bouncingboomergirlgeek: fyi & fwiw

Happy BDay 2 HARO

Get Sourced.
Get Quoted.
Get Famous.
www.helpareporter.com

The lines above are quoted as a favor to Peter Shankman, a fellow who makes me smile daily. It says what it says because he asked his readers to use those words to track the mentions of the 1st anniversary of his business. But the rest of this post is unsolicited.

We have never met, but I feel like I know Peter more than a bit because I see his funny headers in my email que whenever I check what's new. His sense of play is contagious. Even before you click through to see what he's sent (more on that in a moment) you get a grin and a sense of what he's been doing. This guy was born to Twitter (which, of course, he does too).

What's equally obvious is that this man is born to market. He loves to link people with what they need to know and spread the word about what's new, building buzz as they say in the trade. And his way of building both bonding and buzz is perfect for the Web2 cyberverse full of readers moving at hyperspeed, whether or not they are also Twittering.

New & Neat This Week: Befunky

Another nifty "cloud app" I had lots of fun with recently is the "Cartoonizer" from Befunky.com.

You upload a picture (via a desktop file, a webcam snip or or an online link), apply the online tools (including sliders for sharpness and color), and voila, the photo is now a black and white sketch or a color cartoon or a cute little avatar.  Tweak it until you like it, then save to disk. Lots o' fun for gamers and bloggers. Only glitch: it did not play so well with my old version of IE, but worked like a charm in Firefox. (I used it for the NinaB pic here on my profile page,  while the sample at left is a screenshot of the toon-pic of Mehmet O., the Creative DIrector of Befunky.)

Thanks for this tip to Amit at the digital inspiration blog

New & Neat, No.2

My "New & Neat" Nominee this week is Clip2Net, a (free) little Windows utility I seem to be using constantly.

Clip2Net does one simple thing: screenshots. But it does it with such quick, fluid ease, I find myself getting much more visual in everything I write because what used to take a half dozen steps to snip, save and share now takes only two or three moves from me. It's a dream date for visual thinkers who like to show as much as tell.

Clip2Net does two things: (a) it turns your cursor into a temporary marquee to grab any part of what you see on screen and (b) saves that image to clipboard or disk or to a private online bin with its own URL that you can share anywhere. If you register your copy you also get control panel management of all your uploads, including a download counter and a generous hunk of storage space. You can also tag your uploads for how long you wish to keep them.

Consider the effect of simply putting the C2N logo at the head of this post. You instantly see if you already know what I'm talking about, and if so, you keep surfing. Or you have your interest piqued and decide to keep reading. So you, the viewer, can maximize the ROI on your time, while I, the author, can add visual impact, and the developers of C2N can reap more eyeballs if you decide to use it too.

That's the kind of thing I am talking about when I mention the "Win-Win Web" which is what all of Web 2.0 is rapidly coming to mean to me. But more about that in the next post and back to this handy little utility. Read on to find out more about what Clip2Net.can do.

Happy New E! (an e-card from Nina B.)

I am the creator of this graphic and it is my gift to everyone who wishes to celebrate what happened yesterday. Enjoy and share wherever you wish!

Happy New E. to us all,

Nina B.

1.3 Ego-Surfing and "Namerology"

/from our cyberlife dept./

Hearing about Numerology among the Chinese viz the Olympics got me to musing about "Namerology" as revealed by ourselves on the Internet.

In an era where it's so easy to go ego-surfing, it 's natural to start wondering if those who are "name twins" share anything more than the obvious correlates. This goes double if you think your own first and last is not entirely common.

My ego surfing has had a few surprising twists. First was the fact that my maiden-named self was much more common (and active online) than I would have guessed when I first looked in the 90s, and some of them were up to things (example below) that might make my mother blush. Then on the flip side in later life, I found that my later-named counterparts were also much more numerous than I would have guessedd, which I suppose I can count as a blessing for privacy.

Over the years, I adopted assorted handles and pen names for various aims, but now it's starting to seem like a good idea to add a twist to your sig if you want a high ratio of signal to noise around a specific identity. Unless you want the "real" you to live 10 pages deep in the list of Google hits, your primary name online needs to make a mark of some kind.

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