Monitor Your Social Networks Through Email
Feb 18, 2009 Facebook, Internet, Online Tools, social networking
UPDATE: You can also use this service from NutshellMail.com, rather than just the Facebook application.
Yesterday Mashable broke news about a new Facebook application that monitors your social networking and email accounts and sends recent activity straight to the email address of your choice. The application, called NutshellMail, allows you to select at what times and on what days you want to receive email updates. It only informs you of certain Facebook activity, including new messages, friend requests, group invites, friend invites, and unread pokes. However, you can also get updates from LinkedIn, MySpace, Twitter, and any other email address that you dread checking all of the time. I’m extremely pumped that it doesn’t tell me every time your mom threw up on my super wall or asked me to be an interior decorating pirate. Whew.
NutshellMail is enormously beneficial for me. I have two Facebook profiles, manage three Twitter accounts, have two personal email addresses, a work email address, and a profile on all of the sites I listed above. Rather than logging into all of these every day with the possibility of being distracted from my real work, I can simply read the email from NutshellMail email as I do several others throughout the day to catch up on the latest.
Installing the application is pretty easy – just go to the application page, click “Go to Application”, and follow the instructions. Don’t forget to check your inbox to verify your email account so you can start receiving updates.
Hope many of you find this free application as beneficial as I do.
Tags: application, consolidation, email, linkedin, myspace, Twitter, updates
Insert Live Websites Into Your Next PowerPoint Presentation
Jan 28, 2009 Internet, Software
When sharing PowerPoint presentations, I always take a screen shot of a website if I need to show my audience what it looks like. This is never ideal – the full length of web pages rarely fit inside a screen shot. Fortunately, there’s a tool called LiveWeb, a free PowerPoint Add-in for both Mac and PC that lets you put real-time websites into your PowerPoint presentations.
In short, the add-in turns PowerPoint slides into a scrollable web page. Simply download the appropriate version, double click ‘LiveWeb.ppa’ after extracting the ZIP file (do not select ‘Open’ when you are prompted by your browser – you MUST download the file), and you should have a new menu item called ‘Web Pages’ under ‘Insert’. If it doesn’t work immediately, you will need to enable ‘Macros’ and change the security level to ‘Medium’. These options can be fun under ‘Tools’ on a PC. On a Mac, you will be prompted to ‘Enable Macros’ when double clicking ‘LiveWeb.ppa’ if they are not enabled already.
When selecting this menu option, it will take you through a series of alerts – asking you the URL of the website, if you would like to refresh each time you reload the slide, how big the website should be relative to slide size (I usually select 100%), and where to place the website on the slide.
As a note of caution, be sure to log-in to websites that require authentication (such as Facebook) through your presentation before it actually starts. You have to do this in View Show mode. If you stop the slide show, it will possibly log you out.
There’s a handy FAQ about PowerPoint Add-Ins here.
This is is an oldie but goodie – and I hope it’s new to some of you!
Tags: liveweb, powerpoint, Software, techniques
Link Tracking for Ministry / Short URLs
Dec 29, 2008 Internet
In the past, we’ve run on the assumption that some people will click links that we share in newsletters, on Facebook, in emails, and so on, while we also assume that others will ignore them. But what if we could determine how many people are actually clicking them? Many short url providers make this task extermely simple.
For those of you familiar with Twitter, this will probably be no surprise. The purpose of short urls is to take a long url (such as http://www.threeparts.com/2008/12/26/friday-video-a-christmas-greeting/) and make it more managable…err…pretty (such as http://bit.ly/17oA0). Both of these thinks will take you to the same location on the web. The first one is the original URL, while the second is a shortened version of the first, assigned when I signed up for an account with Bit.ly and created it.
The most common use for short urls is to make long urls more friendly to microblogging services. Lately, however, I’ve been using these free services to not only shorten urls, but to track the number of times certain links of been clicked - regardless of where I place them. The click-tracking feature of many short url providers is one that is greatly overlooked. This information can be extremely valuable for you as a youth worker. For instance – if you send a link to a medical release form via your youth ministry newsletter which 25 people receive, and the link only gets one click – you should probably head down to the copier before the next pre-trip meeting so you can have some copies available for parents. Click tracking can also let you know your ‘return on investment’ when providing resources. If you spend two hours a day scouring the web for things to share with your students and parents, and only a small fraction of the people you are sending the information to click the link, you may need to invest your time doing other things.
While many premium email services already provide click-through information, it’s safe to say most of you are not using those pricey services. Therefore, I highly recommend using these in emails, on your blog (though a plugin or addon for stats would be better), on Twitter or other microblogging services, and so on. There is no reason not to track your links, given the process is incredibly simple.
Simply copy a url you would like to share, sign up at one of the sites below, create a short url, and copy and paste the new link where you intended to share the original. It’s truly that easy.
Be aware, there are some very popular short url providers that do not give you click stats (such as TinyURL), though somehow they continue to be incredibly popular. I prefer Bit.ly for tracking my links. Not only does it track the link where I place it, but it tells me where else the link has been placed by other people. It also lets me know how many people on Twitter are talking about it. However, there are several providers. Here are a few:
There are far too many for me to A) have used and B) to cover here. Comments are encouraged and welcome!
