Perhaps the greatest treasure in the recent MacHeist nanoBundle (which was covered by Simon in a recent post) is ShoveBox. It’s a clippings organizer that lets you capture, view, organize and edit data that is elegant in its simplicity. This very usable application resides in the menubar, making it accessible at all times regardless of what application you are using.

Capture Information in ShoveBox

Living online, we can get overwhelmed by the sheer amount of “stuff” that we need to keep track of — URLs, images, notes, quotes, snippets of information, the list goes on. With ShoveBox, you can easily capture all of that stuff into the application and keep it organized and easy to find when you need it. It’s designed to fit effortlessly into your workflow, making it ideal for users who aren’t productivity or organizational ninjas.

For example, you can quickly capture images from your Mac’s iSight Camera. Another capture option is QuickJot, which lets you speedily add your own notes into ShoveBox through a user-definable hotkey. While QuickJot notes don’t have the tagging and Source URL fields like Evernote, ShoveBox isn’t designed to be a full-blown note-taking application. QuickJot is for capturing notes on the fly.

ShoveBox also lets you capture data from the clipboard — it’s really easy to use and a great way to capture snippets of text you want to keep.

Organize Information in ShoveBox

ShoveBox doesn’t force you to use any organizational mantra or fad, so novice users can be organized and productive from the get-go. It has a simple set of organizational tools (folders, flags and labels) that you can set up and use as you wish.

You also have the option to export textual data to text, RTF, and Word files, and images to BMP, TIFF, JPG and PNG.

ShoveBox for iPhone

After checking out ShoveBox as part of the bounty from the MacHeist nanoBundle, I was happy to see there was an iPhone application — I was lucky enough to snag it while it was on sale. ShoveBox for iPhone lets you sync up with ShoveBox on your desktop via Wi-Fi and have full access to all your clippings while on the go.

If you missed the MacHeist nanoBundle, you can obtain ShoveBox directly from WonderWarp Software. It costs $24.95 for a full license with a 30-day trial available. The ShoveBox Mobile application is available from the iTunes App Store for $3.99.

How do you keep tabs on all the bits and bytes of your digital life?

I’ve been talking with a lot of entrepreneurs lately, and one thing I can say for certain is that, as a group, they’re very eager to help each other. They get just as excited talking about the pursuits of others as they do talking about their own, and they’re more than willing to go the extra mile for those around them.

But how do you tap into this invaluable resource? It can be intimidating to go to others for help and can be perceived as pushy and self-serving if approached the wrong way. Here are a few tips to help others help you.

1. Embrace the idea of “paying it forward.”

People really do want to help you, which usually stems from them wanting to help everyone in their network. They ask what you do and immediately think, “Oh, you should meet [fill in the blank]!” Likewise, when you mention that you have a particular need, they mention several people you might consider and offer to connect you with them.

The most important thing to remember is that networking is all about adding value. The more you find ways to help those around you, the more opportunities will inevitably come your way.

2. Make it easy.

In an article on Techcrunch, Michael Arrington said “Those of us in a position to help entrepreneurs need to do more of it…But this is a two way street. Budding entrepreneurs trying to break down the walls need to grow up. Most of the time people don’t have the time to help you, and you shouldn’t aim hate at them for it. Instead, try a different angle or a different person.” This quote made me think of two things. Firstly, it’s important to remember that people are busy, so you need to make it so easy for them to help you that they can do it quickly and without too many steps.

For example, Betsy Talbot of Married with Luggage emailed people in her network recently asking for promotional help. She made it insanely easy by including links, as well as short and specific instructions for what to do with each of the links. She even included copy so that we didn’t have to come up with it ourselves.

3. Don’t be self-serving.

The second thing about Arrington’s quote that struck me was about trying a different angle. It’s easy to come at things from the wrong angle, and when promoting a business, that’s usually followed by rejection. If you always think of it as, “How can I get people talking about me or my business?,” then that means (a) you have to introduce yourself to someone without sounding like you’re selling something and (b) you have to somehow get them to feel compelled to mention you to others. If you think of it this way, it can seem purely self-serving.

Instead, find a way to help them, and of course, you have to always be sincere with your help. Maybe ask to interview the person for your blog or podcast, or if the person has written a book recently, offer to review it. By reaching out in this way, the person will actually look forward to learning more about you and your business, and if they enjoy talking with you, they may take the time to mention you to people in their own network.

The main thing to remember is that people are more than willing to help you. Most entrepreneurs are acutely aware of the value of networking, and successful ones understand that networking is all about helping others. Just remember, as Arrington said, it’s a two-way street.

What have been your biggest lessons in networking and helping others help you with your business? How do you make sure that you’re not perceived as self-serving?

Image from Flickr by crschmidt

When you’re trying to pull together all of the elements for a website, having a tool that can help you to build a mockup or wireframe in a matter of minutes can make a world of difference. Mockingbird is such a tool: You can drag and drop user interface elements onto a page, rearranging and resizing as you go. You can even link together the various pages within your mockup so that anyone you share it with can immediately see how a user might navigate through the site.

The web-based application has been developed with simplicity in mind. Any task that could be made automatic or streamlined has been. Even sizing text has been automated — if you resize an object, any text associated with it will be adjusted to match. You can add as many pages to a mockup as you like, with as many elements as you need. Mockingbird offers a wide array of user interface elements based on the elements that are commonly used in building web sites. From embedded videos to different types of text, you can easily drop in anything you’d expect to see on a web site. It’s the little things that make Mockingbird a solid tool: you can snap elements to a grid, so that your mockup looks clean without requiring you to spend extra time getting it that way.

Unfortunately, there are no templates that you can base your designs on, but overall, Mockingbird has been designed with speeding up the process of creating a web site in mind. It’s easy to share a mockup with clients or other stakeholders in the design process. Mockingbird will provide you with a link that you can send out, or alternatively you can use an embed code to place it on a web site.

Being able to embed your mockups is a nice alternative to trying to share a mockup with a whole list of people via a email — instead, it’s just a matter of following a link over to whatever system you use to communicate with coworkers or clients as a matter of course. There’s also no need to install anything in order to view Mockingbird’s mockups — even Flash is unnecessary. The application is based on Cappuccino, a web app framework that doesn’t use plugins. It may not be the best choice for projects that require some privacy, however, as it looks like anyone with the link can check out your mockup.

Mockingbird is in beta and is currently free to use — you can actually demo the application without even registering. However, to save a mockup, you’ll need to provide an email address and a password in order to create an account. If you just need a tool to pull together a quick mockup, it’s ideal — you don’t even need to know much about web design, making it useful for a non-designer communicating ideas to a designer, and the ability to embed your wireframes is a nice touch that isn’t available in some of the other wireframing web apps like Balsamiq and FlairBuilder. However, if you’re doing a lot of web design work, you may need a more robust solution. If, for instance, your workflow requires you to be able to download your mockup to use in other apps, Mockingbird does not currently provide that option.

Which wireframing tools do you use?

If you don’t have a professional blog or web site, you may think that you don’t need to worry about content strategy. Think again. Celine gave some great advice in her article “How to Develop a Content Strategy for Your Professional Blog,” but these days our blogs and web sites aren’t the only windows to our professional souls. If you use social media platforms for professional purposes, you should consider having a content strategy for the material you publish on them as well.

What is Content Strategy?

Kristina Halvorson sums it up nicely in her superb article “The Discipline of Content Strategy” on A List Apart:

“Content strategy plans for the creation, publication, and governance of useful, usable content.”

If you’re tweeting or updating on Facebook or elsewhere, you’ve got creation and publication of content down. But what about all the other keywords in that definition?

Developing a Content Strategy For Your Social Media Presence

Putting together a content strategy for your social media presence can be a real challenge, especially when you mix business with pleasure; my Facebook friends include relatives, old friends, new pals and purely professional contacts, some of whom I’ve never met personally. You can’t please all the people all the time when you have such a mixed audience, and the privacy settings are too global to adequately address this issue. (My only strategy for Facebook is not to publish things that are too personal. Content strategy is as much about what you shouldn’t publish as it is about what you should.)

But Twitter, for example, is a different story. It’s easy to have separate “personal” and “pro” Twitter accounts. And if you have a pro Twitter account, it’s also easy to apply a content strategy to it. The same is true of professional networks like LinkedIn.

Planning and Governance of Useful, Usable Content

Here are some ideas that might help you get started on a strategy:

• Planning: Define your mission (what you want to achieve with your content). Define your audience. Define what you want your content to do for your audience (inform, persuade, entertain). Define the nature of your content (what it should consist of and the tone of the content). Decide how often to produce it. Decide how you will interact with your audience.
• Governance: In this context, I interpret this to mean managing and monitoring your content and its impact, as well as your own role. Are you meeting your audience’s needs? What’s working and what’s not, and why? Is the quality of your content consistently high? Are you responsive and available?
• Useful and usable: Most of the blogs and Twitter accounts of small businesses I see need a content strategy. They tend to be too inwardly focused, all about their own updates and services (boring), or else they are too much about the owner/founder. These businesses generally need to figure out how to provide some real value to their audiences in order to keep them coming back and turn them into real fans, or even evangelists.

Here’s an example: I discovered a nice app the other day called Memory-Life. It’s a site where you can store media and other files in a virtual “box of memories.” (It’s still only available in French, but hopefully not for long. You can see a demo by clicking “Voir la démo.“)

It has a Twitter account, but it could be doing a lot more. Its audience is interested in preserving memories, so in addition to the occasional updates about upgrades and features, it could share links to articles about repairing old photos, or compressing large video files. It could provide creative suggestions, like “Upload pictures of all your grandmother’s jewelry to your box of memories” or “Create your own art gallery with Memory-Life.” It could suggest alternative uses for the app; designers could use it to create inspiration boards, for example.

If you want to connect with and engage an audience, your content has to provoke thought and action. You know you’re adding value if your content is being retweeted, liked and shared. It takes work, but it’s worth it.

You Too Could Be a Content Strategist!

Content strayegy is a relatively new career field. Large corporations are beginning to have in-house content strategists, but there is no reason why this job shouldn’t be done by consultants, which is where you come in. It could be an ideal occupation for a web worker.

If you’d like to learn ore about content strategy, in April, several chapters of the Society for Technical Communication are putting on “Content Strategy Forum 2010,” a two-day conference on content strategy in Paris. The conference is intended for:

“…anyone who develops, manages, or delivers content within their own organization or for their clients: user experience designers, information architects, business analysts, technical writers, web project managers, documentation managers, translators, web marketers, practicing content strategists, and those looking to break into the field.”

Learn more about the conference program and register here (tickets are very affordable).

Here’s some additional recommended reading on content strategy:

• “Content Strategy: The Philosophy of Data,” a great article by Rachel Lovinger
• There are several good articles on A List Apart about content strategy.

Have you implemented a content strategy for your social media presence?

Image by the_franz from sxc.hu

Last year, I attended a professional workshop where the instructor asked us to write out our worst habit. Unfortunately, more than one answer flooded my brain, and I had to seriously consider which to choose. In the end, I decided that my most unabashed, shameless and ubiquitous bad habit is impatience.

My impatience invades every aspect of my personal and professional life. For instance, I constantly find myself wondering, “Why do these people take so long in line at the grocery store?” Counting out each precious penny, then pulling out a coupon, then deciding they don’t really want the milk after all. Instead of an express line for 12 items or less, I think grocery store lines should be divided up into only two lanes — a line for those of us who move fast, have somewhere important to go and something worthwhile to do and a line for those who don’t. See, I told you I was impatient.

In terms of how it’s affected my productivity at work, I’m embarrassed to say that my impatience has led to countless instances of emails sent in a hurry, which only needed to be retracted or clarified latter; decisions made on quick assumptions  — that turned out to be wrong — and occasional crankiness with those around me who are not moving fast enough.

Having pulled back the curtain on my own worst habit in the workshop, I decided to do something about it. I’ve spent a good deal of time over the last year working on my bad habit of impatience. And while I’ll never be “the soul of patience,” I have made progress. I’ve learned to quell my initial reaction to respond immediately, and, instead, take a deep breath and wait things out a bit. It’s helped my productivity by saving me time, money and stress.

“We all walk around on a daily basis with habits that are detrimental to our productivity,” says Larry Tobin, co-creator of Habitchanger.com.

Tobin, whose 42-day online habit-changing program deals with everything from quitting smoking to reducing stress, says that science has shown us that we can teach an old dog new tricks.

“A habit is an involuntary, unconscious action,” says Tobin. “Habits are learned, not instinctual. They are something we have taught ourselves to do, so it is possible to unlearn them,” he says.

In fact, a whole slew of recent scientific research in the field of neuroplasticity has proven that the brain has the ability to adapt to new information, if it’s consistently presented over a period of time. “It takes between 30 and 60 days of doing the same thing over and over again on a daily basis to create a new habit or break an old one,” says Tobin.

According to MedicineNet.com, Neuroplasticity is the brain’s ability to reorganize itself by forming new neural connections throughout life. Neuroplasticity allows the neurons (nerve cells) in the brain to adjust their activities in response to new situations or to changes in their environment.

Why not put the power of your flexible brain to work? Here’s a simple, two-step process I teach my consulting clients to help them break down their bad habits and build up their productivity.

Step 1: Call out the bad habit and identify its negative consequences.

“To break a habit, the first thing you need to do is step aside and become aware of what you are doing,” says Tobin. In my 25-plus years as a consultant, I’ve noticed a consistent group of productivity-killing habits including procrastination, disorganization, being ill-prepared and operating in crisis management. What are your bad business habits and what negative impact has the bad habit had in your business (and perhaps personal) life? Here are a few examples:

• You work full-time for a company and often find that you arrive at meetings unprepared. The negative impact might include: Feeling unable to make a decision in the meeting, or the progress of the group being hindered by your lack of preparation.
• You’re a freelancer and procrastinate to the point of lost productivity. The negative impact might include: Missing a deadline for submitting a proposal for a new piece of work or delivering late on a project to an important client — hurting your credibility and chances for future work.
• You telecommute and have a disorganized home office. The negative impact might include: Being late to meetings at the office due to looking for needed documents at home or becoming distracted by to-dos around the house, rather than confronting cleaning up a messy home office.

Step 2: Create alternative actions.

One way to change an old, bad habit is to replace it with a new, better one. By practicing the new action, a pathway is created in your brain that, over time, can become as strong as (if not stronger than) the previous behavior. The key is to start small, with little actions you can implement easily. So get creative and think of some alternate actions you could take to counter the bad habit you identified. For example:

• I will schedule my computer alarm to notify me 30 minutes before the start of the meeting so that I have time to look over the meeting agenda and my notes before I arrive.
• The next time I have a proposal to write for a potential client, I will set aside a specific block of time in my calendar, on a specific date, to get it written.
• The first thing I will do every morning when I go into my home office is spend 15 minutes clearing off my desk or cleaning out a file.

Just remember, good habits don’t suddenly appear overnight; instead, they develop slowly over time, as certain behaviors — repeated over and over — begin to overlay the way you work. The good news is that, given a mind as malleable as yours, breaking bad habits is just a few new neural pathways away.

What’s your worst bad habit?

e-tipi sounds like a weird name for a web-based service, and when you find out it stands for “Espresso Thinking Platform,” things don’t become much clearer. But once you find out what the app’s developers think “Espresso Thinking” is, then you start to get the idea:

“We believe that sharing an espresso in a nice café creates a particular atmosphere that frees minds and promotes promising ideas to expressly appear. This is what we call Espresso Thinking.”

It’s a nice thought, but is that really something that can be captured in a web-based environment? I recently talked about the same kind of collaboration (lack of coffee products notwithstanding) in an article about my beloved sketchbook, so I was eager to find out if I could recreate the experience digitally using e-tipi.

e-tipi incorporates elements of Twitter, Digg, wikis and blogs to create a workspace in which ideas can be born and explored. Each user page is called a tipi, and it contains various ideas submitted by the tipi’s users. All of the ideas center around a central “challenge,” which the main problem or purpose of the tipi. Think of a challenge like a big picture problem that requires a multi-parted and multi-staged solution.

Along with your tipi page, you also get a unique email address that contributors can send their ideas to directly, for quickly adding to the tipi’s repository. You can also follow your tipi on Twitter, the stream for which is automatically updated with information of your choosing. I like both of these tie-ins, because they make e-tipi feel more connected with other networks, making it much more accessible, which is something I like in idea generation tools.

You can also export your data at any time as either XML or HTML, which makes it easy to plug into other tools, including database management software. It’s a nice way to help you organize the raw information you produce using e-tipi’s tools. A messy free-for-all is a good way to generate creative thought, but it may not be the best storage solution for more polished ideas.

Ideas are listed on their own separate page, and you can sort them by activity and date. Each idea listed shows votes for or against, total views, and the number of comments users have posted about each. You also get the idea’s title, its creator, any tags that may have been applied, and the status, if the idea has one. For each idea, an administrator can set the status to tell others how far along the process intis, using labels like “Accepted,” “Started,” etc. You can also filter your ideas list by keyword to narrow your search.

Each idea page looks a little like a Digg article page, complete with the text of the idea in question and comments made by other users underneath. You also get to see potentially related ideas listed at the bottom of the description page.

Other nice features of e-tipi include a tag cloud, and a member display, in which you can view a user’s profile information, and access information like how many ideas they’ve contributed to, including comments and voting, and how many documents they’ve contributed. You can also highlight certain areas in a Spotlight menu for quick access.

Overall, e-tipi is a very rough-cut tool, when measured against others I’ve tried in the past. It’s not exactly easy on the eyes, and at times it can even seem disorganized. Despite that sense of mess, or perhaps because of it, e-tipi does feel like something that could well operate as fertile ground for the generation and refinement of ideas. I like the sense of freedom inherent in the site, and the potential for unstructured, loose collaboration with a wide number of viewers.

Do you use a web app for idea generation and refinement? Which one?

Here are some interesting posts from around the ‘Net to catch up with over the weekend:

• TechCrunch: “Google Chrome OS To Launch Within A Week”
• Six Revisions: “Top 20 Essential Firefox Add-ons for Web Designers”
• Outright: “Is Your Small Business Ready for the Holidays?”
• Freelance Folder: “How Freelance Businesses Can Measure Social Media Results”
• Convince & Convert: “What Do Twitter Lists Say About Your Personal Brand?”
• ReadWriteWeb: “Google Executive Says Companies Can Get Rid of Microsoft Office…Next Year”
• LifeSnips: “100 Ways To Find Ideas For Your Blog Posts”

What are you reading this weekend?

As I sit down each day to do my work, the vast majority of which involves writing (articles, web site content, tweets and blog posts), I can’t help but think about the writing rules drilled into me by past English teachers. In most cases, their advice is still very pertinent, and I write better by adhering to it. But there are a few rules that would prove detrimental to my online work if I continued to follow them.

I was taught how to write in a world in which print media still dominated the written word. Much has changed since those pre-Internet days, the practice of writing not least of all. As a result, some things that were once considered big no-nos are now standard practice. Here’s a few old chestnuts you should think about tossing out as you transition to online writing. You may even take joy in doing so, if you’re the rebellious sort.

1. Write What You Know

Even when I was a much younger writer, and a big fan of science fiction writing, I found this rule to be rather limiting. The fact is, now that I’m doing various kinds of online writing that differ greatly depending on the contract, it’s become downright anti-productive.

A much better and more applicable rule for today’s provider of online content is know what you write, as quickly and efficiently as you can. That means doing research to gain a sense of familiarity with your topic, and to quickly find out what kind of tone and tenor is acceptable for the genre. Honestly, your goal as a writer is to be able to fool an expert into thinking the content was created by someone with at least a comfortable grasp and lengthy history with the subject at hand.

2. Don’t Use Contractions

Contractions like “I’ll” and “They’re” may have been completely against all good sense back when you were writing essays for school, but they’re completely acceptable in almost all online writing (see what I just did there?). In fact, when I work as an editor for blog content, I often insert contractions where they belong.

What many people don’t realize when they make the jump from print to online writing is that web content has as much do with spoken English as it does written English, in terms of what’s considered acceptable (see, I did it again!). Contractions more accurately emulate a conversational tone, which is something many blogs, marketing departments and community builders are aiming for with their online publications. If you do not use contractions in your writing, it is liable to sound awkward and stilted to a seasoned Internet media consumer.

3. Revise, Revise, Revise

Revision is terrific, don’t get me wrong (I can see editors all over the world glaring at me menacingly). It’s terrific and necessary, when you have the luxury of time. The fact is, with a lot of Internet writing, you just don’t have that luxury. Taking time to meticulously revise a piece could result in something that was current becoming old news, especially now that Twitter delivers news in real time.

Read over what you’ve written, always, but try to practice producing publication-quality prose on a first draft basis. Part of that means editing as you go, but part of it is just writing with a high degree of frequency. It helps if you can identify your common errors in advance, because that way you’ll be attuned to those areas as you write them, which should make you more likely to catch a mistake as it happens.

Those are the three big rules I break every day. And every time I do, I can still hear my tenth grade English teacher uncapping his red Sharpie. Do what you will, Mr. Marchand, but the Internet demands an entirely new set of rules, and she’s the only English teacher I have to please now.

What writing “rules” do you break regularly?

Corporate email is becoming increasingly less effective for project communications in today’s geographically dispersed work teams. It’s gradually being displaced by solutions like Microsoft SharePoint, instant messaging and even social media tools.

Following the lead of Twitter, microblogging has began to enter the enterprise with Yammer and Present.ly leading the way. Over on GigaOM, Jennifer recently wrote a post entitled “Social Network Use in the Office Could Spur Better Enterprise Technology” about the value of social media inside the enterprise and some of the benefits for companies.

The next step is taking corporate microblogging tools mobile. Both Yammer and Present.ly offer iPhone apps (available for free download from the iTunes App Store):

Yammer: The open-source Yammer iPhone application works similarly to many iPhone blogging clients. With Yammer on the iPhone, you have options to view your Yammer message feed securely; view received messages; view Yammer feeds including direct messages, sent messages, liked messages, bookmarked messages and RSS feeds; access to the directory of users;  and settings where you can view your push settings. The app is clean and easy to use.

Present.ly: Present.ly for iPhone provides secure remote access to the Present.ly microblogging platform. Its features include the ability to post updates; send direct messages to individuals or teams; view a timeline with replies, direct messages and updates; and support for attachments.  While I like using the Present.ly web interface, during testing it took me a couple of tries to get the iPhone app to connect to my account I set up for this post.

Do you currently use Yammer or Present.ly from your iPhone? Share your experience below.

Just in case you missed any of them, here are the five most popular posts on WebWorkerDaily this week:

• 6 Tips For Using Google Wave On Your First Project

While many of us are still scratching our heads trying to figure out how to fit Wave into our workflow, Will has tried using it on a real client project — here he shares some tips.

• My First Month With Google Wave: Can’t Even Stand On the Board

Conversely, Darrell has been using Wave for a month and is not exactly enthralled by the experience.

• How to Build a Better Twitter Bio

Meryl shows you how to build a more effective Twitter bio.

• 16 Lessons in Customer Service from a Car Salesman

Amber’s been trying to buy a car — and got some great lessons in customer service as part of the deal.

• Google Dashboard: Find Out What Google Knows About You

Google has just released Google Dashboard, a window onto all of the data it stores about you.

We’d like to say thanks to this month’s WebWorkerDaily sponsors:

• FreshBooks: Look Professional with FreshBooks.

WebWorkerDaily readers are a diverse bunch. Every week, I profile a different reader and ask them to share what they do, how they do it, and some of their favorite hints and tips.

Who are you and what do you do?
My name is Adam Valuckas, and I have an awesome full-time job creating online video advertising for a newspaper. My second full-time job is my startup VJIX Creative. At VJIX I make online videos that highlight how applications will befit their customers. I have two projects completed and a few more on the way.

What’s a typical day like for you?
When working on VJIX projects, my days are spent animating motion graphics. It can be painstaking work — I imagine that watching me work is about as exciting as watching my girlfriend knit. To keep myself entertained I stream films from Netflix on my Xbox nonstop unless I’m editing audio.

What gear and software do you use, and why?
My main offline apps are:

• Adobe After Effects. I am an Apple guy but nothing compares to After Effects for motion graphics. For longer projects I create individual shots in After Effects then edit them in Final Cut Pro.
• Final Cut Pro. If you’re an editor then you’re either a Final Cut Pro or an Avid person. I got into editing when nonlinear editing (computer editing, not tape-to-tape) was just coming into stride with the Sony ES7 (if you know what this is, you’re old!) and Media 100, Final Cut was the logical choice for me.
• Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator. I use these for general photo and vector manipulation.
• Firefox. The Firefox extensions PermaTabs and FaviconizeTab are the perfect duo to create small permanent tabs for web sites that you use frequently.

I also use a ton of other Mac applications to get my work done. Something a professional might not think about using is iTunes, but it is a fantastic production music library program. You can lump music into genres, convert it to AIFF for editing, and then easily “locate in finder” to keep your production music easy to listen to and quick to find.

My main online apps are:

• Google Apps. Google Apps provides great email, document editing and calendaring. I just wish Google would treat Apps users as first-rate Google citizens.  The video encoding is awesomely horrible — also I would like to have access to services that my personal Gmail account does.
• PipelineDeals CRM. Pipeline’s CRM lands somewhere between Highrise and Salesforce in complexity, but its customization and flexible sales flow are by far the best for me. I have custom fields, to-do lists, and reports that fulfill my lust for information organization. Plus, it is really easy to use. I use it for project management as well, even though it wasn’t intended to do that.
• Evernote. With Evernote I can keep insane amounts of Internet snippets in one location. I use tags with Flickr, but with Evernote I use a ton of folders, which means I can make quick web clippings with the Firefox extension without having to think about filing. No more losing things!
• Netvibes. What makes this service really useful is its widgets. On one of my Netvibes tabs I have (my ego surfing tab) is my Alexa rating, Feedburner subscribers, Google page rank, various keyword alerts, Google Analytics and Webmaster Tools.
• JungleDisk: Every hard drive will die; it is a sad fact of life. I chose JungleDisk online backup and storage for its additional services, such as the local disk, and being able to keep files backed up that are no longer on my computer.

What’s your favorite web working tip?
If you’re going to make a web video you should aim to produce it to HD standards (unless you’re talking about video banners). With HD video you can upload it to video-sharing sites like YouTube (maintaining HD quality playback), repurpose that footage for TV, and size the video down to play on your web site (a win-win-win situation!)

Always remember that compression is your video’s nemesis. When uploading your video to a video-sharing site or converting it to the Flash format, you want to limit the amount of compression before encoding it for the web. In the video editing world, Quicktime is the best format to use. An uncompressed two-minute video may be 4-8GB. But a Quicktime video using the Photo Jpeg codec will give you around a 600MB file that retains virtually all the quality. These files are huge, but you want to start with the best quality video before converting it for the web.

If you would like to be profiled on WWD, get in touch with me at simon (at) gigaom (dot) com.

The second wave of H1N1 swine flu is here. Vaccine’s in short supply, so we need alternate strategies for coping with the pandemic, the consequences of which could include a lack of Internet bandwidth capacity if large numbers of workers opt for staying home and telecommuting via the web, according to a new report prepared by the U.S. Government Accountability Office.

Many of us work from home already, which does afford distinct advantages for infection avoidance during rampant epidemics. However, many web workers operate at least part of the time out of offices, call centers, and institutional settings where some colleagues will imagine they not only have a “right,” but even an obligation, to show up at work with the flu so long as they’re able to stagger in — a problem known as presenteeism, which Karen has written about previously.

So what can you do if you can’t operate entirely from home?

The usual advice to wash hands frequently and thoroughly, to wear gloves as much as is practical when touching common access surfaces and protective masks when within six feet of infected people is sound. Avoid touching your mouth, nose or eyes with hands unless they’ve just been washed and not re-contaminated by contact with taps, door handles or other surfaces that may have been touched by infected individuals. Influenza A and B viruses can survive 24-48 hours on hard, nonporous surfaces such as metals and plastic, and 8-12 hours on cloth, paper and tissues. Frequently disinfect shared-access surfaces that may have been touched or sneezed/coughed on by victims of the virus.

Computer input devices and especially cellphones used by more than one person can be efficient disease vectors. An Apple Knowledge Base article on the topic advises:

“In addition to regular cleaning of your computer and input devices (keyboards, trackpads, and mice), you may find it necessary to disinfect them.

“Multiple people using the same computer, people using the computer when they were ill, and the particular environment where the computer is used, are a few reasons you may wish to disinfect areas of the computer that people come into contact with the most.”

The article goes on to suggest: “In order to properly disinfect these areas, you should use Lysol Wipes, Clorox Disinfecting wipes, or Clorox Kitchen Disinfecting Wipes…”

Another strategy of prevention in the office is use of keyboards, mice, mouse pads, wrist rests and even cellphones that have been coated with antimicrobial agents, either organic (this means antibiotics, which are possibly not so good for you) or (preferably) silver-based.

If enough of us employ these precautionary and preventative strategies, we can hopefully get through this flu season with a minimum of disruption.

What flu prevention strategies are you using?

Image credit: stock.xchng user mzacha.

Two small pieces of recent Google news were just announced that merit a mention, since both have ramifications for web workers. First, Google has put a date on a Mac beta build of Chrome, meaning there’s finally an end in sight to one of the company’s most egregious oversights. Also, a new change to Google Wave should reduce inbox clutter, and maybe make it more usable for those finding it hard to adjust it (like me).

Let’s get to that great news first. While the “new” web browser has now been available for download to Windows users for over a year (the beta was first released last September), Mac users only recently got access to a stable developer’s build of Chromium, and that’s far from a release version of the software. Luckily, the new Mac beta is said to be on track for an early December release.

I’ve been dying to use Chrome’s ultra-clean interface and separately-processed tabs for my work online, which often sees tabs numbering in the double digits, spread across many windows and three screens. If I was really diligent about documenting it, I could probably come up with a pretty solid number about how much productive time I’ve lost dealing with recovering or recreating data after a Firefox tab-related crash. That’s what you owe me, so-late-as-to-be-offensive Chrome Mac beta build!

As for the Wave side of things, Google now allows users to “Follow” or “Unfollow” any public wave. That means that important ones will remain or reappear in your inbox as they are updated, while ones that you’re not particularly interested in will remain out of sight and out of mind. Experienced Wave users will note that “Unfollow” replaces “Mute,” allowing you to remove Waves you’ve started or been added to specifically, so that updates to them will no longer appear in your inbox. Google explains the new feature in detail at the official Wave blog (and if you’re still not sure what Wave could be used for, check out “Google Wave Explained” over on our subscription research service, GigaOM Pro)

Even though I’m mad at it for keeping Chrome for Mac from me for so long, I have to admit that Google has been on a hot streak lately when it comes to innovation for web workers. Even if I’m not automatically in love with everything it’s putting out there, I am in love with the fact that they’re putting out so much of it.

Are you looking forward to trying out Chrome on your Mac?

Because of its recent return to my working methodology, I want to take a moment to single out a very low-tech web working tool for praise. I’m talking about the sketchbook, that handy little tome in which we can capture and generate some of our best ideas. Not to be confused with the writer’s notebook, mind you, which is a great tool, too, but a different kind of beast.

The sketchbook is a free space for your ideas to play, unbound by lines and ruled margins. It’s a laboratory, a playground, a testing facility and a sounding board. And perhaps best of all, it requires no batteries and can go pretty much anywhere you do. Here’s why I love mine so much, and why any web worker would do well to have their own on hand.

Idea Log

You know the feeling of getting hit with innovation lightning? The one you get when you come up with something great, something you’re terrified will fly out of your head before you get to a computer. That kind of idea, to my mind, is best captured by the sketchbook, in as close an approximation to the unprocessed original as absolutely possible.

The nature of our brains is such that as we think about an idea, we tend to process and refine it while we keep it in our heads. I much prefer to capture the really good ideas raw, before I’ve had a chance to rationalize and massage them into something more manageable, but possibly much less potent, too.

With a sketchbook, I find that I can capture the idea in its essence, unhindered by editing and page constraints. I’m a very visual person, so it helps that I can use words and images easily thanks to the clean, blank unlined pages. It also makes it easier to add to or scan later on. Plus, even ideas that turn out to be not-so-great could transform into something really useful just through the absent-minded doodling I do on a regular basis on top of existing sketches and concepts.

Collaborative Tool

Describing what you want to do or want to have done can be very hard. Project disappointments, in fact, are often due to confusion regarding expectations, rather than any real failure on the part of anyone involved in the process.

Having a sketchbook on-hand, depending on your comfort level and relationship with the individual you’re working with, can be a great way to spitball ideas using non-traditional means. Even if design has nothing to do with your project, you can use the space to rough out workflows and processes, draw mind maps and illuminate key project concepts in a way that verbal communication simply doesn’t allow for.

Passing a sketchbook back and forth, and taking turns writing, sketching and thinking out loud has produced some of the best collaborative work I’ve ever produced.

Stress Relief

Doodling has always been one of my favorite pastimes. Ever since my early school days, when I used to idly doodle in the margins of my primary workbooks, I’ve enjoyed sketching and drawing as a means to relax. With all that practice, you’d think I’d be better sketcher than I am.

Skill aside, a sketchbook to which I can turn at any moment to work off a little stress through therapeutic doodling is a must-have for my professional health. It’s always close to hand, it doesn’t cost anything, and it isn’t bad for my health. There are few other stress relievers for which all of the above is also true. Best of all, it’s a leisure activity that I can actually do while I’m working, which is invaluable.

Even if you’ve never tried sketching or doodling before, give it a shot and see how it makes you feel. The key is to master being able to draw with a complete absence of self-conscious thought, so that you truly get lost in the activity.

So do yourself a favor and get a sketchbook. It will become a constant companion, and possibly one of your most trusted advisors.

Do you tote a sketchbook?

It’s that time of year again! Yes, the holidays are right around the corner. But I don’t care. I’m more excited about LeWeb ‘09, which will take place in Paris on December 9th and 10th.

And since the theme of LeWeb this year is “The Real-Time Web” (a hot topic that we’ve been covering in depth in the NewNet category over on our subscription research service GigaOM Pro) I thought I’d take this opportunity to stuff your stockings with a few real-time goodies.

First, something I can’t wait to get my hands on: WorkSnug. Boys and girls, this is the sexiest thing I’ve seen in a while. It’s an augmented reality iPhone app designed just for people like us. It will magically reveal the nearest establishments with Wi-Fi, from the donut shop down the street to full-fledged coworking spaces. Not only that, there will be reviews of the spots, even down to whether the coffee’s any good. Watch the video and register on the site to get updates. It’s starting with London, then San Francisco, and soon the world! And it’s free!

Next on the goodie list is SpeakLike, an app that uses a combination of machine and human translators to translate your emails and IMs in real time so you really can communicate with the whole world (or at least those who speak any of 30 languages). It also translates dynamic web content. It’s a pay service, but could be handy for clients and collaborators. Translators can sign up to work for the service here.

I just can’t deal with Google Docs, though I know many swear by it. But there’s another option for real-time document collaboration: EtherPad. They promise “really real-time” collaboration; EtherPad docs refresh every half second, while Google Docs refresh every 15 seconds. I don’t know about you, but I can do a lot of typing in 15 seconds. EtherPad also offers infinite undo capability. Even if you can’t think of a way to apply this app to your work, it occurred to me it would be great for helping the kids with their essays and reports, and there are probably lots of other practical and creative applications for it. So do check it out.

More about LeWeb ‘09

LeWeb is Europe’s largest, and the world’s second-largest web conference. As such, it attracts la crème de la crème of the web world. Even though it’s in Paris, it’s held in English, so don’t let that stop you from coming. There’s still plenty of time to sign up, and I can tell you where to get good falafel. Let me know if you’ll be there!

We’d love to hear about real-time web apps you use for work or play, and what you’d like the real-time Web to look like.