Technology and Money

How Twitter Helped Me Get Sponsorship

The power of twitter just never ceases to amaze me.

I am planning to organize some sort of a training event about blogging (details still being worked out) and therefore required sponsorship to cover the various costs related to the event.

Since I had absolutely no clue about who to approach for sponsorship, I asked my twitter friends and within minutes, there were about twenty responses suggesting me the next steps.

Everyone sort of agreed that the best approach would be to get in touch with the Marketing / Corporate Communications team as it often the department responsible for handling sponsorships in a company.

Since I first wanted to ask Google India if they could sponsor, the next task at hand was to find someone at Google India who could put be in touch with their Corporate Communications team.

Luckily, Amit Somani (he heads Mobile Products for Asia-Pacific at Google) picked my original tweet, we discussed the idea and about ten days later, I was told that Google has agreed to sponsor the event.

Two messages, each less than 140 characters, and there you have the sponsorship. Wow! Thanks Twitter, Google and of course, Amit.

Recommended reading:

1. Great Twitter Moments – David Spark
2. How Twitter Made My Website Better - Guy Kawasaki

Related posts:

1. Set and Receive Task Reminders in Google Talk with Twitter Timer
2. Twitter Individual Status Pages Bug ?
3. Twitter Guide: How To Do Things With Twitter

How Twitter Helped Me Get Sponsorship - Digital Inspiration

Google Universal Search – Extreme Edition

Google Universal Search presents a mixed content in search results – you get a couple of YouTube clips, some news headlines and sometimes book snippets on the same page .

The idea is that Google users need not have to visit other search properties (like News Search, Videos, etc) to find related information on the same topic.

Now try looking for Matt Foley on Google and what you get is a search page with 70% video content. Very interesting. H/t Aaron Wall.

Related posts:

1. Google Images Prefers Showing Fresh Pictures In Search Results
2. Yahoo! Makes Backdoor Entry In Google Search Results via their Glue Pages
3. The Unnecessary Complex Design of Google Blogs Search

Google Universal Search – Extreme Edition - Digital Inspiration

Play Flash Games in Full Screen with this Firefox Extension

An experimental Firefox add-on Flash Game Maximizer lets you play any online Flash Game in full screen mode even if such an option is not available in the the game.

Whenever the Flash Game Maximizer add-on detects Flash content on a web page, an icon in the status-bar glows yellow, which when clicked, toggles that Flash content to full screen view.

Note that since this is an experimental add-on, you need to login to install this. Thanks CNET.

Related: Some Wonderful Google Games

Related posts:

1. SnagIt Screen Capture Extension for Firefox 3
2. How To Record Movies of Video Games on the Computer
3. Download Updated Google Notebook Extension for Firefox 3

Play Flash Games in Full Screen with this Firefox Extension - Digital Inspiration

Tutorial: Create RSS Feeds for your Website

This tutorial shows how you can quickly make an RSS feed of any website without requring software or having to write a single line of XML code.

Among other benefits, adding an RSS feed to a regular website can help increase visibility and also boost site traffic because your web pages will now get indexed in blog search engines and online feed readers as well in addition to regular web search.

How to Make a RSS Feed from an existing Website

Let’s say you run a website "IceCreamFlavors.com" that sells about a dozen different ice-cream flavors online. This site is small with about 15-20 pages in all.

You created this website in the web 1.0 era using Frontpage and HTML but now you desperately want to have an RSS feed for this website so that customers can automatically know when you launch a new flavor or when there’s a new promotion running on the site.

Great idea but the only problem is that you are no geek and have absolutely no clue about RSS feeds. How do you then go about publishing XML web feeds for your site?

Generate RSS Feeds through Google Reader

Well, there’s a very popular tool that help you do all this for free – it’s called Google Reader. Here are the steps involved:

Step 1: Login to your Google Reader account and drag n’ drop the "note in reader" link from the web page into the bookmarks toolbar of your web browser. See screecast demo if this sound confusing.

Step 2: Manually open all the web pages of your Ice Cream site in the browser – you only to need to open pages that are to be included in the RSS feed so you can safely skip pages like "Contact Me", "Terms & Conditions", "Return Policy", etc.

Step 3: Now the real fun starts. For each page, select just the relevant content (i.e., text, images, embedded YouTube clips but no navigation areas) with your mouse and then press the "Note in Reader" button.

 

Step 4: A pop-up dialog will open in your browser as shown in the screenshot. Click "add tags" and assign some tag to this page (we use "website") for this example. Close the browser tab and repeat the same process for all other pages of your site – make sure you assign the same tag to each page.

Step 5: Go to Google Reader Settings => "Folders and Tags" and click that gray RSS icon next to the tag "website" to make it public. You’ll then see a new link that says "view public page" – copy the URL of that page to the clipboard.

 

We are almost done now. Go to FeedBurner, paste the URL in that feed box, click Next and give your RSS feed some nice title and an address. You can subscribe to this new feed address in Bloglines or Google Reader to see if things are working as expected – they should.

Later, when you add new pages to your ice cream website, you can easily distribute them via the RSS feed by just repeating steps #3 and #4. You may also add the following line of code to your HTML web pages (inside the <HEAD> tag) so that visitors may auto-discover your RSS feed:

<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="Ice Cream Flavors" href="http://feedproxy.google.com/icecream" />

Related hack: Lifestreaming RSS Feeds with Google Reader

Related posts:

1. How to Embed RSS Feeds into HTML Web Pages - The Easy Way
2. The RSS Feeds You Subscribed in Orkut May Have Gone Missing
3. Trim Down Your RSS Reading List By Removing Duplicate Feeds

Tutorial: Create RSS Feeds for your Website - Digital Inspiration

InLinks – These New Text-Link-Ads May Be Tough to Detect

The company behind Text-Link-Ads.com service has launched a new program InLinks.com that too a marketplace for buying and selling Google PageRank text links but could be slightly tough to detect.

Here the advertisers can pick blog posts where they want to place text links and once the blogger approves that link, particular words in the blog post automatically get linked to the advertiser’s site without the rel=nofollow attribute thus passing link juice.

Tony Hung says the starting rate for such links are about $10/month. The linking is automatic and done via plug-ins (available for WordPress, Movable Type & Drupal) and unlike the regular text link ads, here blogger don’t give a site-wide link but only from a specific post.

Text Links are dangerous for sure particular if your site traffic is dependent on Google. My advice would be to stay away because, sooner or later, search engines will figure this out especially when you are embedding links to commercial sites in your old web pages – that’s because a copy of you pages are already in Google’s index so a simple diff will reveal them all those new paid links.

Tony too has some advice in this case - "If you don’t care about how Google thinks of your site..then its probably worth a go."

Related posts:

1. Google Webmaster Guidelines, Text Link Ads and Lynx
2. Text Links from .edu or .gov Domains Are Not Special to Google
3. Get Better Search Engine Rankings Using Descriptive Link Text

InLinks – These New Text-Link-Ads May Be Tough to Detect - Digital Inspiration

Create Affinity Diagrams with Microsoft Sticky Sorter

Building an Affinity Diagram on the Whiteboard. Credit: cmu.edu

Sometime back I attended a brainstorming session where people had to share opinions about mobile phones and also come up with ideas that could make phones less complex for the common man.

We would write down our ideas on sticky notes (of different colors) and the organizer would then stick these notes on to a large whiteboard. The session continued until evening and by the time we wrapped up, there were a few dozen sticky notes arranged on that whiteboard.

Video: What is an Affinity Diagram

This is called the Affinity process and what we ultimately had on the whiteboard is called an Affinity Diagram. It was fun but imagine how cumbersome it would be to put all that information into a spreadsheet and then re-create the affinity map on a computer later.

Microsft Sticky Sorter interface

To solve this problem, the very innovative team of Microsoft Office Labs today release a new software – Sticky Sorter - that makes it very easy to create affinity maps on the computer using data that you have saved Excel or CSV files. Watch the following video to learn more about the Sticky Sorter tool and its application.

Video: What can you do with Microsft Sticky Sorter tool.

Related posts:

1. Microsoft OneNote for Teachers and e-Learning
2. Kavitha Radhakrishnan of Microsoft Office Live Workspace Team
3. Create a Coloring Book for Children Using Microsoft Office

Create Affinity Diagrams with Microsoft Sticky Sorter - Digital Inspiration