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- Cool Websites and Tools [July 8]
- 20 Tips to Manage Your Online Social Life – Part 2
- Find Cool New People on Twitter With TwitterHIT
- Free Security Suite for Windows: Microsoft Security Essentials
- Make Quick & Professional Looking Videos With Windows Movie Maker (Part One)
- Search Popular RapidShare Files Easily with RapidShare123
| Cool Websites and Tools [July 8] Posted: 08 Jul 2009 04:00 PM PDT
(1) CostOfLiving – Useful online cost of living comparison tool provided by the CNNMoney magazine, it lets you compare living costs of your current location with any other city in the US. Simply select your current location (city/state) from the list, enter your current salary and press "Get Result". Read more: CostOfLiving: Salary & Cost Of Living Comparison Tool (2) Delicious Spy – This application shows the sites people are bookmarking on Delicious in real time. You may save the ones you like on Delicious or share them on Digg and Reddit directly from this site. You can also filter the results by tags and be notified by sound when new bookmarks appears. Read more: Delicious Spy: Real Time Tool For Delicious Users (3) Google Web Elements – Provides a simple way for you to add number of Google services on to your website or blog. You can easily embed Google Docs Spreadsheets, Google News, Google Search, Google Maps and YouTube videos, along with features like social conversations from Google Friend Connect. Google Web Elements are easy to use and can be customized according to your needs, simply choose the features you want, and copy a few lines of code to your website. Read more: Google Web Elements: Embed Google Products To Your Site (4) Kukoo - If you are always looking to reply an email as soon as possible so that the sender doesn't think you are ignoring him, then Kukoo would prove to be a great help to you. It helps you create email reply rules and provides you with an autoresponder email which lets the sender know instantly when he should be expecting a reply from you. Read more: Kukoo: Free Email Autoresponder Service (5) PermaTime – Web service which makes it easy to schedule meeting times across multiple time zones. You no longer have to share the event's time details in a confusing universal time format (e.g. UTC+8) as PermaTime automatically converts the event's time into the local time of each participant. Read more: PermaTime: Easily Schedule Meeting Time Across Time Zones
These are just half of the websites that we discovered in the last couple of days. If you want us to send you daily round-ups of all cool websites we come across, leave your email here. Or follow us via RSS feed. Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section! New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/ Related posts
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| 20 Tips to Manage Your Online Social Life – Part 2 Posted: 08 Jul 2009 02:00 PM PDT
As you can see, those tips are for the “beginner” online socialist. Here are some more to help you become a power user of social media and networking sites. 11. Use Your Mobile for Social UpdatesIf you spend a lot of time with your mobile phone, use applications that interface with multiple networks. Access Flickr via mobile. Use CellSpin to post video, voice, photos, or text to multiple social networks. Chatterous is great to chat with your existing IM buddies, while MobiLuck is a good mobile friend-finder. Check out Hellotxt for updating your status across 40+ networks, and Mobypicture for sharing pictures/audio/video.
12. Engage and ParticipateAre you sharing a lot of content in your blog posts, photos, videos, and bookmarks, but not receiving many comments, ratings or feedback? Sometimes we get so caught up in our 'create/discover-post-share' routine that we forget to listen, view, comment and rate others’ posts. Use your social map visualization to see where your content is landing. That's where you need to spend time. Engage and participate in the community. The more you give, the more you get. 13. Use an AggregatorChoose an aggregator service that supports your favorite networks. Use only one service and make sure your content is not being pushed twice. Avoid spamming your friends! Select from some of the popular aggregator services like Friendfeed, Plaxo Pulse, or Lifestream.fm.
An important consideration is data portability. Some lifestreaming services like Profilactic and Swurl have shut down or are struggling, so choose a service that aims to make all your data portable across services like Chi.mp. 14. Unleash the Power of FeedsRSS Feeds are very powerful. For example, you can get an RSS feed update every time you Digg an article or save a bookmark in Delicious. Flickr provides 3 different feeds for your photostream. All Twitters have a feed. Use feeds in combination with your aggregator services, and in sites like Facebook. Use feeds in widgets in your blog's sidebar. Use them in your HTML email signatures. The possibilities are limited to your imagination! If you are the DIY type and want to get creative with RSS Feeds, use Yahoo Pipes. 15. Create a Portable Online IdentityIf you have signed up with a lot of sites and services, letting people find you on all of them can be a daunting task. Use specialized services like Retaggr or DandyID to create an online identity that is portable and consolidates all your web locations. Your profile can then be easily shared as widgets in blogs, in email signatures, posted to Facebook and more.
16. Merge Your Social MediaYour social media (photos, status, bookmarks, etc.) lies scattered across different websites. It is not easy to share a single URL that encapsulates all your social media together. There are some services that aim to help you do just that.
Cliqset lets you merge all your scattered data and share it with people, applications, or devices. With Chi.mp, you can get your own personal yourownname.mp domain and website for free, and it automatically feeds many of your social interactions to your site. With Gizapage, your contacts can see your social media presence across several networks in a tabbed interface at yourname.gizapage.com. 17. Auto Sync Your ProfileWant to change your profile picture across several networks at once? Atomkeep helps you keep your profiles in sync across 23 social networks as well as cool stuff like keeping your resumes in sync across job sites. 18. Use DashboardsDashboards let you view and update statuses in real-time across multiple networks. Since Twitter is the de-facto real-time service, all dashboard applications are centered around Twitter. TweetDeck and Seesmic Desktop are popular desktop clients that also let you view and update Facebook status feeds.
Peoplebrowsr is a web-based dashboard that provides a column-view of custom groups that combine friends and updates across many services at once. It supports a plethora of other services Facebook, Flickr, LinkedIn, Friendfeed, YouTube, etc. and is also available as a desktop application. 19. Manage Your ReputationSocial Networks are powerful. Whether you are an individual or a business, you should track your reputation by what people are saying about you. The viral nature of social networks can cause reputations to swing very fast. Setup Google Alerts to monitor your brand name, or use MonitorThis to subscribe to a feed of search results from 26 search engines. Keotag lets you search and subscribe to everything in the blogosphere by tags, and it supports several different search engines like Technorati, Digg, Delicious, etc.
Use RSS feeds of Twitter searches to monitor mentions of you or your brand. You can use Facebook Lexicon to monitor what's being written on Facebook Walls. Use BackType to monitor comments around the web, including all comments of specific people who may be intent on tarnishing your reputation. Use Social Mention for real-time search across social media networks and to set up social media alerts. Trendrr gives you automated tracking and reporting for various types of social media. With the help of BoardTracker and BoardReader, you can search forums and discussion boards to see what people are actually saying about your brand. 20. Live the Real Life!Social media and networking can get very addictive. Remind yourself to take adequate breaks from your online social life, and spend time offline with your real-life friends and family. In case you forgot, that's what being social really means! Did you find these tips useful? Do you have any that we missed? Do share with us in the comments! small>Image Credit: єvαиdяσ иαรciмєитσ Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section! New on Twitter ? Now you can follow MakeUseOf on Twitter too. Related posts
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| Find Cool New People on Twitter With TwitterHIT Posted: 08 Jul 2009 12:00 PM PDT
The problem, though, is that Twitter does essentially nothing to help you find interesting people. There was the whole @replies debacle, where Twitter took away the ability to see who your friends are talking to – that was almost a disaster for discovering new people. Even after that was fixed, Twitter made it easy to search for interesting tweets but not as much for interesting people. That’s what TwitterHIT is out there to remedy. TwitterHIT is all about finding new people and new friends on Twitter, by providing some unique search options.
The first thing to do is log in – you use your Twitter account credentials – which always makes me nervous – but in a few hours of using it, TwitterHIT didn’t ever tweet anything or take information I didn’t want it to. It appears, at least for now, trustworthy. It does send one tweet when you follow people (a super-cryptic one at that), but it’s harmless enough, and easy to delete.
Once you’re logged in, you’re brought to the “start” screen (above). On that screen, you get two different boxes – a space for keywords, and one for locations. The keywords are essentially like any other Twitter search, but the location-based search is what makes TwitterHIT great. Let’s say, you want to find people in your city who like to play squash. Type “played squash” or “playing squash” into the keywords, and then your location in the bottom field. All the people on Twitter who are near you will be returned to you, and they are the ones who have tweeted about their squash-playing activities.
TwitterHIT finds the results and presents them in a list on the results page, with usernames, pictures, and latest tweets all on that one page. It returns 20 results, and with an upgraded account – 200. The free account always did me fine, though. Browse the list, and toggle the checkbox next to anyone you want to follow. At the end of the list, click the “Follow These People” button, and TwitterHIT automatically follows them for you. If you want to, you can then repeat the whole process. There are some seriously annoying ads that come up after each “Follow These People” session, but they go away after a few seconds. Also part of TwitterHIT’s upgraded account (which you get either by paying $147 or completing a trial offer through an affiliate like Blockbuster) are several other tools – following back your followers automatically, automatically retweeting things with certain keywords, and the like. These all sound like ingredients for a spammy Twitter account to me, or may come in handy for someone who uses Twitter for business purposes – the free version’s got the one feature I really want to use. TwitterHIT is great for making Twitter a more localized version of itself, and helping to bring you into contact with people you might actually develop a relationship with outside of Twitter. There are more and more people on Twitter every day, and TwitterHIT offers one great way to find the people near you who might actually be relevant to you both on and off Twitter. How do you find interesting people, not just interesting tweets, on Twitter? Don’t forget to share with us in the comments. Image Credit: the trial Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section! New on Twitter ? Now you can follow MakeUseOf on Twitter too. Related posts
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| Free Security Suite for Windows: Microsoft Security Essentials Posted: 08 Jul 2009 10:00 AM PDT
So let's talk about the essentials. An incredibly small installer, clocking in at 5-7 MB depending on the platform, it gives you anti-virus and anti-malware functions, free updates, scan scheduling, all wrapped into an incredibly simple, elegant user interface, that even a 5 year old could manage to use. The interface is separated into 4 tabs:
Detection rates are on par with OneCare, the now discontinued for-pay security application also developed by Microsoft. In a Windows 7 virtual machine, MSE detected 17 out of the 23 malware/viruses, preventing their installation. Rootkits and keyloggers scored the poorest marks with 2/5 and 1/4 recognized. Performance is comparable to other modern security suites, with 40MB of memory used when idle. An additional 3MB is taken when opening the user interface. The full system scan appears to take longer than other products, finishing a 120GB hard drive in 1 hour 32 minutes for a SATA 1.1 hard drive spinning at 5200RPM. Overall, I noticed a visible increase in the system's speed when compared to Kaspersky's Anti-Virus.
Microsoft Security Essentials is currently in beta. The downloads were limited to 75 000 copies – but it is mirrored on many websites and does not require a license key or registration. It does however check to see if the copy of Windows is legitimate. There's nothing wrong with the application itself, the concept behind it screams 'paradox'. It's created by the same people that made Windows. Releasing a security product is essentially admitting that the operating system you market as 'the safest' – is flawed to start with. Otherwise how can you justify its creation? Like O.J. Simpson giving a signed confession. Secondly, it's going to kill revenues for all the other security companies like Symantec and Kaspersky from the home and small business users segment. If the European Commission was worried about Windows Media Player and Internet Explorer, how do you think it will react to this, especially if retailers or even Microsoft bundles it with new computers? I can already imagine the headlines: "Microsoft fined $100 million for making Windows secure". Coupled with a responsible behavior and Windows Defender, Microsoft Security Essentials is the way to go, especially for people on a tighter budget. What do you think about Microsoft Security Essentials? Do you think it's a threat for other security companies? Are you ready to ditch your for-pay Antivirus? Talking about security, you might want to read 10+ Best Firefox Security and Privacy Addons, 10 Free Online Malware and Virus Scanners or articles related to Microsoft. Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section! New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/ Related posts
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| Make Quick & Professional Looking Videos With Windows Movie Maker (Part One) Posted: 08 Jul 2009 08:00 AM PDT
If you are running Windows on your computer, Windows Movie Maker should also be installed by default. Just check your Start Menu to find it. If you can’t find it or if you happen to have uninstalled it for whatever reason, there is a brilliant free portable version which you can run off the computer or a USB stick. For the purposes of this article, I am going to be working off the portable version of Movie Maker, although 99.9% of the portable program is completely identical to the installed program that comes with Windows OS’s. So let’s get started trying to become the next Quentin Tarantino… Then run the portable Movie Maker (MM). When the folder opens, click on “Runonce.exe”. As the name says, you only ever have to click on this file once every session. I’m not sure exactly what this does but it seems to be essential to the running of MM. When you click on the file, this window will pop up :
The last sentence is in German for me because I am running a German language computer. But it will be in your language when you run it. It says “Press a random key”. So just press any key on your keyboard to make this screen go away. The next step is to double-click on “moviemk.exe” which runs and opens the MM program :
To get started on making your video, the first step is to “capture” the video from your camera. So after making sure that your camcorder USB cable is in, go to “Capture from video device” in the left hand bar.
This will pop up a box asking you what you want to call your new video file and where in your computer you would like to store the video footage. Make your selections and then press “Next”.
This is the box that appears next. You have to decide if you want playback quality for your computer or if you plan to watch the footage on a DVD on television. This box also shows you how much space on your computer the movie file will take up as well as the file type (which is stuck on .wmv) and the file speed. After making your decision and clicking next, the next box will ask you if you want to capture the whole tape or just portions of it. If you have used up a whole cassette on the same movie then you can just let MM capture the whole lot. But if you only want to capture part of the tape (perhaps if you have several movies on the same tape and you only want to work on one), choose the second option. When you have made your decision, the capture box will come up. I took this screenshot from Google Images as I couldn’t get the video picture to show in my capture box screenshot. So please don’t think I am a toilet fetishist or something!
Everything here is pretty much self-explanatory. Keep the “Create clips when wizard finishes” option ticked. You can mute speakers if you want to (I don’t). You can also set a time limit on how much video it captures (but I don’t see the point as you can stop it yourself when you have what you need). Before pressing “start capture”, use the controls under the picture to rewind / fast forward to the point you want to start capturing. Then press “Start capture”. You’ll then start to see “video captured” and “size of audio file” start to increase. Make sure you have enough space on your computer to store it all! When you have all the footage captured, press “Stop capture” and then the “Finish” button. The footage will then be broken up into “clips”. This makes it a lot easier to edit the film and also get a general overview of the whole project.
To get started on editing it, highlight all the clips you want in your movie and then drag it to the bottom into the timeline. Everything will then be moved down and you’re ready to begin editing.
That’s all for part one. In part two, I will show you how to edit your footage and also add in some special effects such as adding AVI and WMV movie files as well as music and credits. Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section! New on Twitter ? Now you can follow MakeUseOf on Twitter too. Related posts
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| Search Popular RapidShare Files Easily with RapidShare123 Posted: 08 Jul 2009 06:00 AM PDT
So, we might just have to find other methods of searching for and downloading files like television shows or movies from the interweb. I have been using a website called www.RapidShare.com for a while now to trade files with friends who don't know what FTP is. Now, I found a neat search engine that will let you search what other people are uploading! In the past, I’ve shown you a Rapidshare search engine but this new one is even better. It’s called RapidShare123 and is located at http://www.RapidShare123.com. RapidShare123 collects Rapidshare links from sites, forums, blogs and portals. Don't have something to search for? Come on, all you need to search is a little bit of imagination – and if you don't have any of that, RapidShare123 lists the most recent search terms on their homepage. In the past, we have showed you how to make use of your Rapidshare account with some free Rapidshare tools that you should definitely check out if you haven’t. Enough shameless promotion, let's take a look at how RapidShare123 works.
After browsing over to their website, you will see a big old search box followed by a big blue Find button. That's all there is to it! I decided to type in something that would not bring up copyrighted materials for this article but hey, you can do whatever you want. I tried and I tried but all of my searches kept returning copyrighted information. I won't download the actual file but I will walk you through how it works. I settled down with the search term Simpsons and got a lot of results. Some times RAR files are broken into multiple files. This is denoted by the “part01″ before the file extension. Using this search, I try to stay away from them but your results may vary. I hit the link 7 items down for The Simpsons Season 19 Episode 10.
That took me to another page that returned this information:
It has the actual Rapidshare link as well as its file size. Click the link to start the download. Below, it lists the most recently downloaded files through their service. The site was just recently released so this info should improve over time. Long story short, RapidShare123 is awesome and can be used to kill some time searching for keywords and then watch what you get. It is almost like looking through someone else's files. Do you use a RapidShare search engine? Is yours better? Then, you should definitely share it with us in the comments! Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section! New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/ Related posts
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After buying a new camcorder, I was suddenly thrust into the fascinating world of 
Popular 
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