le blog de bloogue

Pandora Radio is a web app I discovered through Go2Web20 that determines the type of music you like by playing a song and providing you a “Thumbs Up” or “Thumps Down” button and further matches your interest the more you listen.

This is certainly an app that you would use personally though it could certainly be a nice tool to use while working! I didn’t see any options for privacy but do I care if people know what music I like? Not at all, in fact I encourage people to see what great taste I have in music!

The site has a very simple, easy to use interface. Music starts playing immediately upon arrival, even before signing up for an account. If someone decides to sign up, the process is very easy–they only ask a few questions and off you go, deciding what you like to listen to!

Upon further discovery, I noticed that Pandora also has an App for the iPod/iPhone that utilizes the Internet to download the music. A few other options with Pandora is to share what you are currently listening to on Facebook, Twitter, email, and also to create a specialized “station” to send to a friend.

Google has a variety of web tools. Included in the long list of tools, Google has further detailed ways of searching and different ways of communicating.

One that caught my eye was Google Health. I was able to easily enter and store my health statistics, link up with a pharmacy that I purchase my medication through, store my insurance information, download my medical records–to name a few.

The site was mobile friendly. This would come in handy if you were without your medical card. Also if you needed to know how many milligrams of whatever pill you were taking.

Since this is a private sort of tool, it’s limited to personal use and obviously there were no examples to see how other people are using it.

Another Google tool available that I haven’t tried until recently is Google Desktop. While this isn’t specifically a Web tool, it works with your web browser to configure Google Desktop’s settings and view search results.

Google Desktop is a utility installed on your computer. You can add “gadgets”, much like what other OS’s and similar products call “widgets”. These range from mini applications that display computer usage, weather, random quotes, photos–just about anything you can think of.

Google Desktop is very easy to install. Simply download a single executable file, launch it, and then follow the easy to answer steps to install the software. After its installed, gadgets are easy to search for and add or remove.

I can see it having its place at home and at work if used–depending on what gadget you may be interested in. Also the file search can be useful in both a professional and private setting.

The application may make some people nervous, seeing their file search results shown within google.com but everything is being integrated with the site–not actually sent to Google’s servers so that content is served locally from the PC.

I’m going to take a look at a couple of web tools in the Multimedia category: Posterous and Twitpic. I like these two sites as you can share photos quickly from your mobile phone.

Both sites are easy to use. My iPhone is capable of sending an email which is all it takes to post on either site. Posterous capacity is a little greater with being able to upload about any type of file such as photos, video, music, or a Word document while Twitpic posts just photos. Additionally, Posterous has an iPhone app.

As far as privacy goes, with Posterous, you can allow or disallow users to comment on your posts and/or password protect your posts. With Twitpic, you can keep your posts out of the public timeline and not allow others to tag your photos. I don’t have a lot of privacy concerns but it’s nice to have the options available should I later decide the need to hide certain posts from the public eye.

Twitpic and Posterous seems to be mostly used by individuals but is certainly not limited to only them. Businesses could utilize it to post coupons to their Twitter account or some other publicity or promotion. Me, I would just use it to post photos of things I find interesting enough to share with friends and family.

This week we’re exploring the use of photos on the Internet. We are to explore two web tools related to photos and then compare and contrast the tools. I tried a few of the suggested tools, but found them to be clunky and not really something I would use on a regular basis. I already use Flickr extensively which is a Yahoo! product and would like to compare to something similar such as Picasa which is a Google product. I’ve used Picasa very little throughout the last couple years but would like to know more about it.

Flickr and Picasa both have the same objective: to get your photos online to share with friends and family or the entire Internet if you wish. You can create albums, tag photos with words or geographic coordinates, order prints, add fellow users as friends or family, and several more options.

Several users on both sites use their product for personal and professional reasons. Photographers may use it to advertise their portfolio. Landscape designers may use it to show off examples of work they’ve done. A new family may use it to share photos of their newborn to the rest of their family and allow friends and family to order their own prints—whether they decide to order a 4×6 or even a poster.

My current use of Flickr is to post photos from vacations and everyday life including uploading photos from my iPhone. Many family members and friends like to drop in now and then to see what my family and I are up to. I also get contacted by people all over the world that may have questions about a photo I took on vacation to get more information about it as they’re planning on visiting the same place.

Should I choose to, I can set privacy levels high on everything I upload or on individual photos. I can set limitations on photos to only be viewable by friends, family, or to display to everyone.

If finances are tight, I’d go with Picasa. As a “free user” you’ll get 1GB of storage on Picasa and with Flickr, you can upload 2 videos and 100MB worth of photos uploaded each calendar month. Adding on extra storage will cost you. Picasa offers 20GB total for $5/year and have other annual plans for bigger sizes. With Flickr Pro, you’ll have unlimited storage for $25/year – and be able to upload up to 2GB/month, which would be a challenge for me.

I found both tools to be fairly comparable. I still prefer Flickr over Picasa. I believe they’re both very good tools but I just am used to the interface for Flickr and don’t find Picasa any easier to use as a whole.

http://picasaweb.google.com/bradley.johnston/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/trypnotic/

I’ve seen the Delicious logo on several sites I’ve browsed to over the last several years but never looked into what it was or did, nor did I have any friends that talked with me about it. Now that I’ve given the Social Bookmarking site a chance, I can see that it can be a useful tool that has given new life to the run of the mill bookmark that we only used to be able to save on our local computers.

Delicious was easy to set up and use from the beginning. Since I already had a Yahoo account, it was able to use those credentials and create a Delicious account from that information.

Once I got on the site and created a few bookmarks, I browsed through a few of the other users on the site and saw how they had tagged the same site that I also bookmarked.

Delicious would be useful in a business environment or for personal use. Bookmarks are part of everyday life for everyone that uses a computer, both personally and professionally. Delicious allows you to have all bookmarks in one place instead of saved statically in one location. This is especially helpful if you use multiple computers on a daily basis.

There are several privacy settings that you can adjust to your liking. By default, all bookmarks are public. You can adjust each link’s setting on whether or not you want everyone or just maybe your friends to see it. You can also manage how people can view your friends or any networks you may be in.

This week we’re exploring the various social networking web tools available. I chose a location aware app called Google Latitude. With this app, I can see my friends’ locations, status messages and share mine with them on my mobile phone or on the Internet.

Why did I choose this app? A couple of reasons. I’ve always been fond of Google’s products over the last decade, plus or minus a few years. I also recently received a Google Latitude invite from a friend that also led to my decision to use this app.

Google Latitude was easy to start using with little or no instruction. If anyone wanted more information, Google provided several highlighted features and a video. It also helped that I had pending invites from two friends to see how the app interacted with other users. One of the invites was over a year old — whoops.

In a nutshell, this tool makes it easy to find your friends. You can control your privacy settings on whether you want to share your location at all, set it manually, or just to temporarily hide yourself from the world.

I can see this being a tool being used mostly outside of the workplace. However, it could be a useful tool for businesses to track employee location. Now whether or not that’s legal, I couldn’t tell you! Personally, it saves a lot of trouble for two friends trying to find each other. Instead of trying to explain to a friend of where you’re at, they can simply look you up with the help of this app and get detailed directions on how to get to where you are — or at least to the same city. See a screenshot below from my iPhone to see how the app looks.

http://www.google.com/mobile/latitude/

Google Latitude, originally uploaded by trypnotic.

Through the Go2Web20 web site, I chose a web application known as Tweepler. Tweepler describes itself as a new way to organize the people that follow you on Twitter.

For those that aren’t familiar with Twitter, Twitter is a social networking application where you can follow people or businesses and they may follow you back. By following someone, you are enabling yourself to view their “tweets” which are composed of short messages, 140 characters or less. Twitter users can either post their tweets either publically or privately — of which you’ll need authorization to view their posts.

Depending on how many people you know or how interesting you are will impact how many people will start following you. Tweepler helps you manage those people. Once someone starts following you, you can choose to follow them back in order to view their tweets or you can ignore them and archive them out of your way.

Tweepler provides a ten minute video on their web site that does a good job of helping people make the best use of their product.

Again, this is another tool that can be used both professionally or personally as Twitter can be used in the same way. Many businesses use Twitter to reach out to their users and offer information about their products and even coupons. A business could utilize this tool to keep track of competetors and ward off spammers just as a private user could.

My assignment this week is to locate two Web 2.0 tools and report my findings. We are to choose from storage, collaboration, content, management, aggregation, and organization categories.

I crossed the storage category off my list as I already use Flickr.

Collaboration was crossed off the list as Brandy and I have already been playing around with Google Wave to plan our eastern Mediterranean trip coming up in June.

The next category up to bat was content. After perusing the list of suggested Web 2.0 tools provided and deciding that none of them looked familiar, I chose a site called called “fwix”. Fwix was described as providing the most relevant and trendy information and media in your local area. Among categories they listed included photos, videos, events, articles, reviews, and music.

One of the first things I did was sign up for the free service after noticing that Minneapolis/St Paul was in fact a city that I could select. I was happy to see that it would connect with my Facebook account and allow me to skip over the registration process.

After signing up, I was presented with content immediately. Several recent stories, top stories, sports, weather, and business to name a few. I’m able to modify the content by selecting “Home” at the top of the page and choosing from several of suggested topics or general categories. I can also change my location, say if I were to travel often or want to keep in touch with your hometown.

I can see this tool to be of much use both professionally and personally. Professionally, I could add topics that had to do with the airlines. Personally, I could add categories that talk about my local interests such as restaurant reviews.

As most of you may or may not know, I’m enrolled at North Hennepin Community College and taking a course in Web Tools. One of our assignments is to create an ePortfolio and share our experiences about it. The following are questions our instructor asked us to answer on our blog:

• Which E Portfolio did you choose? How easy was it to use?
I chose eFolioMinnesota. It wasn’t as user friendly as I expected but after reading some of the help sections, things became more clear.
• What might you use an online portfolio for? Do you think you could use it professionally or personally?
An ePortfolio can be used both for professional and personal reasons. Perhaps you want to keep your family updated on the birth of a new child or the progress of a hobby of yours. Professionally, you could post your resume or a research paper that you created.
• What do you want your E Portfolio to say about you?
I plan to create a profile that has a professional tone to it. Something that highlights my career and educational history along with my achievements and skill set. While many people use Twitter, Facebook, or their own blog to create a web presence, it’s likely to be a bad idea to share that with potential employers — depending on the content you produce.

Feel free to see my progress:
http://bradjohnston.v2efoliomn.mnscu.edu/

To be continued …

So, I paid my Sears card three days late this month. This is probably the first or second time ever since I got the card. I scheduled the payment last night for a next day payment and have so far, received about four phone calls from them today. During the most recent encounter, the woman on the phone demands to know when I made the payment, for how much, scheduled for when, etc. Well, I explain to her that I don’t have the details but she keeps pressing it.

ME: Perhaps if you checked to see I submitted a payment through your computer system, you’d save everyone a lot of grief.
SEARS: Sir, it takes two days to post.
ME: Your web site told me last night that it would post the next day. Maybe you should upgrade your computer system.
SEARS: Maybe you should upgrade YOUR computer.

Sigh… Stay in school, kids.