At the end point (your side, as a user) all that Aardvark does is take a question you submit, find someone who can answer it and send you back the answer. It does that by searching for a user that is online and has knowledge in the field of the question you asked (and preferably, is from your network on Aardvark). Than it sends him or her question. The answer is sent right back to you, usually within few minuets. Often, you get more then one answers from several different people.

If you are not satisfied with the answer you got, you can easily resubmit it for other people to answer it or asked the ones that already did to elaborate.

…Read the rest of Aardvark – Get High Quality Answers in Real Time from Real People » ‎ ‎

information processing methodsEvery day we read, hear, and see tens of web pages if not more. How do you process the useful and interesting information you find online? Do you send it to yourself via email? Do you star it in Google Reader or add tags? Or maybe you just rely on the good old brain to retrieve the right information at the right time?

To participate, write in the comments what are your online information processing methods.

Next month I’ll post a summary of all the answers.

image by kevindooley

August 10th, 2009Facebook Acquired Friendfeed

friendfeed facebookFacebook has just announced it has acuired Frindfeed.  Frindfedd says in thir blog that:

FriendFeed.com will continue to operate normally for the time being. We’re still figuring out our longer-term plans for the product with the Facebook team. As usual, we will communicate openly about our plans as they develop — keep an eye on the FriendFeed News group for updates.

Facebook’s offical press realse:

PALO ALTO, Calif. — August 10, 2009 — Facebook today announced that it has agreed to acquire FriendFeed, the innovative service for sharing online. As part of the agreement, all FriendFeed employees will join Facebook and FriendFeed’s four founders will hold senior roles on Facebook’s engineering and product teams.

“Facebook and FriendFeed share a common vision of giving people tools to share and connect with their friends,” said Bret Taylor, a FriendFeed co-founder and, previously, the group product manager who launched Google Maps. “We can’t wait to join the team and bring many of the innovations we’ve developed at FriendFeed to Facebook’s 250 million users around the world.”

“As we spent time with Mark and his leadership team, we were impressed by the open, creative culture they’ve built and their desire to have us contribute to it,” said Paul Buchheit, another FriendFeed co-founders. Buchheit, the Google engineer behind Gmail and the originator of Google’s “Don’t be evil” motto, added, “It was immediately obvious to us how passionate Facebook’s engineers are about creating simple, ground-breaking ways for people to share, and we are extremely excited to join such a like-minded group.”

Taylor and Buchheit founded FriendFeed along with Jim Norris and Sanjeev Singh in October 2007 after all four played key roles at Google for products like Gmail and Google Maps. At FriendFeed, they’ve brought together a world-class team of engineers and designers.

“Since I first tried FriendFeed, I’ve admired their team for creating such a simple and elegant service for people to share information,” said Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook founder and CEO. “As this shows, our culture continues to make Facebook a place where the best engineers come to build things quickly that lots of people will use.”

FriendFeed is based in Mountain View, Calif. and has 12 employees. FriendFeed.com will continue to operate normally for the time being as the teams determine the longer term plans for the product.

Financial terms of the acquisition were not released.

Follow the conversation real time

Some more resources

you migt alos whant to learn how to Make Yourself Easier To Find On Facebook by Adding an Alternate Name And IM Nicknames.

excel2007 Excel Secrets Discovered – 6 Steps For Perfect PrintingDo you get tens of pages out, with some of the columns standing by themselves in an unknown page every time you print out an Excel worksheet? Tired of wasting paper time and time again?

It’s time to get things straight. Let’s see how to print an Excel sheet the right way.

This is an excerpt of a post I wrote on MakeUseOf. To read the full post visit Excel Secrets Discovered – 6 Steps For Perfect Printing.

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.

Status_Search_logo

Social networks and social media tools let you find and communicate with people all over the world, even if you’ve never met or known them before. But sometimes, all you really need is the opinion, advice or support of the people closest to us. Status Search answers that need by letting you search your friends’ social status updates.

Recently launched in beta, Status Search is a little private search engine. It connects to your Facebook and Twitter accounts (no need to give away any passwords) and then lets you search the status updates of the people you follow, and also the photos, links and videos of your Facebook friends.

Can’t I just use Google?

If you think about it, many of your quests for information would be better answered, and sometimes can only be answered, by people you know or those who are in your close surroundings. Also, you have much better information about the reliability of these people and it is easier to approach them.

Let’s think of some realistic examples. It’s Saturday morning and you want to go with someone to the sea. Just type in ’sea’ and you’ll find all the people who’ve written something about it – some are probably about to go there…

…Read the rest of Status Search – Search within Your Friends’ Status Updates » ‎ ‎

karma 5 Recommended Bookmarklets To Simplify Tedious Tasksbookmarklet is a piece of code saved as a bookmark. When you click it, instead of just taking you to a bookmarked website, it performs an action (which may include taking you to another website, but does not have to do that). Here are 5 recommended bookmarklets to boost your productivity by helping you instantly subscribe to, read, tweet, share and translate webpages.

This is an excerpt of a post I wrote on MakeUseOf. To read the full post visit 5 Recommended Bookmarklets To Simplify Tedious Tasks.

Image credit: vramak

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