Blog Reviews If you're looking for some new blogs to read, check out the blog reviews over at Forbes.com. The blogs they review cover a range of topics, including political, media, medical, health and fitness, small business and more.  ¶ 11:23 p.m. 0 comments

  Delicious Bookmarks Delicious is more useful for finding new and interesting links than it is for finding your own old bookmarks.

I was looking for a link the other day that I was positive I bookmarked on Delicious a few months back, but for the life of me, I could not find it. I thought I tagged it with a certain word, but no. I couldn't find it.

Bookmarks don't work for me at all, no matter what the implementation. Maybe the answer is to blog your bookmarks instead (like Cory Doctorow). That way you have the link and all the annotation you care to add. And all easily searchable.  ¶ 4:43 p.m. 0 comments

  Google Calculator Although the Google Calculator is nothing new, a lot of people don't appreciate it's power. You can use it for more than just a quick multiplication or division. For example, in Canada we use the metric system and my car's mileage is rated in the awkward litres per 100 kilometers instead of the handy miles per gallon (or even kilometers per litre). So to convert from the former to the latter, type this into Google's search box:

8 litres per 100 kilometers in miles per gallon

And Google replies with:

29.401823 miles per gallon

Of course, Google understands the abbreviations as well, so you could write mpg instead of miles per gallon.  ¶ 8:49 a.m. 0 comments

  Firefox Increasing Market Share From Slashdot, Firefox increasing market share between one half and one percent a month since the beginning of the year and is now at 8.71%.  ¶ 10:33 p.m. 0 comments

  Need an Email Address? You're interested in something on the net, but the site requires registration and wants an email address from you. You don't want to give them your address and invite the spam in. But you still need to receive an email from them. What do you do? Use Mailinator. Just make up any old address at mailinator.com, like this: anyoldaddress@mailinator.com.

To get your email, go to mailinator.com and type in anyoldname in the "Check Your Inbox" text box and click go. You'll see your email. There's no sign up. It's instant. And the emails are deleted after a couple of hours.  ¶ 10:12 p.m. 0 comments

  Raising Money on Ebay An Indian singer named Shayan, sold shares in his music career on Ebay to finance his album. The investors bought a share of earnings "for every single piece of music I ever write". He managed to raise 9000 British Pounds.

I wonder if it's possible to raise capital for a business in this way? Post your business plan on Ebay and sell shares. It may already have been done. More likely, it violates some securities regulation.

(via BBC, via Lifehacker)  ¶ 9:45 p.m. 0 comments

  John Battelle Article John Battelle has an insightful article on AdAge.com about how marketers should be thinking in the age of search: ARE YOU BECOMING IRRELEVANT TO YOUR CUSTOMERS?

"The traditional model for marketing used to be that content companies made content, then advertisers attached themselves to that content in various ways. Content was a proxy for the audience, and the audience was what marketers were after.

But in the age of search, consumers are declaring their intent first through the mechanism of the search box. They are stating what they want. This is proving an irresistible attachment point for marketers, and hence we have the rise of paid search, with Google/Yahoo as its leaders. Content is what is found after intent is declared, and a new middleman -- the search box -- has created value by creating an attachment point where every marketer wants to be -- at the point of intent. This doesn’t mean content is dead; far from it. Content is often what consumers want. But if your content is not found when the consumer’s intent is declared, well, you lose."

He also makes a good point about how writers don't necessarily need a publisher to find an audience or to get paid. I found his points very well stated.  ¶ 1:09 a.m. 0 comments

  Set Your Homepage I didn't know you could do this, but there's a great way to set the homepage in your browser: just drag the favicon from the browser's address bar to the homepage icon. (From Tricks of the Trade.)  ¶ 9:51 a.m. 0 comments

  Firefox Printing Not There Yet Firefox printing is not quite there yet. There are a couple of annoyances that cause me to turn to IE when I have to print. For example, whenever an image falls on a page break, Firefox splits the image and prints it across two pages, like so:


Not so horrible, but irritating nonetheless.

Another printing-related annoyance in Firefox has to do with the print preview functionality. Namely, the scrollwheel does not work. I can scroll down to the first page break in print preview mode, but that's it. The wheel won't scroll the page any more, either up or down. I can still scroll the page with the scrollbar however.

I use IE only in very specific circumstances any more. Printing a page with images on it is one of them.  ¶ 3:39 p.m. 0 comments

  Google Toolbar For Firefox Google is finally coming out with its toolbar for Firefox (probably on July 7th). Most of the functionality has been available for some time anyway in the form of the open-source Googlebar, but I think it's great that there will be an "official" Google Toolbar. Apparently, Google will keep the link to the Googlebar project on their toolbar web page. See the story from CNET.  ¶ 3:02 p.m. 0 comments