Hiding behind your Twitter avatar and telling the world how terrible everything is is pretty easy. It’s even funny sometimes. Putting yourself on the line and making something original is really hard work. Which one do you want to be. Which one deserves our respect and attention?
-37 Signals blog, Signal vs. Noise, on critiquing others’ work when you don’t know the contexts (yeah, I didn’t want to print the title).
And this would accurately describe why I don’t use anti-virus and anti-malware software: it doesn’t work. The best protection is to not download files from people you don’t know and don’t click links on sketchy websites. My computer has been virus and malware free for two and a half years thanks to these two simple principles.
The British Government is urging civil servants to utilize Twitter more often. “Publishing tweets, replying to incoming messages and monitoring the account would take less than an hour a day,” the strategy report says. Here is the blog post announcing the release of the strategy report and here is the 20-page Twitter strategy template.
The New York Times has a great article on productivity/organization apps for the iPhone and iPod Touch. I would like to add to this the apps I like. I use Remember the Milk (iPod Touch, mobile on BlackBerry, and web app) for my todo list, Evernote as my second brain (iPod Touch, BlackBerry app, and web app), and GroceryIQ (iPod Touch) for grocery lists.
If you regularly read this site, you know I love WordPress, the open source CMS software that powers this site. I also love hearing about how other (more productive than me) people work, so it was interesting to read this article by the WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg on how he works.
I know I’ve posted this video previously, but Twitter is exploding into mainstream. Several good friends of mine (and a former professor) have recently joined Twitter (within the past week). It is on all of the news shows, on Oprah, and all over the web. Everyday people are hearing about Twitter and they don’t know what it is. Even my parents asked me to explain Twitter. As such, I’m reposting this video from Common Craft, explaining Twitter in Plain English.
While extolling the virtues of using Twitter to update your status (instead of Google Talk/GChat), I discovered this list of government agencies and public servants that use Twitter.
If you don’t know what Twitter is, see the video from Common Craft explaining Twitter in plain English.
Some that communicate information in unique ways include food recalls (care of the FDA), pandemic flu updates (care of the CDC), road condition updates from the Kansas Department of Transportation (for specific metro areas like Kansas City, Topeka, Wichita, and Garden City), National Terror Alert Response Center, and earthquakes and tsunami warnings.
Some big names (and agencies) include the Transportation Security Administration, Department of Homeland Security, NASA, Supreme Court, several states (Colorado, Idaho, Kentucky, Maine, Nebraska, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Utah, and Vermont), the Israeli Consulate, and CSPAN, among many others.
Michelle Murrain, the author of Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology, has an excellent post detailing the considerations nonprofits need to think about when putting video up on their websites. The post is very applicable to governments and most others.
Slashdot links to a BusinessWeek article that introduces open source and reports on companies using open source to save money. Some popular software they list as cost-conscious include Linux (operating system), Apache (server), MySQL (relational database), Firefox (web browser), Xen (virtualization), Pentaho (business intelligence), OpenOffice.org (full office suite), Drupal (content management system), Alfresco (content management system), SugarCRM (customer relationship management), and Asterisk (telephone switch/PBX).
My favorite new web browsing utility is called Shortwave and was created by Shaun Inman.
The idea and implementation is really simple. You use Smart Keywords to search in Firefox and other browsers that you use, but how do you keep all the searches you do in sync? What if you want to use keyword searches for the first time?
Go to the Shortwave page and drag the bookmarklet up to your browser’s bookmark toolbar. If you don’t know what a bookmarklet is, try Wikipedia or this introduction by Matt Cutts.
Then when you want to search on, say, Wikipedia, just click the Shortwave bookmarklet and type w Earth. This Wikipedia article will pop up. Want to search the Internet Movie Database? Click the bookmarklet and type imdb Top Gun.
Shaun added a lot of default searches (Google, Google Maps, Google Images, Amazon, Flickr, YouTube, whois). Even better, you can upload your own search file to a server of your own and customize your search terms. I added a Lifehacker search and some others to my Waves file.
The best part about Shortwave is you can use the same bookmarklet on any browser on any computer you use. You can have the same search terms on your work and home computers, and on your iPhone or iPod Touch (as a webclip).
I emailed Shaun last week with an idea for Shortwave – I hesitated to use his contact form on his site because I hate bugging people through email, but he had closed the comments for posts related to Shortwave. I had an idea to implement site searches with Shortwave, where you could perform a search within the site you are currently browsing on Google. Shaun got back to me, and quickly posted this update to Shortwave implementing the functionality. Now you can search gs Shortwave and find posts on ChrisMLindsey.com with the term Shortwave.
Hopefully you will find Shortwave useful. If you implement any custom searches in your own Wave file, share them in the comments!