Many of you use more than one computer. You probably have a computer at home and one at work, and you may even have a laptop as well. Some of you probably even have a few computers in different rooms in your home. Keeping track of logins, passwords, bookmarks, and other information between your computers can be a real pain in the neck. Fortunately, there are some online tools to help you keep all of this information in sync. Here are five of them.
Category: Internet (page 10 of 10)
I’ve talked about Evernote a few times here already. 
At the risk of suffocating you with another post about it, I want to call some attention to a time-saving tip from Elldove over in the Evernote official forums. Elldove posted some javascript for a bookmarklet that combines the Readability bookmarklet and the Evernote web clipper bookmarklet into one bookmarklet.
Readability is a tool, in the form of a bookmarklet, that removes the clutter around what you’re reading and presents a page in a format that is easy to read. Here is a before and after look at a page formatted with the Readability bookmarklet (images have been resized to fit the page):
Your reputation is important, especially if you are established and have a job that depends on public perception. At the same time, the internet can be a dangerous place for your reputation, as one false story or news item can spread like wildfire. Two tools that can help you keep tabs on what people are saying about you on the web are Google Alerts and Backtype. With Google Alerts and your Google account, you can enter search terms, and have emails automatically sent to you when there are new Google results for those terms. I’ve set up alerts for various permutations of my name (my whole name in quotes, first name and last name in quotes, etc.), as well as for each one of my websites (to track when my sites are mentioned elsewhere). I imagine this would be less handy if you have a common name. You can schedule alerts to be sent once a day, once a week, or as they happen. You can also configure an alert to be accessible via an RSS feed.
When is choice a bad thing? When the choice comes from YouTube, that’s when. Over on Technologizer, Jared Newman discusses a new advertising model that YouTube is trying out on a limited basis. Let’s get one thing out of the way- ads aren’t going away. The streaming of online video is expensive. One report predicts that YouTube is on pace to lose $470 million in 2009, thanks largely to bandwidth costs that exceed $1 million a day. It is only natural that YouTube needs to find a better way to monetize its service. The Technologizer article indicates that you’ll be able to "select from two advertisements to watch at the beginning, or intersperse a grab bag of ads throughout the video." Depending on how YouTube implements it, this could be an annoyance for tech-savvy users and busy users, who would be better off having no choice in the ads that are fed to them. Why?
Any 40-something is quite comfortable with “old media,” such as newspapers, magazines, and television. If you’re like me, though, you’re also fascinated with “new media,” such as social networks on the internet. You’re probably wondering how all of this eventually will shake down when the dust settles. With many traditional news outlets experiencing financial difficulties, in what form will we get our news in another ten years? Lately, we’ve had some events transpire that show some of the pitfalls with gathering information from “new media,” if it comes from the wrong source. Read more