Web Worker Daily

MeetingWave Might Be a Little Late to the Party Posted: 18 Aug 2008 03:00 PM CDT If you’re looking to connect with folks in your area or while traveling, MeetingWave wants to bring you together with the help of their online meeting planner. Post an invite to your meeting, either publicly or privately, and interested parties use the service to accept. You can search by zip code or general location to find something interesting and RSS feeds can be created to match your specific event criteria. It has the obligatory reminders, recurring event creation, and I really appreciate their efforts to help ensure the privacy of users and event locations. Formerly called Travelers Table, MeetingWave is re-branding to acknowledge that meetings occur everywhere and perhaps their old name was limiting interest in their service, but is it enough? It may not seem fair to judge a site like this based upon the limited content but no matter how good the platform may or may not be, success is entirely dependent on community involvement and with sites like Meetup or even evite already firmly entrenched here, it may be hard for MeetingWave to attract the folks it needs to be useful. I honestly didn’t find much of interest to me in the Chicago area, and absolutely nothing out in the suburbs where I spend the majority of my time. While there are a lot of “business opportunity” sort of events, I didn’t see much in the way of networking related to common interest. Also, the inclusion of “romance” meetings seems very out of place for what was pitched to me as a professional networking site. I also experienced a couple of troubling issues during my registration and testing. The first thing it did after registering me was to lead me to a screen where the only option available was to create my own invite. I really wasn’t ready to do that but there was no other navigation or option for me (like a cancel button.) I had to close the window, revisit the site and log in again. I did this for the purpose of review, otherwise I likely wouldn’t have bothered. I did have a couple of other navigation issues as well. Occasionally input screens were too long for my display and since things are set to auto-center on the page, I couldn’t get the submit button to stay visible long enough for me to press it. I had to go to full screen mode to increase my display area enough to proceed. Your mileage with MeetingWave might vary based upon your location and area of interest. I’m going to plan a local tech-worker coffee get together and see what happens. It’s free to use both as a planner or guest so it might be worth a shot to see if you find what you are looking for. Let us know how it works out. How do you connect with like minded folks where you live, work or travel? Share/Send

A Second Look at Evernote, Joint Contact, Backboard, Retaggr and Zemanta Posted: 18 Aug 2008 02:00 PM CDT I’ve been blogging here about Web apps and ideas for work for a while now so I thought I’d revisit some of the apps I’ve posted about in the past months. Where are they now? What are some of their latest developments? Ever Improving Evernote I blogged about Evernote back in April while they were still in private beta. Mike Gunderloy has also covered them several times. Judi Sohn has also mentioned them a few times including recently. The latest from Evernote seems to be some tweaking to add more finesse to the application’s versions on the Web, via Mobile Web and on the iPhone such as: Rich text editing including bullets, colors, and styles on their Web version. A new web clipper Firefox and Flock extension for Windows, Mac and Linux. The ability to change the title of a note during web clipping The ability to edit text notes on Evernote Mobile Web and soon on iPhone. I like the way Evernote uses social media communications to stay in touch with customers including FriendFeed and via a Facebook fan page. Joint Contact Gets Even More Twittery In my constant quest for the ideal project management tool for Web work, I took a look at Joint Contact last month, especially taken with their ideas around using Twitter as part of project management. The latest version of Joint Contact includes the ability to send automated Tweets (through a Twitter account with protected updates) when users add documents, images or tasks. Team members who are comfortable with Twitter can be in the loop via their favorite Twitter tool or platform including desktop with Twitterific or Twhirl and via SMS. Again, to use Twitter as an integrated part of the Joint Contact project management process, the company is emphasizing that the Twitter profiles created must be protected to keep the project messages secure. Regardless of how it plays out, this is an interesting example of a business application for Twitter and for the use of SMS communications for project management. (Joint Contact on Twitter) Backboard Gets More Secure Last month, I also posted about Backboard, the handy and elegant feedback application. Since then, the company has enhanced security, providing an access key for extra security when sharing your Backboard with a large group. You can also restrict access to your Backboard to a group confirmed with their own password-protected accounts. Backboard Groups let’s you share multiple Backboards with the same team and the Address Book Import let’s you easily add your contacts from your Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, LinkedIn and Outlook. Another helpful feature is supporting multiple versions of the same document so you can change your file and get feedback on the new version. Backboard is one of those Web apps that I really loved in demo but haven’t used it in my Web work to date, but I can definitely see using it in the near future. Retaggr Enhances Profile Cards I played around with the Retaggr profile card back in June and thought it was a nice, compact way of displaying one’s credentials. The latest from Retaggr includes: The ability to add professional affiliations. The ability to include your card in your sig file. A feature where you can compare your card with others. Host custom widgets in your card. Add any profile link into your card even if not a Retaggr partner. I’m going to use Retaggr soon, really I am. I have an account but have yet to be able to embed it into my blog. So many apps and widgets, so little time. (Retaggr on Twitter) Zemanta Odds and Ends Just got an email from the folks at Zemanta. I blogged about them twice - here and here. While I don’t usually find Zemanta helpful blogging at WWD, I am finding that I use it for other pro-blogging gigs and even more often for my personal blogs. Zemanta’s latest: They now support Windows LiveWriter. They are suggesting content from CrunchBase. They’ve expanded their Amazon books integration to include book covers. Zemanta does help me enhance blogs in a pinch so I’d put this under the “useful app, using it” category. You can also find Zemanta on Twitter. BTW, I really like being able to follow my favorite companies and apps on Twitter. Are you using any of the apps mentioned here? If so, how are you using them? Share/Send

Back to School for Web Workers Posted: 18 Aug 2008 01:00 PM CDT Although most of us on the web working front have been out of school for at least a few years, this is the time of year that it can pay off to pay attention to the student world. That’s because all of the big retailers are desperately trying to jump-start their fourth quarter sales with back-to-school promotions. Most of these aren’t really for web workers - I don’t know about you, but dropping a pile of money on the latest “must-have” college clothing doesn’t appeal to me - but there are a few out there that it’s worth knowing about. When we’ve mentioned laptop bags in the past, RadTech has come up on our readers’ lists. Today only they’re having a 20% off sale on all laptop bags and sleeves, including ones with solar cells built in and the minimal NeoCase. They also sell the aluminum allow MacTruck heavy-duty case - worth a look if you’re hard on laptops. If you’re the sort of web worker who admits to an office supply fetish, now’s the time to hit up the big retailers. Staples has a variety of back to school sales running, as does OfficeMax. Better yet, if you use PayPal to pay, OfficeMax is offering 20$ cash back up to $25. Anyone who has shopped Dell knows that they always have some sort of special pricing going on - but for back-to-school, their laptop specials are pretty good. If you’ve been looking for a second machine, they have a low-end Inspiron for $499 at the moment. Do you know about any other sales worth passing along? photo credit: stock.xchng user woodsy Share/Send

Another Option for Laptop Security Posted: 18 Aug 2008 10:00 AM CDT We’ve looked at laptop security several times - it’s a critical issue of those who are mobile with our (or our clients’) critical data. CMS Products is out with another solution in this area: the EasyEncrypt Upgrade Kit. CMS has been making drives with hardware-based AES encryption for a while now; this kit makes it possible to get one of their drives into your laptop without losing data. The basic idea is simple: they send you a drive, enclosure, and software. You use the software to clone your old drive on to the new one, encrypting it in the process. Then you put the new one in your computer, and mount the old one in the enclosure, giving you extra storage for low-risk files. The whole kit costs $299 with a 160GB 2.5″ drive, and is available for Windows only. Share/Send

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