Spotify is supposedly testing subscription-only tracks (via Engadget). When I first saw this reported on Anthony Notes, he used an image of redemption cards. I initially thought Spotify was going to be offering some sort of redemption code via cards. Imagine if you can get access to a particular song if you have the redemption …
Will Spotify start selling access to individual albums? Read More »
Why does this RSS reader beat out the likes of Facebook, Pinterest, and Instagram? Read my blog post, Where I find my inspiration online. A summary of the points: Facebook: too noisy, doesn’t show you everything from your Pages Instagram: too noisy, too slow (scroll, scroll, scroll through images) Twitter: not quite the visual medium yet …
Feedly is my number one source for inspiration online. Read More »
Over the course of a year, you probably end up reading hundreds of interesting articles. Even if you read just one interesting article every week day, that’s 240 interesting articles in one year. In this digital age, we mostly ignore who wrote the article. We might even ignore the publication. Whenever I read an interesting …
Auto-generating a list of authors whose articles you found interesting Read More »
Imagine a service where podcast listeners can select five-minute highlights from podcasts. I would very much subscribe to people’s highlight clips. In most cases sixty minutes in one podcast episode is way too long. Lots of chatter, but what are the best parts? Podcasts that are 10 minutes long are my sweet spot. Focused. To …
Pulling five-minute highlights from a 60-minute podcast Read More »
Looking for ideas to blog about? Would you like to have over 900 blog drafts in your queue? On my spudart blog I gave six tips on how to have a continuous flow of ideas for your writing: Keep ALL your blog drafts in one place. Read and comment on other blogs. Prune your reading list …
Did you use Yahoo Messenger back in the day? How about AOL Instant Messenger? Both of these services have died out in favor of mobile texting. Do you grow wearing of tippy-tapping messages on a cell phone? Chatting on desktop is much easier with a full keyboard. But the desktop has seen some of its …
Alternate means of instant messaging on the desktop Read More »
Harvard is cutting spines off books to digitize them (per an article from goodreader.com). Your first reaction might be, ‘OH NO! NOT THE SPINES! OUR BELOVED BOOKS!” But hey, if the spines of books prevent information from being shared, then so be it. Cut off the spines. What is the function of book spine? To …
Google, the mind reader. Ever forget what you are doing at the moment and you turn to Google to tell you what you were just doing? “What was I just doing?” results in about 197,000 results. “What was I just thinking?” gives about 295,000 results. Most valuable of them all is when you want to google something, but …
Evernote can hold so many things. Blog drafts, photos of notes, articles. It’s amazing archival service that is searchable. It even searches for text in your photos! Today I was looking for a blog draft about my notepad setup, I headed over to Evernote and searched for “notepad.” Certainly enough the notepad blog post came …
Evernote to search the contents of your items in storage Read More »
The longest a twitter username can be is 15 characters. Sure, it’s nice to have a short name, but sometimes you need just a few more characters. For instance, I own the domain christiannotebook.com. I cannot reserve @christiannotebook because that is 17 characters. I work at a company called Tribune Content Agency. When we set …
Extend the max character length for Twitter usernames Read More »
Headlines are a great way to surf the news. All the RSS readers allow you to browse articles by headlines and the first couple sentences. But sometimes I just want to browse articles by images. There are no RSS readers that give you an alternate view of seeing just the images. Specifically, it would be …
Google offers a custom news feed according to your defined preferences. Many other players in the field are doing this, Zite, Flipboard, and now Apple. But Google has some weight here, because y’know, they are Google. For the past couple months, I’ve been fine-tuning my “Suggested for you” feed in Google news. Telling Google I’m …
Do people still use browser bookmarks? With social media, it may seem like there is no need for bookmarks. But there are several key uses. Bulk load for surfing Every morning, I load up about 10 websites that don’t have RSS feeds. They are all inside one bookmark folder, so I can right-click on the …
Thinking about creating a blog, but always put it off? Just make it. You’ll be happy you did. For many years I wanted to have a blog that was about publishing and marketing. I would always put it off thinking I’ll start it at some point when I can focus on it. But then one …
Did you have a blog in the past but let it lay dormant? Where you part of the blogging craze in the middle of last decade, but then you turned to social media? I have to admit in the past few years blogged less, because I knew that google changed their ranking to prefer longer …
Why the quickness of social media was the downfall of my blogs Read More »
Do you enjoy writing notes in the margins of books and articles? The quest for an online marginalia system continues with Instapaper. Instapaper offers the great service to export articles to their service. You can even highlight passages and leave comments on the article. However, your comments are buried underneath a blue word bubble. Here’s …
Content marketing is indeed on the rise, as Google Trends shows. As searches for “content marketing” are increasing, searches for its cousin term “social marketing” are decreasing. (View live Google Trends chart or archived version). Does this mean social marketing is going out of style? By no means! Be very careful when using Google Trends. …
Thinking of starting a design agency whose sole focus is creating Microsoft Word templates? Yesterday I covered the need for this unique and undervalued service. Today we cover why one should not create an agency with a focus on Microsoft Word templates. 1) Word templates are extremely undervalued Approach a company and say, “we’ll redesign your …
7 Reasons to not start a design agency whose focus is Microsoft Word templates Read More »
There is a market opportunity for a design agency to be focused solely on making branded Microsoft Word templates for companies. Which is not just sticking the logo at the top of the Word file. Branding in a simple Word document can be done with many of the tools in Microsoft Word. Here’s a few …
A business opportunity: designing Word templates for companies Read More »
What happened to links? Blogs don’t have blogrolls anymore. Tweets really only hold one link each. Instagram doesn’t allow you to have clickable links in captions. A blogger was imprisoned in an Iranian jail for seven years for supporting the free web. Upon his release, he wrote an article “The Web we have to save” …