Wielding the web with proactive alerts

Most people use the internet as a vehicle for email, social media, and maybe some finance or light shopping. Very few understand how to use free services to monitor thier online reputation, follow content from artists/speakers they enjoy, or even look for jobs. Those that understand how are at a serious advantage, because they're not just using free services - they're weiding the internet. So you want in on the secret?

Weidling alerts is really a fairly simple process. First understand how to do advanced searches in google, if you need help with this here is a link: http://bit.ly/g-tips. Remember to be as specific as possible in your searches, you can always go back and refine as results appear. However, if you are too general on the onset you can set yourself up for failure by being overwhelmed with results and giving up. Also ensure that the frequency of the alerts and place where you look at them sets you up for sucess. If you get overwhelmed take look at the results that are helpful and think about what characteristics of phrases they contain, on the converse you can also filter out unwanted results using a minus sign in the search.

In order to truly get started you need to have an idea of what you'd like to monitor. The most classic example is using your full name in "quotation marks", but think of this as the begining. While you might think that only people in Public Relations would need to do online monitoring, this can be applied for both professional and personal use. Below you'll find a list of things that I specifically look for on the internet to align yourself with getting in the know about things you're interested in.

Personal Use

• Your full name - make sure you know what people are saying about you on the internet.
• Your favorte bands & name of your town so you never miss a show. e.g. "favorite band" + Boston
• Your favorite living authors for book tour or newly released books e.g. "favorie author's full name" + book tour or + new book
• Keep an eye out for your dream house going on the market or find out when houses in great neiborhoods are for sale.
• Track forclosures on your block, so you can better understand how this will affect your home value. 
• If you're renting put a search out on your own address, especially if you have sketchy landlord. I've actualy had a friend that found out her landlord was in foreclosure after being contacted by the new owner's laywer. Trust this is not a good place to be in.
• Put a search out for sales, if you're looking for a specific piece of furniture, equiptment, or item let these results come to you.
• Do you want to keep up on certain types of social events in your area, put a search out using the name of the event or more generic terms. That way you're never at a loss for a low cost good time.

Professional Use

• Keep an eye out for careers you're interested in. There's nothing wrong with keeping your mind open to new opportunites. Search for your dream job title + name of your city or a city you'd like to move to.
• Feed leads to your sales team and become a champion of information in your organization. I'll often use job searches for our industry inorder to give warm leads. e.g. job or career + "competitive intelligence"
• Be known as the go-to person for highly actionable information for individuals in your organization you want to build strong relationships with. I from time to time will send highly relevant case studies and news information to people in Director and VP levels highlighting the pages and paragraphs in which would be of most interest to them. If you do this don't spam these people, keep in mind that these insights should only be actionable and well thought out.. Pushing every whitepaper or news article to them would waste thier time and make you look like a suck-up.

You get the idea...

TL;DR

In short, set up google alters to help you better stay on top of things that are important to you. If you get frusterated by the volume of results refine them until they're managable, by using the advanced searching techniques.

Dear Junk Mail, I need you to stop

Delivered during the month of April, almost eight pounds. More than 70% - junk mail.If you're an adult with a pulse you've at one point received junk mail. Like an unwanted dinner guest it permeates your living space. It shows up on your door step uninvited, hangs out on your counter tops, fills your trash can, and invites over more friends with every magazine subscription and mail order purchase. Since this massive amount of waste is so disgusting to me, I stumbled around the internet and updated a pre-existing online resource for my own use.

Fighting Identity Theft's list broker labels required having address labels, which I didn't have so I edited this form, feel free to download it and personalize it.

To do edit this document follow the quick steps below.

1. Download the file by clicking this link: http://eatseesurf.com/storage/ReduceJunkMailForm.doc
2. Open the file in your chosen document editor (word, office libre, google docs) & select Save As.
3. Rename the file whatever you like so that it's editable
4. Update the address section with your own address information so you can put a stop to junk mail.
   
   The best part I find is that credit card and mail order offers already give you postage in the self-addressed stamped envelope, so you can tuck away the cliping and request to be removed in one swoop.

Here's a link to the original resource for more information: fightidentitytheft.com. I hope you enjoy this simple print-out and it helps you fight the good fight against junk mail.

Update on Friday, July 22, 2011 at 9:52PM by Linji

Since moving to a new residence in the past couple of weeks, I've needed to start this whole process of requesting to be removed from mailinglists over again. Here are two pieces of common direct mail I get in Boston, MA and how to unsubscribe.

Everyone's favorite blue envelope to throw out, Valpak savings use this form opt-out: http://www.coxtarget.com/mailsuppression/s/DisplayMailSuppressionForm

Globe Direct Mail: email gddelivery@globe.com use the same copy from the downloadable form for the mail you already get.

Happy unsubscribing from Junk Mail!

The Snappy new Firefox 4 & the 5 plug-ins you can't live without

I downloaded Firefox 4 today, and while the menuing system was a bit disorienting at first. I really like the minimal nature of the foxy, new fox. It sure is snappy and all this newness inspired me to share the top 5 plug-ins I can't live with out. These are part of my barebones install, I know we're talking plug-ins but these are the fav-5 that help me best optimize my tabs, browsing experience, and screenshot friendliness. We can talk best mobile or social plug-ins another time, these are the lowest common denominator for getting things done with firefox.

Oh, when you're finished downloading these awesome plug-ins, scoot over to http://firefoxlive.mozilla.org/ for some serious red fox cub cuteness.

1. Tree Style Tabs

If you're a tab weenie like me, you'll love this feature. You can group and fold your tabs, neatly organizing them along the side of your broswer vertically with tree style tabs. It keeps you from hiding tabs along the top and scrolling through them. You can also open and close groups easily, I've also mananged to bookmark groups of tabs for work and open them as a group every morning when I start fresh.

2. Bar Tab

Have you ever had your computer screach to a near dead halt because your 300 tabs were all running labor intensive prosses like flash in the background while you're doing something strait forward like writing and email? Bar Tab makes this a problem of the past by allowing inactive tabs to hit snooze and become idle. This decreases the amount of CPU firefox hogs and makes your computer run smoothly even if it's been around since you had an aol mail address.

Disclaimer, I love this plug-in but it acted up when I upgraded to version 4. If you're rocking it old school on the 3.6 then by all means put it on the tab!

3. Undo Close Tab

If you're like me you're always accientally closing tabs by quickly shuffling around and fat fingering ctrl-w. Undo close tab has one fuction, undo.. it's the ctrl-z your browser never had. Let's say you just closed an article you ment to bookmark or share and you don't remember the url. No worries, undo close tab comes to the rescue! Just click it's cute icon at the top left of your tabs and you're right as rain.

4. Ad Block Plus

If the thought of animated gif ads gives you the twitches, Ad Block Plus is your new body guard against circa 1995 visual asaults. It will also block contextual ads so if you're tired of reading news and getting marketed to, you can surf freely without seeing ads. Freedom never tasted so sweet.

5. Awesome Screenshot

While this is a new plug-in to my repetoire, I need to share a bit of love for awesome screenshot. It sits in the upper right corner of your screen, snuggled up next to google and allows you to snap screenshots in your browser and quickly edit, anotate, and save them. It made the task of documenting some new internal processes a breeze to document and plop into a sweet looking slide presentation. I'd share but it's some of our internal business process :)

The Flavor Saver that Seals in Freshness

If you thought that Flavor Saver was just another nickname for mustache, than you were sorely mistaken.

I picked up these puppies today from Newbury Comics and they've since been holding in the freshness of my tortilla chips. I'm surprised because the clips actually have decent pinching strength, and they're hilarious to boot. I may be alone in my love for the stache, but no one can argue that freshness isn't important.

I doubly love the fact they make me laugh when I'm about to dig into some calorie laden noms. There's nothing like a good giggle to make being bad feel good. 

If you're on the last minute look out for funny gifts under $10 they make a great yankee swap gift.

Colourlovers goes mobile, renames itself ColourSchemer

I spend a lot of time with my cellphone and magazine subscriptions keeping me company each week as I shuffle back and forth to work. Due to the fact that my cell reception is spotty at best, I'm always on the look out for great apps you can use offline. That said, ColourSchemer, the new iPhone app by CHROMAom has rekindled my crush on ColourLovers*. The very first thing that I did after downloading it was test the app in airplane mode. I wanted to be sure that I could still save my palates without a connection and indeed you can! Outside of the offline abilities it mirrors the webapp palate functionality pretty closely. However, I really enjoy the satisfaction of touch interaction when picking colors, because it makes the experience much more tactile.

The Color Wheel and Spectrum sections are pretty intuitive, but one of the coolest things is that you can seemlessly switch between any of the interfaces.

The LiveSchemes interactivity of picking up colors by touching down on the color wheel and dragging the dots takes a bit getting used to but the learning experience is fun nonetheless.

My favorite thus far is the PhotoSchemer, because you have the ability to use pictures as a reference. I found that the online ColourLovers version was fun to use but I was always at a loss with too many image choices. With this version, I can just look back to what's going on in my week and pull from my iPhone directly. My first PhotoSchemer palate: Bun Vermicelli was created using a picture of a noodle bowl I snapped in Chinatown over thanksgiving break. My only critism is that it doesn't seem to allow you to attach the image you used to the palate. While not a deal breaker it would be nice to have the context.

At the end of the day, $2.99 is a small price to pay to feel creative on your commute home. If you're a fellow lover, be sure to friend me under the handle linji.

*If you haven't heard of yet I urge you to check it out. It's an online social network for those that love creating color palates, patterns, and identifying color trends. (Side note, ColoUr lovers is originally an internationally based project hence the spelling.)