Idea Buzz

Blog with iPhone: 10 Apps for Beautiful Blogging

noreply@blogger.com (Ayman Qarout) — Mon, 28 Dec 2009 20:57:00 +0000

Most people nowadays blog, we write about anything and everything, we like to share our stories and ideas.
Computers are the way we use to blog; well, not for me! Thank god I have and iPod Touch and some cool apps that help me blog anywhere, anytime!
So, here is the apps that I think will give you the best mobile blogging experience:

1) First you need something to write and post with; BlogPress will do that. It's easy to use, let you write, edit and manage posts from ( Blogger, WordPress, TypePad, Drupal, ...etc ). The app problem is that you can't change font color, size and such stuff! you can only write and post pics; but you can always edit them later on pc.

2) Sometimes you need to make simple sketches and hand drawings, for fun or to explain something; while there is many apps to do this, free and paid, I recommend autodesk SketchBook! you can do everything with it. and export pics as PNG or photoshop file ( Yes, you can make and draw in layers ).

3) Who doesn't put images in his post?! images make posts come alive. To get the image you want, use Flicker app or Google Image Search.
For editing images, there is three apps I like; Photoshop mobile, which is free but lacks some features, Photogene, very good for editing and 101 Photo Effects for applying filters ( more than 100 filters ).

Flicker

PS mobile

Photogene

101 Photo Effects

4) For podcasters, try iTalk, the free recording app from griffin; it's very good for recording in high quality.
Cinch is another free recording and podcasting app, but I haven't tried it yet.

5) If you have a blog, then you probably want to tell people about your blog and what you write about. One of the best ways for marketing your blog posts is Twitter, and the best tool for using Twitter on iPhone is Twitterrific! free, beautiful interface and easy-to-use.

6) As blogger, I bet that you like to always keep an eye on your blog, how many visitors come by and what they read; chances that you are already using Google Analytics. There is many apps for iPhone that shows GA results, but may favourite is a new simple app called Pocket GA; here is some pics for it:

Hope you find this useful!
If you have any app that you think it worth adding, please leave me a comment.

Me vs Stress ... Killing Stress is Not Hard Anymore

noreply@blogger.com (Ayman Qarout) — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 18:58:00 +0000

The world is becoming more complex day after day; to cope with this complexity, we need to learn, adapt and change; but this continues learning leads to a big problem, stress.
Stress is affecting both our personal and work life negatively, so we need to manage and control it.
Looking around and reading about stress management, I found three interesting ways:

1) Time Management
2) Predictable and Required Time-offs
3) Self-Assessment

In this post I'm going to talk about the self-assessment method.
What you need to do here is find and identify what is important in your life, the things that you value and you care about; here is a sketch I made to help you easily understand how to identify these things:

So as you see in the sketch, identify the important things in your life with self-assessment; meaning you take a look at yourself and the world around you:

Look at yourself and think "what do I value most?"; you can do that by looking backward to your past and see what in the past made you the man you are now, the experiences and stories that made you reach this point. Another practice is to imagine yourself in the future; what do you want to be? and how you want to achieve that? what difference and effect you want to make to people around you?
After having a look inside yourself, think of people who matter to you most in three domains: in family, at work and people from the community you live in, and ask yourself "what these people expect of me? how do I affect their lives?", and even go and ask them what do they expect of you.

Now that you had a look inside and outside you, you know what is important for you; knowing this help and let you experiment! and try different ways to do things, which in return help you save time and focus more on things that matter, reducing the pressure you face.

How can this be applied in the work environment?

If you are a worker, then try to do the method above, identify what is value and important, experiment and find new and better ways of getting things done. If you are a manager or leader, encourage your team members to do this, give them more space and empower them to do their tasks in the way they find better for themselves, let them think and try different ways of getting task done, which in return will improve their efficiency and effectiveness! this will improve the work and tasks done, and will let them find time to focus in their personal lives.

This was a simple method for managing stress by Stewart D. Friedman, from his book "Total Leadership: Be a Better Leader, Have a Richer Life" .... note that you can find more methods for self-assessment on his book; I haven't read it yet, but I will soon.

If you have any comment, positive or negative, or any suggestion, please leave a comment, I'll be happy to hear from you.

Hope you find this useful.

Engage Your Visitors With TweetBoard

noreply@blogger.com (Ayman Qarout) — Mon, 21 Dec 2009 09:25:00 +0000

Engaging visitors is the holy mission for every blogger and website owner, because engaging them would improve your site, your content and increase your visitors.
A new service that takes engaging visitors to new way is TweetBoard, which is an instant Twitter-powered forum for your blog or website.

"Tweetboard pulls your Twitter stream in real-time, reformatting tweets into threaded conversations with unlimited nesting"; with this tool you can have a conversation with your visitors in easy intuitive way, and visitors can see recent activities in your blog.

The beauty of this small tool is it's placed in blog as a sidebar, which expands on-demand, so you don't have to worry about taking out space of your blog.

"Each time your webiste visitors post via your Tweetboard, a link back to the corresponding conversation is appended to their tweet, creating a viral stream of traffic proportional to the volume of tweeting performed via your Tweetboard.

I should mention that this service is free, but still in alpha, so you have to request and invite for now.

I have TweetBoard installed in my blog, you can see the tab on the left side; go check it out and tell me what you think

20 Second Break - Tweet is Money

noreply@blogger.com (Ayman Qarout) — Sat, 19 Dec 2009 18:12:00 +0000

I was looking around for some twitter tools, and I found this tool for twitter that can tell you "How much is your twitter profile worth"!; The creator claims the value is calculated with a Ph.D algoritm that is based on the public information available on your Twitter profile.

http://tweetvalue.com/

I don't know if this is true or not; but if it is, I think this tool would be for much value for marketers who use twitter as it would help estimating followers values!
By the way, my twitter profile is worth $9 till now :)

so go check it out and have fun

20 Second Break - Same Username

noreply@blogger.com (Ayman Qarout) — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 23:23:00 +0000

Do you like social networking?
Do you like to have the same username for all accounts? Then this small website is for you:
www.usernamecheck.com
Just go to the site, enter the desired username, and it will show you if it's available or not in more than 65 sites!

Hope this was useful :)

Get Some Out of Your Day!

noreply@blogger.com (Ayman Qarout) — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 20:29:00 +0000

We all usually have busy days, no free times and no room for additional activities; we live either in a hard daily routine or in laziness!

What we miss between the routine and laziness is the small, exciting things we could learn and the cool info we could gain ... I'm not talking about the study courses info or what you get from work! but the other exciting life topics, our hobbies and even stuff we don't know.

Why? self-satisfaction is the ultimate gain, along with improving your work and social life; you would find something to talk about with your friends, family and colleagues.

You said it, I don't have enough time for such things!

well, there is some cool sources out there where you can learn with almost no time, and without interrupting your daily routine; my favorite sources are:

- Blogs: if you don't know what are blogs, they are personal sites where anyone can write about anything! a story, personal experience, share knowledge in informal easy way.

Blog posts are usually short so you can read a post in almost no time! read anything that interest you while you are checking your e-mail and you won't regret it.

There is special search engines that sort blogs to categories, and search posts of your interest; the best out there is Technorati.com ... go check it out.

- Podcasts: my favorite source of info; A podcast is a series of digital media files (either audio or video) that are released episodically and downloaded or watched online.

What makes podcasts widely-used and recommended for everyone is that you can use it on the go; personally I put some episodes in download at night, and listen to them while i'm on my way to university or in bus!

You can find podcasts about anything, everything, from business, comedy, arts, technology, anything! and what makes them appealing is that you can find podcasts in any length .... 2, 5, 10 or 30 minutes, all you have to do is to choose what fits your time.

My main source for podcasts is iTunes, which has every podcast you could imagine.

So think, if you read a short post, and listen to a 10-minutes podcast aday, both won't total more than 15 minutes! but that very short time would take you to a whole new world!

So what are you waiting?!