“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.

I’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.

The exercises are monitored and statistics are shown after each lesson.  Here’s mine, I still suck at accuracy.

Might as well start improving your typing to make yourself more productive today.  Look at how much time I could save if I really practiced typing.

Try it at typingweb [via ghacks]

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

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?

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.

More examples after the jump.

In an orgy of admiration for Gmail and love for its new Task function (and possible an over-rush of endorphins) I declared the week to be Gmail appreciation week around here at Enquiring Mimes Ranch. In that spirit, today we’ll explain another way to increase your productivity due to the general wonderfulness of Gmail.

Do you have a few old email address that you rarely check and when you do, you find they are chocked full of spam and maybe one halfway-important message that you’ve missed and you’re going to have to write one of those crow-eating messages that say something like “sorry I missed your message, I don’t read email in that account very often?” Gmail to the rescue.

You can have Gmail get the mail from other accounts, pull the messages into your Gmail account and throw away the spam. If you do find a treasure you can answer the message directly from Gmail so that it will look like you send the reply from your other account.

Tutorial after the jump

Here’s how:

Within Gmail select Settings – Account – Get Mail from Other Accounts – Add an account, enter your email address and press next step.

Enter your username and password, Gmail will probably guess your pop server name. Your choice as to whether to leave the retrieved messages on the server, but if you really don’t use the account very often — don’t leave them there.

Let Gmail create a label for that mailbox. This is very handy for viewing all messages from the retrieved account. Press Add Account, you’re halfway there.

Now lets set it up so we can send mail using Gmail from that account.

From Gmail choose Settings – Accounts – Send Mail As – Add email address

You can change the name that is displayed when you send email messages, by default you’re shown the same name as is used for your Gmail. Then add the new email address for the account that Gmail is now going to retrieve and hit Next Step.

You’ll then be asked to send an email to the old account to verify that it is yours. Since Gmail will retrieve the message, press Send Verification and just wait until it appears in your Gmail account and press the link in the message to verify your address. You’re almost there.

Okay, one last detail and we’re done. One more time, go to Settings – Accounts and check the bottom of the page to see that “Reply from the same address” is select as below, and you’re finished.

As if my favorite email service could get better, but there it goes again.  After already singing its praise today, I discovered the newest function added to Gmail – to do lists.

You could long keep you to do list directly in messages in Gmail or by using a Firefox plug-in associate your Remember the Milk list with your Gmail.  Now through the Labs interface (where they include the new stuff) you can turn on Tasks.  That allow you a new action of Add to Tasks after selecting a message, or better yet just use the keyboard shortcut  Shift-T and that message will be added to your to do list.

You can also add non-messages to your to do list.  To do items can be indented and moved up and down in the list to prioritize them.

If you don’t use Gmail, you should.  Sign-up for it here.  Read about this in the Gmail blog.

And since I’ve already outted myself as a raving Gmail fanboy, I’m declaring the rest of the week Gmail appreciation week and will post hints and features for the rest of the week.

Use Gmail?  If you do, you have a free cross-platform, accessible anywhere-you-have-access-to-the-web perfect place to keep your lists. 

When I say lists, I mean the important ones.  There are plenty of useful programs and services for keeping track of the old to-do list.  I’m talking about the real ones like grocery lists, and errand lists and the “honey do” lists.

Just start a new message, give it a title, no addressee necessary, type your list and when you’re finished save it as a draft.  Your list will always be available from a computer on the internet as well as your Blackberry, G1 or iPhone. 

If you don’t use Gmail, you should.  Sign-up for it here.

Do you like the experience of going to photo galleries but don’t have time or browsing images on Flickr, but don’t want to look at snapshots?  Get the gallery experience by browsing these three image sites.

The reviews below are from the NY Times.

Vi.sualize.us: Victor Espigares, a software engineer in Spain, was flipping through a photographer’s portfolio on the Web when he was struck by a particular image. “I was thinking about bookmarking the picture — but not the site — and found that I had no choice,” said Mr. Espigares. “So I started to think about filling that need. Later, I started to think a little bigger and realized that others might have a similar need.”

Vi.sualize.us features more variety than the other sites: anything from T-shirt designs to artsy studio shots and illustrations are likely to pop up. Since the site began in September 2007, the community has expanded to roughly 10,000 members with a collection of nearly 300,000 images.

We Heart It: Unable to land an invitation to FFFFound (see below), Fabio Giolito, a Brazilian Web developer, created We Heart It in March partially as an alternative to the exclusive site.

“As a designer, I keep an inspiration folder on my computer where I throw all the cool images and links I find,” said Mr.Giolito. “I created the site to organize things that I like. People liked it, so I opened it to everyone.”

With its wealth of portrait and fashion photography, the site is similar to Flickr but with a more risqué and avant-garde feel. Unlike the other two visual-bookmarking sites, We Heart It also allows its 16,000 registered users to tag favorite videos from Vimeo and YouTube. The site currently has more than 200,000 submissions, and Mr. Giolito estimates a new selection is added each minute.

FFFFound: Tokyo-based design firm Tha started FFFFound as a side project in June 2007. “We just genuinely wanted to share images that are considered good by a community of people,” said Erica Sakai, a spokesperson for the company. “At the time, there were no Web sites that offered this kind of service.”

As members add fresh fodder to the site, images appear and drift down the homepage, forming a steady stream of album covers, typographical posters, experimental photography and snapshots of street graffiti.

Unlike the other sites, FFFFound is a closed to new contributors. Ms. Sakai said the team elected to cap the community’s size for fear FFFFound would become overly cluttered and unmanageable. But any visitor is free to browse the catalog of 500,000 images.

I’ve enjoyed browsing these sites, be warned that We Heart It does contain images that are NSFW – I’m warning not necessarily complaining.

Read the NY Times posting.

Months ago I was skeptical whether there was a use for Twitter, and wrote here “Twitter – Why” Silly me. I did eventually allow that it could be useful. Since then I’ve become a fanboy and am following more than 400 individuals with about 200 following me. (Shameless self-promotion – follow me on Twitter ).

I do believe Twitter is a great communications and marketing (self-marketing?) vehicle. I first heard of the Mumbai attacks via Twitter and now follow world news and industry news via Twitter.

Yammer allows you to use “microblogging” which is blogging a la Twitter privately only within your own company. I want to share the same kind of information as Twitter but only to colleagues not the world or twittersphere.

Yammer is free and easy to setup. All you need to launch it for your company is to provide your corporate email address, then you can invite your colleagues, boss, and direct reports. Anyone can join Yammer for your company as long as they use the same domain name.

I’m vp of marketing for a software company called Virtual Bridges, our domain name is vbridges.com. All of my friends at Virtual Bridges can join the Yammer conversation using their somebody@vbridges.com email address.

Give it a try.