A workaround in Facebook to use lists again
Facebook has slowly been killing a long-time efficient feature, lists. Now with the updated Pages UI, you kinda have some of the functionality of lists back.
How we discover
Searching and discovery, for searchers
Idea: an AI tool that recommends tweets based on your recent blog posts
Every time you make a blog post, an AI tool could automatically give you five related tweets from people you follow on Twitter.
Sparking the imagination by looking at a list of Google search terms
Certainly there are times when you have quirky google searches. Author Tessa Wegert tweeted a few of hers: My searches today:• World’s biggest trophy • Ferris Bueller vest • What are superhero suits made of • Estonian Krooni • Hyde and Eek I’d love to see a list of people’s Google searches for unique topics. …
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Amazing song recommendations by speaking gibberish to Google speakers
What happens when you say: “Ok, Google please play tootily doot-doot, da-toot-doot, da-tootily doooooo.”
Have you ever accidentally used your town’s website to search for a book instead of your local library website?
Funny, I just went to do a search for a book in my local library. But instead of pulling up the library’s website, I accidentally just googled the name of my town, “Glen Ellyn” and pulled up the village’s website. My first thought was, “huh, they did a site redesign.” Without even thinking, I used …
Categorizing your blog by your passions
Because I work in the media industry, I started this blog in January 2011 to share my thoughts on how to use media better. On the three-year anniversary the site became organized into four categories. How we create (Writing, designing, and illustrating, for creators) How we discover (Searching and discovery, for searchers) How we read …
Facebook Page invites waiting to be accepted
Did you know there is a section on Facebook that lists all the pending invites for Pages you’ve been invited to? Apparently over the years people have invited me to lots of Pages, but I haven’t accepted the invite! How to get to your pending Page invites Just go to: https://www.facebook.com/pages/?category=invites Page invites I just …
Idea: a script to find Flickr photos being used online
Flickr is a great place to find photos to use. Many photographers assign their photos with a Creative Commons license, so any can use the photos. (there are different requirements with this license. Some require attribution. Some don’t allow profit use.) Whenever I see an article using a Flickr image, I almost always click over …
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How do you listen to music on Spotify?
Do you listen to albums? Or maybe you like curated playlists. Or sometimes you might just want to hear an artist, not a specific album, but just the list all the songs by an artist. With the advent of streaming music, I thought the album had been severely diminished. Playlists have hundreds of songs, all …
In a Google search, WP is a shortcode for Wikipedia
If you do a Google search that starts with the letters “wp”, Google will automatically bring you to a Wikipedia page. (WP is a shortcode for Wiki Pedia.) Sounds pretty handy, right? Why type out the full word “Wikipedia”? You can just type a shortcode, “WP”. Except it’s not so handy, when you really do …
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Do you still use iTunes for podcasts?
I haven’t used iTunes for podcasts in 18 months. Today I relaunched iTunes and was reminded how glad I am that I no longer use it. Oh, the old days when iTunes would stop downloading a podcast because I haven’t listened to any episodes recently. I found myself having to manually update all 90 podcasts …
Rare hashtags
It’s funny to find hashtags on Instagram that are rarely used. When commenting on a photo, I’ll often combine two words together into a hashtag. And then I click on the hashtag to see if there any other photos. Apparently is the first Instagram photo with the hashtag: #comiccompilations in the comments No photo has ever …
Control the topics you like for Google ads
Have you adjusted your privacy settings with Google? You get to pick what topics Google shows you in Google ads. Pick exactly what you want to see. Cull down all those boring unrelated topics. Force Google show you super-cool ads! A few weeks ago, I adjusted mine. Since then, Google secretly added “Pest Control” to …
The discovery metadata field
The internet would be a really interesting place if every article that was shared automatically had a “via link.” Ok, so the internet is already interesting. But what makes the internet such a great place is its connectivity. Everything is linked together. We can easily share a link to an article. So many links all …
Imagine the internet with no search engines
What the internet would look like if there were no search engines? Twitter would have a lot more questions posted. Often times when I’m curious about something, it’s tempting to ask on Twitter. But then I quickly realize we have Google (or DuckDuckGo). For instance, I was about to ask on Twitter, “Does Adobe Creative …
My favorite way to set up Tweetdeck as a background stream
I’ve found my favorite way to keep Twitter running in the background at work. Tweetdeck is the tool, with two columns. Yup. Just two columns. If you try to use the normal Twitter stream on the homepage, you’ll have to manually click the “See 35 new Tweets” message. Plus, the homepage of Twitter shows you …
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What’s popular in your Twitter network might be not interesting to you
Twitter is now curating a list of articles that are popular among the people you follow. A bit like what Nuzzle has been offering for years. Twitter calls this section “Popular articles”. Sounds like it would be great, right? “Popular articles” will unveil what your Twitter network considers to be good. However, you might not …
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Finding and sharing archived college memories
Does your college offer digital archives online? If so, you might find some good memories within their files. College memories hidden away in film My alma mater, Illinois Wesleyan Univerity, is a smaller school of 2,000 students. When I attended in the late 90s we didn’t have social media. To my knowledge, there was only …
Today one of my bots alerted me about one of my other bots
We live in an age with an increasing number of bots that are able to alert you of new content online. I have one such bot set up to alert me whenever there are tweets containing the phrase “Chicago Croquet”. When such a tweet appears, my bot sends me an email to let me know. …
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Would you like to search Feedly by article length?
Sometimes I’m in the mood to read longer articles. I would love to be able to search within Feedly for articles over a particular word count. If you would like Feedly to add “article length” as one of the advanced search criteria filters, please upvote this suggestion on their suggestion board.