Archive for: articles
I have spent a long time lately trying to find unique tools that will help me simplify certain tasks in my day to day activity. I have put together a list of 15 web apps that have really help me to save time online. All these applications are different markets but they all have one thing in common, they are cool, new and very useful!
Driver-Generated Live Maps and Real-Time Road Information. Driving with waze mobile client lets users passively and actively share real time data and receive the optimal route to their destination.
Spacky is a free keyword research tool. Spacky lets the user type in any keywords and then lets them know search volumes in Google, Yahoo and Microsoft.
Curculator is a very simple currency converter and calculator that has been design to save users time. The currency converter uses daily mid-market rates from various trusted sources. All rates are refreshed daily. However, I would really like to see them announce their source for the financial information
Itumz is a powerful web application that lets you make lists, access them from any web browser, and share them with your friends and the world. The rich user interface is simple to use and makes it easy to create to-do or task lists.
To-do’s are too simple, calendars are overly complex, sometimes you just need to be reminded. Superminder is a micro-application that will make sure you don’t forget.
Springo is a visual search engine like no other. Currently Springo lists some of the main search results but is still yet to get very detailed.
Tatango, the ad-supported group SMS service. The service is dead simple to use, as it should be. I made the jump from accountless bum to en masse messaging mogul in all of about 2 minutes.
Amplify is a service for sharing clips from articles, blog posts or anything else you read on the web with your friends on Twitter.
Topsy is a search engine powered by tweets. Topsy sees the Internet as a stream of conversations. Topsy treats people differently from the webpages they create and the things they say.
Create your own website with ease. It’s fast and it’s free! You can have your own website in less than ten minutes and begin using it right away!
Snipi uses drag and drop technology that will change the way you browse, organize, shop, share, and discover the Internet.
Charts.fm is the ultimate tool to create your personal music charts by (re)mixing the charts of more than 2650 radiostations.
FeedMingle makes lives simpler for web designers/developers, feed readers, bloggers, or just anyone who wants to merge two or more RSS / Atom feeds into one. It mixes all the feeds provided and creates one RSS feed, Atom feed, JSON feed, and a html widget to simply paste into your website or blog.
Fotopedia is breathing new life into photos by building a photo encyclopedia that lets photographers and photo enthusiasts collaborate and enrich images to be useful for the whole world wide web.
Twitcaps is a directory of images inside twitter messages by arranging into list that refreshes as new images are tweeted. Twitcaps is a great stream of twitter images and you can even see which are the newest and most popular.
For the last two years we have been developing RouteNote at Insomnia Media, and in that time have been closely keeping an eye on digital music news and where the shift is going. I thought I would write a quick post and let everyone know my favourite digital music blogs to follow.
Hypebot – Hypebot is written by Bruce Houghton and is a daily report on the last news in the digital music space. Bruce is also the founder and president of Skyline Music (booking agency) and Skyline Consultancy in which he is a music and technology consultant to many music startups.
Digital Music News – Digital Music News is the news and information authority for music industry and technology executives. Digital Music News is founded and edited by Paul Resnikoff. Paul writes daily posts on Digital Music News and also send out a dialy newsletter to industry executives called the Daily Snapshot.
Billboard.biz – Billboard.biz is the digital music arm of the Billboard website. Billboard.biz discusses digital music news with normally at least 10 articles per day. Articles on Billboard.biz don’t just come straight from the USA they as encompass International digital music news, so that you get the full picture.
Digital Audio Insider – Digital Audio Insider is written by David Harrell, who writes digital music news from an artists perspective. David is in a band based in the UK and they use all kinds of different digital music stores and partners to sell/stream their music, and David’s writings are a great insight into what the average artist is thinking and what they are looking for.
Coolfer – Glenn Peoples has worked in the music industry for over eight years and founded Coolfer.com while working and living in New York City. Coolfer was a total ad free blog which is pretty unheard of these days. A week or so ago Glenn announced on his site that he would stop writing because he was offered a new job over at Billboard.biz asSenior Editorial Analyst, so you can now read his work over there.
Today we have added a new feature on Crenk that we hope will help many other blogs promote their great content. This new feautre is called Community News. The Community News section can be found in our sidebar and it is basically a submission process that lets any user advise us of a great blog post.
The articles that will be shown in our Community News section will be related to startups and will either be great start lists or reviews. We hope that by adding links into our Community News section other sites will get some great promotion and traffic, while at the same time receive a linkback from our site.
Submissions to the Community News section is completely free and only takes a minute to submit. So please feel free to help us promote some of the best content on the web.
Google Reader has for a long time been my RSS reader of choice. The design has been simple, easy to use, lots of customisation options, ability to group and more.
Last week Google released a new version of Google Reader and I thought I would take a little time and review it for everyone.
(old)
(new)
Key changes include collapsible navigation, updated look and feel, friends get promoted and more bundle feeds.
Friends get promoted
Shared items have grown up and gotten their own section in the navigation pane. You can collapse this entire section and use the title to see everything your friends have shared, or leave it open to track friends with shared items. (Don’t forget that you can add new friends in “Sharing settings“.)
More bundled feeds!
Previously Google has some default bundles that you could subscribe too, in a variety of areas. Previously this was very limited and there were only about 10 areas. Now they have added huge amounts of bundle feeds for pretty much every major niche. If you go to “Browse for stuff” then you can see bundles.
Collapsible Navigation
Each section of the navigation pane now has its own options menu and minimize/maximize controls. You can collapse each major section of navigation down to one line and focus on only the things you choose to use.
Updated look and feel
The look and feel has changed a lot in this new version of Google Reader. I personally would have liked it if there was an option to return to the old version or at least have a variety of versions. The new version is very neutral, with white and a very light blue being the main colours. However, I find post a lot harder to read in this new version. Recently Gmail received a variety of themes in which users could choose from, I really hope this isn’t too long in coming to Google Reader.
Overall
Overall the changes to Google Reader were needed, except in the case of changing the colour scheme. I think the colour scheme changes are definitely a step backwards, but this can be changed when hopefully they release a themes range to choose from.
Blogs.com owned by Sixapart has launched a new blog directory. The blog directory is very similar to Blogged.com, providing news from the blogosphere for different sectors with an attached blog directory.
Blogs.com has been a great success from launch and has some great traffic already to the site. However, when I look closer at the site it seems they it is very basic and isn’t providing too much insights, so why such high traffic numbers. For one it is very hard to get your content shown on their, so doesn’t show true news from the blogosphere, just selected information. Additionally, I have submitted Crenk three times to their direct and I don’t even think they have referenced my site yet!
The design itself is very limiting and only allows them to show a certain amount of information on every page. Additionally, when it comes to finding more interesting sites in a particular niche, I think this just doesn’t happen at all. It is hard to find their directory and they don’t seem to want to show information from various blogs, just stick to the top blogs that everyone has already heard of.
Where do you head to find technology company information? Currently, there are a lot of technology blogs that provide company directories, but I think there are two key players that stand out in this sector and I’m sure their pageviews will sore in the coming months and years. Those two players have to be Crunchbase and Tradevibes.
Crunchbase is the company directory from the superblog Techcrunch. Crunchbase is build on a wiki type system and instead of just writing about companies and collect data, Michael Arrington thought it would be a good idea to actually put it all together and make some more money from it. Crunchbase has a great look about it and it brings together information from some of the most well-known companies. On Crunchbase you can find descriptions of the company, funding information, location and telephone numbers, competitors and staffing information. I would like Crunchbase to find new ways to make money apart from advertising, like a highlighted company feature.
Tradevibes has a bit of a different layout, but essentially it is the same concept with the type of wiki development. Tradevibes provide a similar set of information as Crunchbase but it also has additional features, such as a fantasy exchange game, voting system on companies, and forums. The design on Tradevibes is actually a bit cluttered and there seems to be a lot of products that have simply just been put together to add features, instead of developing something in house that matches the site. For example, the job board in the left column from SimplyHired.
Both of these companies are leading the way in this niche, however there still seems to be a lot of issues in terms of design and integrating information that is actually needed, without information overload. It would also be nice to see integration with several technology blogs to provide news about each of the companies in the database, but so far even this seems to be limited.
WebHostingRating.com is a new host rating site where they are trying to build the biggest searchable web hosting directory featuring complete information on all web hosting providers, all their web hosting plans, promotional and discount coupons, and unedited reviews by real customers.
From what I can tell this service is built on a Wordpress platform which incorporates a review feature, allowing users to find the right provider and package to suite their needs.
Webhostingrating.com also have other sections on the site, such as a directory, web hosting awards and web hosting tutorials. The articles section is basically their blog in which they discuss everything web hosting. The site itself is brilliantly design and I can see this type of directory really taking off.
Since the site is relatively new, they have only review 4 key web hosting companies at present, but make sure you keep and eye out for more coming in the future. The hosting companies they have reviewed are all Unix hosting, but they have other categories that I’m sure will develop over time, such as Windows hosting, reseller hosting, VPS hosting, dedicated hosting, collection hosting and managed hosting.
While offering some good reviews on trusted hosting companies, they are also writing their own corporate blog, which discusses everything from the world of web hosting. Currently, they seem to have approximately 100 articles in a variety of categories. These categories range from domain hosting to ecommerce to scripting. All the articles seem to be of good length and are very helpful. It would also have been nice to see them add a few pictures in the posts to mix up just the plain text. Normally, a site with the quality of articles they have would grow in the blogosphere, but add in the reviews section and you have a great site in the makings.
Anyways, make sure you head over to Webhostingrating.com and I’m sure they can help you find the right hosting package to meet your needs.
