This blog is resting

Phew – life is a bit hectic at the moment & I can’t keep up my blogging for On the Nodes. I hope to return soon.

In the meantime you can keep track and find lots of resources at my other web presences – see the sidebar.

I’ll be posting about free Web 2.0 tools for small business here.

Who’s.amung.us is a neat little widget you can use to track the number of readers you have and see where your visitors are from. It will also give you a graph of visitors over time so you can find out when you had the most people online? They say:

Once you add our widget code to your pages, it immediately begins working for you. The widget will display the number of people currently browsing your website. This is not a page counter, think of it as a ‘people’ counter. Clicking on the widget brings you to a detailed real time stats pages.

You get three sets of stats. A list of pages people are currently reading:

 

A graph of visit numbers each day:

 

A map with dots showing where visitors are from:

 

It’s simple to install – just copy the code. AND they provide a non-java version – which I’ve installed here. I chose the ‘Who’s Online’ button – you can see it at the bottom of the column to the right.

See sample stats and get your own widget.

Find feeds with Page2RSS

Page2RSS is a service that helps you monitor web sites that don’t publish feeds. It will check any web page for updates and deliver them to your favorite RSS aggregator.

You simply type the URL & hit the ‘to RSS’ button and Page2RSS will give you a feed for the page. You can add instantly to Google Reader, Bloglines, My Yahoo! and Netvibes.

You can add a button to your browser’s bookmarks toolbar that will create Page2RSS feed for the page you are currently viewing. This is an easy and convenient way for you to create feeds for pages you are surfing. 

A word of warning – I tried it on our LearnTel website and it returned the message: The page doesn’t look like valid HTML page. I wonder if this is because it’s written in cold fusion?

Try Page2RSS

Twitter goes way beyond 140 characters

This is an interesting article from WIRED about the many and varied uses for Twitter – thanks to numerous apps that have been developed. It begins:

Thanks to its open-ended design and a thriving user community, Twitter is fast outgrowing its roots as a simple, easy-to-use messaging service. Enterprising hackers are creating apps for sharing music and videos, to help you quit smoking and lose weight — spontaneously extending the text-based service into one of the web’s most fertile (and least likely) application platforms.

Hardware hackers have set up household appliances to send status alerts over Twitter, like a washing machine that tweets when the spin cycle is through, or a home security system that tweets whenever it senses movement inside the house. Others have incorporated Twitter into their DIY home automation systems. Forgot to turn off the lights? Send a tweet to flip the switch by remote control.

Read the article.

And along the same lines, Search Engine Marketing Group lists 10 Examples of Creative Twitter Uses. These range from checking your laundry to wine tasting!

We’ve broken the 6000 mark

While I wasn’t looking, this blog went to over 6000 readers – now more than my long running videoconference blog.

Thanks for being here. I promise to write a little more often than I have in the last month!

Visualise your del.icio.us bookmarks with Favthumbs

If you’re a visual person you’ll like this. Favthumbs is a neat little online app that will visualise your del.icio.us bookmarks. You just enter your del.icio.us account details & it will offer you two visualisations – grid & carousel.

The grid shows a thumbnail of each home page. Part of mine looked like this:

The carousel version allows you to scroll through each thumbnail in a circular manner. Mine looked like this:

Try Favthumbs on your own del-icio.us bookmarks.

50 Best Websites 2008

Time has published what they consider to be the 50 best websites in 2008. There are some interesting sites that I didn’t know. And there are more than 50 because they often sneak one or two ‘like’ sites on the page.

If you don’t have time to go through the 50 best, you might like to check the 10 essential sites that we can’t do without. They consider these to be:

• Wikipedia
• Yahoo! Finance
• Craigslist
• ESPN
• Yelp
• Facebook
• Digg
• Google (everything)
• TMZ
• Flickr

Mmmm – I agree with half of those.

Time also lists 10 Social Networking Apps. They include:

• Entourage
• My Flickr & Happy Flickr
• iLike on Facebook & iLike on MySpace
• Graffiti on Facebook and Graffiti on MySpace
• TextTwirl on Facebook and TextTwirl on MySpace
• Bubble Town
• BuyBooBuy (Facebook) or ProductPulse (MySpace)
• Dopplr: Where Next?
• Twitter
• Universal Profile Information

Enjoy…

Collagr: Make a collage from your photos

Collagr is a neat little online app that will turn a bunch of photos into a collage. All you do is give it a URL (on flickr or photobucket) to the photos you want to use & it will mix them into a collage. You can change a few settings like background & colour. From what I can see all creations become publicly viewable.

Here’s one I made from some photos of Canada:

Here are a few examples from some more creative souls:

Make your own photo collage.

Top 10 tools for 2008

I’ve been meaning to list my top 10 tools for Jane’s page for quite some time now. Inspired by the effort of my mate Steve Wheeler in listing his top 10, here they are – it was a hard fought contest as we saw so many great new tools emerge in 2008. Oh – and it doesn’t include the iPhone that came into my possession in November – without doubt THE best tool ever!!! And of course my 2007 favourites still remain: delicious, Facebook, flickr & Netvibes.

1. Plurk: without doubt this is my favourite tool since it launched in about May 2008. In case you’re not familiar with it, it’s a micrblogging tool. You have 140 characters to tell people what you are doing – not too exciting so far! However, many people have taken microblogging & turned it into a way to share ideas & resources with others.  I’m connected to an amazing group of educators in many countries who freely share their thoughts & ideas & come to the rescue when anyone is looking for a particular resource. What I like about Plurk over Twitter (see next in the list) is that it encourages conversations amongst users. The fact that comments can be made in a drop down box under the original plurk makes it easy to collect thoughts on each particular topic.
2. Twitter: another microblogging tool that appeared before Plurk. Your 140 character staements appear in a list down the page. I originally saw Twitter as a useless tool and am on the record for saying so. However, I’m also connected to a great group of people on Twitter who freely share their ideas. I’m caroldaunt on Twitter if you want to follow.
3. PBwiki: I have wikis for everything from the business plan to project planning to my doctorate. This is a fabulous way to work collaboratively and share files with distributed teams. There are various free wiki platforms available but PB is my favourite.
4. Ning: the app that allows you to build your own social network. I belong to numerous Ning groups where like-minded people exchange ideas and resources. I’ve set up a Ning for our Learning Technologies Group and we always have one to support our Learning Technologies Conference.
5. Google Docs: I’ve really been using Google docs in a big way in the past year. We’ve used them for shared ‘Word’ documents that we can work on collaboratively and also as ‘Forms’ to gather information from people – which then goes automatically into a spreadsheet.
6. FriendFeed: a social-network-activity aggregator that acts like a funnel for all the updates from my various networks and brings them into one master stream, relieving me of the responsibility of visiting a dozen or more sites. You can follow my FriendFeed directly if you’re not connected to me in any other way.
7. Slideshare: I’ve been a member of Slideshare since early 2007, but only started using it in earnest during 2008. It allows me to post my slide shows for others to see, but, more importantly, allows me to find great slideshows from others. There’s some amazing infromation there and all free of charge.
8. Scribd: where I place my documents so others can read them online or download them. It’s also a great place to find articles and papers written by others.
9. Animoto: a terrific little app that allows you to create videos from photos and/or text. You upload your photos – choose a piece of music & Animoto does the rest. You can make a 30 second version free of charge or pay $3 for a longer version. You can direct people to your video on the Animoto site, embed it in other websites and download a copy. Click here to see a fun one I made for my Plurk buddies for Christmas.
10. Live Blogging: we experimented with Cover it Live’s new live blogging tool for the Learning Technologies Conference this year. It worked a treat and allowed those both on and off site to get a running commentary of selected sessions and to interact real-time with our live blogger. Click here for an archived version of the George Siemen’s session.

That’s it for 2008 – if you haven’t tried any of the above, I hope you enjoy experimenting with them.

New Year – New Name

The summer holidays are almost over downunder so it’s time to get back to work – and to blogging.

In 2009 my name change is complete – Carol Skyring. I’ve updated the About page to reflect this. I’ve also started a new personal web space (access through: www.carolskyring.com) which is still taking shape. In this space I’ll have links to all of my ’stuff’ and other information you may not find anywhere else ;->

Happy Web 2.0-ing – I’ll start with the posts in a couple of days. I’ve added a few new categories so topics should be easier to find.