Now you’ve seen it. Have a nice Sunday.

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A new project from Small Batch Inc. looks to change all that. Typekit promises to give you the ability to embed fonts on any web page with full fidelity and typographic control. 

Typekit is not yet available, but you can sign-up here to be notified as soon as it is.

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Google is making it easier for people to find you — if you are using Google Profiles. As reported on the official Google blog, once you setup your Google Profile, your profile may show up at the bottom of search results. I say “may” because if you have a fairly common name, you’re stuck with competition.

In my case, a search for Jeff Hester brings up the astronomer (not me), the business owner in Oklahoma (also not me), but also this blog (most definitely me, and #2 on page one). At the bottom of the search results page, you’ll see this:

Hint: I’m the guy on the left. You’ll note that Google also puts links to search for me on several popular social networks, including MySpace, Facebook, Classmates and LinkedIn. 

Simon Mackie at Web Worker Daily shared these step-by-step instructions for setting up your own Google Profile:

1. Go to the Google Profiles site.
2. Sign in with your Google account. 
3. Fill out the form. Add a photo and links to your sites. 

Remember that information you share will be available for others to see. You can share as much or as little as you like, but Google will rank a well-filled profile higher than a skimpy one. 

Have you setup your Google Profile? 

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Companies committed to a culture of antidesign (also consultants like Jakob Nielsen) may occasionally succeed in the marketplace, but they do so in spite of their antidesign, not because of it. Of course we can’t prove that; we can’t run a controlled experiment, let alone 41 of them with distinct shades of blue. It is merely one of those things a visually literate person knows. The fact that you don’t know it, or you deny it’s important, or deny it even can be known goes to show you really are better suited to programming a computer all day than dealing with actual human beings.

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On the surface, robo-calls and text messages may seem like equal nuisances, but anectdotal evidence suggests that Obama’s text messages have been much more effective. 

With a little thought and it’s easy to understand why. A text message is permission based and less intrusive. I had to provide my mobile number willingly to sign-up for Obama’s text alerts. And I can read them when it’s convenient. In contrast, I have never received a recorded message that didn’t piss me off just a little. Who wants to be interupted by a recorded message? Not me. 

Hats off to Obama for his great use of this technology. And be sure to vote on November 4th.

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Here’s a preview of the new dashboard:

The new dashboard is really a great improvement, with at-a-glance views of the stats effecting your blog. I also like the “quick post” feature and the ability to reply directly to comments. An already amazing product is getting even better. 

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Things is a nice little commercial iPhone app that dovetails with David Allen’s Getting Things Done (GTD) methodology for time and task management. I was using Todoist for a while, which is a nice, free web-based to-do list. I experimented with Jott, which is notable for its voice-driven interface. But so far, I like Things simple, no-nonsense interface. 

So what’s on my plate today? 

First, I’m doing a little rearranging right here. I’m updating the blog theme to make better use of screen real estate in general, and the right column in particular. I’m also going to be updating Wordpress and some 

plugins in preparation for next month’s release of Wordpress 2.7. And I’ll be adding the top content, making it easy for new readers to find the “greatest hits” (yes, there are a few). 

Next, I’ll be working on my two big forum sites, GetGamer and BigBlueBall. I use vBulletin on both, and they are both ready for upgrades to the latest versions. I’ll be adding a storefront to the GetGamer site in preparation for the holidays, and fleshing out the design mockups for BigBlueBall (which hasn’t been refreshed since 2005!). 

If you feel like checking in or throwing a little morale support my way, leave me a comment. I’ll also be online throughout the day, so feel free to drop me an IM.

Oh, and for you design geeks out there, check out Cultured Code’s “making of” Things for a pictorial that shows how they designed Things for the iPhone UI.

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Dropcard aims to solve that problem, and could even eliminate the need for business cards altogether–a very green idea. I read about Dropcard on WebWorkerDaily and immediately saw how I could’ve used this.

How it works

The concept is simple. You register on Dropcard and can create two profiles: business and personal. You control how much or little information you want to share. When you want to send your “business card” to someone, you do so either via text message to 41411. When I meet Bill G., I can ask for his email, then send him my Dropcard by texting drop billg@windows.com to 41411. 

If you’re using an iPhone, you can thank your lucky starts and skip the text message, opting instead to use the clean, web interface you see to the right. Either way, it’s quick and easy. 

What happens next?

Once you send an instruction to send someone your contact info, they get a nicely formated email with all your details and a vCard attachment for quick import to Outlook. 

Dropcard allows you to enter multiple phones, addresses, chat networks, websites and personal profile addresses. 

There are no advertisements. Dropcard is supported by paid subscriptions. With a free account, you can send up to 15 Dropcards per month. $4.99 a month gives you as many as 20 profiles, and the ability to send up to 100 Dropcards per month. $9.99 a month gives you unlimited Dropcards. 

Oh yeah, my old skool carbon-based business cards did finally arrive this week. I’m not ready to ditch them, but Dropcard will be a handy backup in the future. 

Check out Dropcard.

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Being the weekend, I’m sharing something a little more recreational in nature.

When I first bought my iPhone 3G (same day they came out), the lines were horrendous. But I did have plenty of time to learn about the new apps that were available. The Apple store employees were showing off their favorite apps, one of which was Midomi.

Midomi essentially let’s you find songs when you don’t know the name or even the artist. You can hold it to the radio and it will tell you the artist, the song title, the album and even provide links to YouTube videos and the ability to purchase the song on iTunes. But even more impressive, you can hum or sing a bit of the song and Midomi will find it for you… usually.

I didn’t really get the appeal of Midomi when the guy in the Apple store described it, so it wasn’t until a week ago that I downloaded it and gave it a try. The verdict? Midomi is FUN!

This week when I was driving to Dulles airport, I had the radio tuned to a classic rock station, and heard a song that I wanted to add to my personal library. I fired up Midomi,

Midomi records about 10-15 seconds of the song, sends it to their server and returns a list of matches. In my experience, grabbing songs from a radio was extremely accurate.

To purchase via iTunes, you must be connected via wifi. Since I was on the road, I just added a bookmark so I could return later and purchase the song.

Now for the real fun…

Midomi is useful, but the real fun begins when you try singing or humming a song. Lynn and I were cracking up as we tested the accuracy of Midomi (and our singing talent). Here’s how to play:

Get a few friends together. In round robin fashion, you challenge your friends to “match” a song from the band or artist of your choice. They choose the song, and sing or hum into Midomi. Who ever gets a match (or the highest match, if you’ve got a group) can decide the next challenge.

Let the laughter ensue.

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Seriousness is stupidity sent to college. – PJ O’Rourke

I don’t have any particular reason for sharing this quote, other than it caught my eye while reading today and wanted to capture it. My brain is too full to store it, so I’ll use this little corner of the web to do so. 

If you’ve got a good quote or anectdote about stupidity, please share!

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After using it for a week now, I can say I’m sold. It’s got some great features for users of all types. Best of all, it’s simple, clean and uncluttered. It mostly stays out the way and lets you make the most of your browsing experience.

I won’t go into the details, since you can get a great overview from Google’s Chrome site, but I was surprised to see Chrome take off at BigBlueBall, where today’s stats show that over 4% of the visitors to the site used Chrome. Pretty amazing for a browser that’s still in beta and barely a week old.

Currently Chrome is only available for Windows XP and Vista, but word is that every day Sergey asks the Chrome team when the OS X version will be ready.

Google Chrome website

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So what is Office 2.0?

For starters, it’s the name of the conference described on the web site as “…a collective experiment organized every year in San Francisco, CA and aimed at discovering the future of online productivity & collaboration. It is a unique gathering of visionaries, thought leaders, and customers using innovative online services for getting things done at the office, at home, and on the go.”

Wikipedia describes Office 2.0 as “…a marketing neologism representing the concepts of office productivity applications as published applications rather than stand-alone programs. The term leverages the Web 2.0 concept to conjure imagery of collaborative, community based and centralised effort rather than the more traditional application running on a platform locally.”

So just as Web 2.0 embraces the community and user-generated content, Office 2.0 explores new ways of working in a primarily online, collaborative environment.

I’ve seen firsthand success with collaborative online communities, particularly with the online, community-centric approach Fluor has taken with knowledge management. Distributed ownership, administration and accountability, coupled with a culture that encourages every voice to be heard has proven to be not only extremely effective, but essential to success.

In the spirit of “eating your own dogfood” the conference is paperless. Instead, each participant is given an HP 2133 Mini-Note running Linux, with wireless access to all of the tools necessary during the conference: Google Apps for email and calendaring; ClearSpace for discussions, blogging and publishing; Zoho for presentations and so on. On Wednesday, we will split into teams and respond to a simulated enterprise crisis in which we’ll put all these tools to work to solve the problem.

I’m looking forward to meeting others who are applying these concepts to support their business strategy, and learning innovative ways to stimulate similar success throughout the enterprise.

The Challenge

Probably the largest challenge to Office 2.0 is breaking down the barriers put up by IT Czars and establishing trusted, reliable ways to work outside the firewall and in the cloud. Most enterprises are leery, and rightly so, of putting their eggs in someone else’s basket. It will be interesting to see how other companies are tackling this issue.

Check back here and via Twitter, and I will keep you posted throughout the week from Office 2.0.

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One of my favorite tools when learning a new language has been Google Translate. I know that it has plenty of problems, as does pretty much any software-based translation system. There are many things that simply cannot be cleanly translated without the application of a little human intelligence. But it does a reasonably good job of getting the gist of a conversation. I found it useful for “checking” my own translations.

Google has done a great job of getting their other products (mail, calendar, even docs) iPhone enabled, but their translator was neglected for some reason — until last week.

Yep, Google Translate is now available on your iPhone or iPod Touch. It’s very quick and being free, makes an excellent resource for travelers (or students!). To access the new iPhone interface, just point your iPhone browser to http://translate.google.com. Yes, this is the same URL that you can use on your PC, which makes it easy to remember.

Unfortunately, Google has decided to auto-detect if you are browsing the site with an iPhone and automatically serve the iPhone version. This is convenient if that’s what you want, but the iPhone version doesn’t have all the same functionality of the full website. Most notable exclusion? The “translate this URL” function is missing from the iPhone version. And Google didn’t see fit to include a link or an option to view the full version (which, up until last week, you could do on an iPhone).

So kudos to Google for (finally) providing an iPhone specific version. And curses to Google for forcing us to use a limited version, with no option to get to the “full” translate site.

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Flump is an Adobe AIR application that lets you download all the public photos from any Flickr user. Written by a couple of Adobe employees — Lee Brimelow and Mike Chambers — Flump makes it easy to backup your photos for archival purposes — useful if Flickr ever looses your stuff.

Personally, I have grown to trust Flickr for all my photos, and often I don’t even bother keeping local copies. This trust in “the cloud” sometimes worries me, especially when I hear the horror stories of people losing their Gmail inbox or worse. Flump fills the gap and makes it easy to create a nice clean backup to my local drive, where I can then burn it to DVD and file it away.

You can get Flump now at Google Code.

Thanks to Amit for the tip.

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