Building 43 for People Like Us

building43-logo“For people who are passionate about the Internet” — that’s the idea behind Building 43, Robert Scoble‘s new website. Scoble is a highly visible web personality who has in the past been a Microsoft Evangelist and has worked for, the magazine, Fast Company making videos, though he’s probably most famous for his own blog, Scobelizer and as a prolific poster on FriendFeed and Twitter.

Simply, Building43 aims to help businesses make the transition from the old web of static pages and brochureware to the interactive kinds of sites that newer technology has made possible — Scoble calls this the 2010 web, or call it Web 3.0.

What the site, launched last week seems to offer are “proof points” from those organizations out there who have already changed their businesses by using these new interactive techniques.

A good example of this kind of case study is the Twittering hotel manager, Kelly Nelson, who has incorporated Twitter into her customer service repertoire for the Palo Alto Four Seasons Hotel.

Or discussions with those folks who are making the social networking and interactive tools the next generation sites use, like Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook or Google’s Marissa Mayer, VP of search product and user experience.   Amongst her advice, don’t build your homesite using Flash.

Building 43 looks like it’s going to be a great site for those of us who want to move along the adoption of the technology that lets businesses really talk with their customers.

The name?  Scoble says it because coincidentally Microsoft and Google both have Building 43s.  Me?  I think the entire growth of the Internet was planned at Area 51.

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Work on your masterskill — typing

typeweb_logoI’m old enough that when I was a kid learning to type meant you either wanted to be a secretary or a reporter. I took typing in High School, without enthusiasm, figuring that someday I’d have someone to type for me.

As I started to write more, I did eventually learn to hunt and peck on a manual portable typewriter seeing myself as an apprentice Hemingway.  Then something happened.  Sometime soon after 1981 when IBM introduced the PC, suddenly being able to type became a masterskill.   After a PC landed on my desk I realized I better learn to touch type.  I swung with Mavis Beacon, commercial typing tutor software that been available since 1987, and somewhat learned to use the full keyboard.

Now, TypingWeb allows you to learn typing and practice your typing skills,  online, and for free.   After free registration, you can begin your typing skill-building with exercises and visual cues.

typing_screen

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Need a quote to make a point? Try QuotesDaddy

quotesdaddy-logo

A pithy quote is often the best way to make a point. 

Using QuotesDaddy, a free website service, you can search for the ideal quote and then share it, copy it or embed it in a web page.

Try it, it’s fun, useful and free. QuotesDaddy.com

 

 

Paying for it — products I’ll spend money on

Devil inside
Image by Funky64 (www.lucarossato.com) via Flickr

The idea of paying for stuff can be difficult — my father firmly believed that there was one thing real men never did — pay for parking.  He was from NYC, when we went there for visits, he was willing to park the car in another borough (or probably another state) and take the subway to our hotel before he would be exposed to the embarrassment of being seen “paying for parking”.

On this site, I encourage the use of free web services, freeware and open source software as substitutes for much commercial software, but sometimes I pay for it — I thought it might be interesting to look at what services for which I’m willing to pay and how I feel about them.  Let’s call this disclosure.

Evernote - I pay $5 a month for unlimited bandwidth and storage.  Evernote is my primary means of syncing information between computers and storing information.  The service is free for a generous amount of storage and bandwidth.

Audible - Audible is a service that allows you to download “audible”, get it, books.  They have most bestsellers and a pretty good selection of classics, history, bios, business and meditation books.  Since recorded books themselves tend to almost as pricey as their paper counterparts, I subscribe for $22.95 per month, I can download two books.  Perfect for dog and baby walking, downloaded to my iPod.

Tivo - I have two Tivos, for timeshifting Letterman and old movies, for one I pay $12 a month for service, the other has a lifetime plan so doesn’t cost anything.

Cable – I use Comcast for video and Internet.  The download speed is actually very close to the 16MB they advertise.  Other than a 250 GB a month cap, I have no comlaints.

Mobile Phone – I use Tmobile and have since 2003.  I have a grandfathered 5000-minutes-a-month for $99 plan which is too good to ever give up.  I use a G1 Android phone which at the moment is only available on Tmobile.  Their customer support answers immediately and has always been very helpful.

Web Hosting – I pay HostGator $35 for a reseller account and host more than 20 websites for my various businesses and still have more than enough resources for the forseeable future.

Wufoo -  This one may be a little geeky but it’s one of the coolest products I use.  Wufoo is a service that creates beautiful forms for web pages as well as collecting information the information that is entered.  If you do any web development and don’t use Wufoo, best check them out.

Increased Storage for Gmail and Picassa Web Albums – I pay $25 a year for extra storage for my much used Gmail account.  I’ve been using Gmail constantly, archiving pratically everything, since 2004 and have used 4.9GBs of storage.

Flickr - I pay $25 a year for a Pro account which pretty much allows me unlimited uploads and storage.

That’s it.  I’m quite satisified with all of them.  What are you willing to pay for?

Banish “Dog Eye” from Your Digital Photos

kaley-red

Everyone knows about “red-eye” in pictures of people and now most digital cameras even correct for it right in the camera, but what about those spooky glowing eyes of your pets?

Sandra, my SO, writes about dogs, sansanpups.com.  Besides the shameless plug, the relevancy is that people are always sending her pictures of their dogs.  The dogs in most of the pictures look like refugees from “The Night of the Living Dead”-pet edition.  See our dog, Kaley, above.  Pet eyes have a reflective quality that, well, reflects back the light from the flash in an even more eerie way than the red-eye in humans.

What to do? What to do?

The easiest way to fix your pet photos is also free.  I’ve mentioned picnik.com before, it’s a very useful online site for repairing and enhancing digital photos.

What sets it apart from the rest is while attempting to fix your pet’s glowing eyes you usually have to play with the normal red-eye settings or go to elaborate steps using something way high-end like Adobe Photoshop, while picnik.com actually allows you a furball option for correcting your pet’s eyes.

Here’s the sequence.

Visit picnik.com

Upload your pet’s pic

Within the Edit tab, choose Red-eye and

there, lo and behold, you’re given a choice between human and furball.

Furball will work great at making your pet’s glowing eyes, stop glowing.

When you’re finished, save your results.

Kaley corrected below.

kaley-red-fixed

More examples after the jump.

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