Ideas from Mark Stout

The concepts in this week's Family Tech are likely already known to readers of this blog.  If family members though ask how do you keep up with all the news you do, you might refer them to this column.  It is all about using Google Alerts, RSS feeds and Twitter to find the information we need for our business and personal lives.

Have you followed the story of LisaTickledPink? In his podcast "This Week in Technology" on March 7 , Leo LaPorte told the story of how Conan O'Brian chose one Twitter user with three followers and asked all his followers to do the same.  Getting a bit silly, Leo and his panel for the show decided it would be a great idea to do the same. Tasking Kevin Rose of Digg, a panelist that day, to find someone, Kevin searched Twitter for "I hate technology" and discovered Lisa Etheridge of Auckland, New Zealand.  Lisa had only two users and three twits, one being "I hate technology".  Leo said come April 3 he would chose one of Lisa's followers and give them an iPad and within minutes she had over 2000 followers.  She now has over 26,000. Almost immediately, Leo started feeling unease at what they'd done.  It also occurred to them that the default setting a new Twitter user like Lisa probably had still turned on was to receive a new e-mail for e...

  My Family Tech column this week was about the choices we have in browsers.  I mentioned to my readers that I love Google Chrome and promised a blog post outlining my favorite extensions. I moved to Google Chrome full time a few months ago.  Now that the latest release supports extensions, and there are many useful extensions out there, I can fully recommend Google Chrome for most people. With web access most people's number one use of a computer, your browser is a big deal.  Changing it is akin to a sales company moving their CRM from Seibel to Salesforce, or a corporation converting their financials to SAP.  Of course, it is safer for browsers.  You can, and should, have multiple browsers on your PC.  While I use Chrome primarily, I also have Internet Explorer 8 which I use for one mis-guided web site that seems to work only with IE.  And I keep Firefox, my long time favorite, around too. I thought I'd review some of the extensions I've ...

Yesterday, Phil Libin, Evernote's CEO, pledged to answer all questions submitted on Twitter about Evernote, over a two hour period. I made a PDF file of all the answers , stored of course, in an Evernote Public Notebook.

I have created  a public Twitter list of Evernote users .  If you would like to be on it, please leave me a comment here and I'll add you. It would be ideal if Evernote created such a list.  I'm dong one myself because a lot of people that follow me, and that I follow, do so because of our common appreciation of Evernote.  Hence the list. If I added you and you are not an Evernote user or interested in Evernote, also let me know. Aside : Twitter Lists is great, but Twitter needs a few things : Show you a list of people you follow or follow you that are not yet on one of your lists Have a way for you to record for yourself why you followed them in the first place The ability to send a Tweet to juse those on a given list Not knowing the latter is why I suspect I've added some people to the list who are not Evernote users.

I've written many times before about Evernote .  I love this program.  It is my brain's memory on steroids.  I have over 6000 notes in it now.  And I keep finding ever more uses for it. While originally written in 2009, this post has been frequently updated. New January 2012:  If you like what I write about Evernote, check out my 136 page e-book,  " Get Productive Fast with Evernote ".  Just $10. Sunday October 11, 2009 I wrote about Evernote in my print column, Family Tech. If you are wondering what is Evernote, and why would I want to use it, start with the column . I promised in that column this post to help new users get efficient fast with Evernote. I thought I'd write a quick plan for someone's first day with Evernote. This is really meant for after you've installed the client to your computer, so this picks up after you've gone to  Evernote's Get Started Page and created an account and downloaded and installed a clien...

My favorite product was featured in a great write-up over the weekend in the New York Times. In an article about Freemium, the concept of giving your service away for free but charging for premium content, Evernote was one of the success stories. I enjoyed this Tweet from an about to be married man. At least he didn't tweet again for sixteen hours. I haven't had a chance to play with it yet, but Google Voice enthusiasts like myself now have a PHP library to play with for their own projects. I have to go fix a broken lawn mower. Why can't you just download a fix?

For the past week, I've used Tweetdeck to catch up on Twitter feeds at the end of the day. I follow only a handful of people so I get more quality then quantity out of Twitter, which is okay by me. Tweetdeck lets me quickly scan my Friends twits, but also quickly see if I have replies or Direct Messages. More useful is the panels I can have for search. I can easily see new Twits from everyone, not just friends on topics of interest. Yesterday, Google Voice stopped working with Gizmo5. Since I use Chad Smith's Google Voice Firefox Add to easily dial numbers from my work's CRM, that was a hassle. I spent the days channeling outgoing work calls to another phone, but I missed being able to use my headphones with Gizmo. There was an active thread on the Google Voice Help Forum , but as the day wore on, no responses suggested Google Employees may not have seen the post and knew of the problem. Finally, I had the bright idea of twitting @googlevoice and also the Twitter addr...