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Google Search’s Market Share

Fascinating information about Google Search from TechCrunch – http://techcrunch.com/2010/07/29/google-mobile-search-market-share/

Google Search's Market ShareAmazing!

Adding Notes to Cloud-Stored Bookmarks

I like to save the URLs of sites or pages I might need in the future. Because I have had to change computers from work to home and because I’ve had computers crash and die, I like to keep my bookmarks in the cloud, that is, I like to use web applications to save my bookmarks, rather than save them in my browser. To do that, I mostly use Diigo, which I also backup to delicious, (just in case either fails).

What I like about Diigo, is that I can add a description of the site, and, in some browsers, Chrome for sure, I can highlight sections of the webpage text and have it show in my Diigo library.

Here’s a screencast explaining how that works:

A Very Different Search Engine

Google is a good first place to search, but Wolfram Alpha goes places Google doesn’t, and you should add it to your searching strategy, especially if you’re a student, or engage in business transactions, or if you are just a curious person.

Wolfram Alpha

Actually, Wolfram Alfa calls itself an “Answer Engine” and that is accurate. You can ask questions and get answers, including math calculations, and all the other possibilities you can find out about here: http://www.wolframalpha.com/examples/

Wolfram Alpha Examples

So add Wolfram Alpha to your bookmarks, wherever you save them  -  on your favorite browser, on your NewsReader, or in a notebook that you keep on your desk. And spend some time asking Wolfram Alpha questions, so you can see what it can do!

gMail Labs – and “Canned Responses”

Sending the Same Message with Small Changes

When you want to send messages that are almost exactly the same to many people, but you want to make small changes, you could copy & paste and alter and send to individuals. Or you could use the Google Labs feature, Canned Responses.

Google Labs is found by clicking the icon of a green Lab beaker found on gmail’s upper right, between your address and Settings.

When you click on that, you find many experimental features, among them, Canned Responses.

Inside Google Labs

When you enable it, it shows up in your Compose screen.

Then, you create the main message, leaving blank spaces where you want to add different words or numbers for different individuals.

message

This was a fairly complex message with many areas to add information, (marked in red) but I sent individual information out to over 30 people, and they liked getting private messages.

Here’s the menu I used -

Canned Responses menuYou can have a number of different canned messages, and personalize them before sending them out.

More gMail: Sending to Many People

Sometimes we need to send a message to many people, and gmail makes that easy. Here are two situations:

  1. Sending the same message to a group of people and respecting their privacy; and
  2. Sending the same message with some small changes for each person in a group of people.

Sending the Same Message to a Group of People and Respecting Their Privacy

If you want exactly the same message to go to a group of people, the most important thing to remember is that you don’t want to look (and behave) like an unskilled newbie and share all the addresses publicly. Instead you want to be polite and digitally sophisticated and hide the individual addresses from the group, thus respecting their privacy. Here’s how:

  • Go to gmail’s Contacts
    gMail Contacts
  • Chose the group you are sending to (I’m protecting my and my Contacts privacy by blanking out most of their names and addresses) -

    gmail - Contacts list

  • Check off the people you want to send to in the group you chose and click on email -
    Chosing Contacts
  • All the addresses show up in the “To:” field, and if you click on “Send” at this point, everybody will get to see all the other addresses, and that’s considered poor privacy management, so don’t click “Send” yet! Instead copy and remove the addresses and click on “Bcc” (Blind carbon copy).
    gmail - Don't "Send" yet
  • Paste the addresses into the Bcc field and address the email to yourself, add an informative subject, and hit “Send”. Voila! Privacy respected and many people receive the same message!
    gmail - using Bcc
  • More on how to send almost the same message to a number of different people, respecting their privacy and saving yourself time next post!

Google Docs Rock!

Before I talk about Google Docs, I want to be clear that I get nothing in return from Google; I am simply sharing the possibilities that Google provides, to try and be a web mentor. I find Google Docs incredibly useful. The video below explains how Google docs can be a useful web tool.

There are other uses for Google docs, as mentioned at the end of the video, and I’ll introduce you to how you can use the spreadsheet as a survey tool in a future blog post.

How We Research and Draft Now

The web has radically changed how we research and plan and draft our writing. It’s happened over 20 years so we haven’t always noticed just how immense the change has been. From a time when libraries and pads of rough yellow newsprint paper were what was needed to start writing till now, where Google, a computer and wordprocessing capabilites are the starting point, our writing process is utterly changed.

I’m not going to go over the many ways word processing makes life easier for writers, except to mention 2 aspects:

  1. The spellchecker! Oh how I love it. I’m a little dyslexic and struggle with the spelling of some words. Is it “a” or “e” or “o” before an “r”? And is it one letter or two there in the middle of a word? (I believe the spellchecker has actually improved my spelling because it alerts me, when I’m wrong, with red underlining or squiggles, and then, if I right click, gives me the correct answer. Sometimes I even use it as a test; when I see the red, I try to correct it without right-clicking); and the other useful word processor tool is -
  2. The really helpful but little known Styles. A few years ago I made a short screencast to illustrate how easy it was to use, and how helpful for writing long documents. If you’re curious, take a look -

http://www.screencast.com/users/JoanVinallCox/folders/Jing/media/ef8e1a8a-c439-4172-a24e-bbca626d168a

However what I really want to focus on here are the differences that are more than technical, that are changes in our writing process and our expectations on how we think and draft.

Last Friday, I was scanning through Tweets from people I follow on Twitter and I found one from Marcia Connor (@marciamarcia) that gave a very brief list of what we expect now when we write. We expect to be -able!

Tweet by Marcia Connor

Marcia listed the 5-ables that are now an integral part of our writing proces:

  1. Searchable – Whether through search engines or through our files on our computer or through the document we are working on, (using Edit / Find) we expect to be able to search for words or phrases.
  2. Editable – Despite initially finding the computer very difficult, I became determined to write on it the first time I watched someone edit out their mistakes without re-copying the whole page. I HATED typing because I was prone to making mistakes, especially in the last 3 or 4 lines in a page. Word processing eliminated the mindless drudgery of re-copying everything that was correct (95%) in order to correct the mistakes (5%). People can also edit online applications like wikis or some blogs with ease and no knowledge of HTML. Being able to edit easily is so freeing!
  3. Linkable – Just scroll up and see the link to my screencast on using Styles to automatically generate a Table of Contents. Links are great! I think of them as semi-linear. You bump into something interesting or something confusing and, if there’s a link, you can get more information, or go to a level of richer detail. Like a budge in linearity, you can choose to go deeper, but not off-topic. That’s a link that makes you able to get an explanation or follow your interest. That’s an outgoing link. I will have incoming links when I link this blog post to Twitter and Facebook and some people chose to read it. (That’s how I and many others use Twitter; if they’re interested in the same things I am, I can ‘harvest’ links from their Tweets, like I did with Marcia’s Tweet.)
  4. Tagable – That’s a new word, and a very important one. When I write a blog post, I add tags to it. That is, I add words that describe it in a way that makes sense to me and (I hope) my readers. For example, my tags for this post are “learning”, “researching”, “web tools”, “writing”, and “Twitter”. If I (or you) want to find this post again in the future, you can look at the Tag Cloud on my right sidebar and click on a word that (we hope) matches a tag I’ve added to it. (You can see the tags for each post at the post’s bottom.) You can also add tags on pictures in sites that let you upload your photos, like Flickr, and you can use tags in social bookmarking sites, like Diigo or Delicious, to find web addresses on different topics. Tags allow you to search, and multiple tags allow you more chances to find the same picture or post by searching from different aspects or points-of-view.

5 . Feedable –  Nothing to do with food. More to do with being lazy (or maybe, more accurately, with being smart!) If you find a blog or site that frequently has new and interesting information, you can get its feed and add it to an aggregator like Bloglines or Google Reader so you don’t have to go to the address every time you want to check what’s new on it. Sometimes you don’t even need the RSS Feed, and just the URL will do. Currently, my choice among feed readers is Feedly, which takes a magazine approach. I am able to use feeds to follow my favorite blogs (and comics!)

Feedly

The five entirely new writing -ables, – searchable, editable, linkable, tagable, feedable, – have become part of how we think, research, draft and write in a way we could not have imagined 20 years ago. How new and different our communication culture and tools are! And how helpful and useful.

Google's Free Calendar

Google Calendar is a very handy free tool, and very easy to set up and use. As I mentioned in my previous post, it’s easy to find information on how to use web tools. Here is a link on setting up your own Google Calendar:

Once you get used to it, you’ll find it invaluable.

Google, a Many-Splendored Freebie

One of the most significant aspects of the web is as a learning tool. Once you hear of or find a tool you want to use, you can almost always find information on how to use it, usually by googling – and then you can learn how to use it by reading the instructions available on the web.

GoogleThe arrows show -

  1. One of my email addresses, and it’s there because this is my Google account, and
  2. A number of the Google tools that are very useful.

When, as part of JNthWEB Consulting, I work with people to expand their web know-how, one of the first things I show is all the uses of Google that they are interested in. I usually start by advocating gmail as a very handy email tool, and I use many other Google tools. Not only are they free, but instructions are available:

Google AccountsA Google account can be a handy tool, and you might want to use some of the other Google tools. Exploring the possibilities of gmail and Google Accounts is a good way to learn more about how you can use the web for your purposes.

The Web and Gmail

e-Mail IconMy parents are in their late eighties, and yesterday, in an email he copied me on, my father told friends how much he enjoyed Skyping with them the previous day. I have heard of people getting computers simply to have e-mail and the family photos that can be attached to email messages.

Almost everyone is now on email, even if they don’t have a computer and have to use a public one. Yet many people still struggle with their email and how to deal with it. I like to find the easy ways to deal with email, and like to share  them. I am a Gmail fan. I have set up a Gmail account and have forwarded my other email addresses to it. I can reply from my Gmail address or from my other address from right inside Gmail.

One of the things I love about Gmail, is how much help you get. If you set up a Gmail account, and click on “Help” in the upper right corner, you go to a page like this -

gMail Helpand get instructions on how to add accounts. Try it out!

I’ll write more about why I find Gmail so easy to use in future blog posts.