You definitely want to be successful in all your endeavors. And your business is not an exception to it. Certainly, you want a healthy flow of wealth. Having a business necessitates dedication, diligence and lots of hard work. And…
Google reaches out to its millions of users by speaking in their tongue. Finally, Google Notebook becomes multi-lingual. The move is taken to make it easy for the users to collect, organize and share information online. It is said…
Wish you could delete URLs but you can't… Oopps. Not to worry. Yahoo has recently added one of the most important features to its Site Explorer and that is the ability to delete URLs from its index. Yes! Yahoo…
Google offers two additional applications to treat PC blues and to keep them safer than before. The first application is called Symantec's Norton Security Scan, which detects and removes viruses. The second application is dubbed PC Tools' Spyware Doctor…
Filed under: Fun, Internet, Windows, Macintosh, Linux, Web services, Social Software
Listen To A Movie is a website designed solely for the purpose of listening to your favorite movies and TV shows. The site contains a pretty substantial collection of low-quality audio files for popular movies and TV shows that can be listened to for free using the sites built-in audio player. Clips can be paused, fast-forwarded and rewound to get to your favorite parts, or you can scroll through parts that translate much better when you can see them. You can also comment on your favorite movies, read small plot outlines, and of course purchase the DVD.
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There are several reasons why an internet business needs to optimize their website to appear highly in any major Search Engine. First and foremost, you need traffic to your website, without traffic nobody will buy your product. So then…
One of the usual mistakes that webmasters commit is the lack of diligence in researching SEO keywords. The result is poor Search Engine rankings and less web traffic. Come to think of it, all your hard work in creating…
Filed under: Internet, Web services, Social Software
37signals’ online PIM service Backpack is known far and wide in part for its extreme simplicity. It offers everything you need with nothing you don’t - but that doesn’t mean it’s lacking in the power user department. While it hasn’t been updated in a while, 37signals maintains a Power Users archive page at the Backpack blog with a whole slew of tips and tricks that will likely serve as a great review for old schoolers, or a killer resource for those new to the handy service. Some of our favorites include prefixing reminders with a plus sign and a number to quickly set an alarm for a few minutes or hours, as well as being able to email pictures and even lists of items to pages.
Since that blog hasn’t been updated in a while though, what other tricks have you users discovered for the service? Let’s see if 37signals’ Backpack blogger(s) have been laying down on the job.
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Before finding your website, search engines are faced with different choices. The four distinct choices made include: Choice number one: They choose to use the Internet to find a specific product or service, to research an issue of interest…
HitTail, a product that reveals the real time score of keywords used by searchers to find a particular website, has added HitTail Plus to make way for a premium version of the tool. The tool is significant in doing…
Filed under: Fun, Internet, Video, Web services, Social Software
Just when you thought there were enough tools and talk about social networks, more tools for those crazy social networkers have been unleashed. YouCams embeds video, voice and text chatting with a flash file format. The full featured video format allows users to embed and watch YouTube videos with friends, share Links with other users, create and move through a series of public and private rooms, broadcast webcams, and create password protected rooms. There is also a series of profile widgets that can be added without installing anything.
The YouCams application can easily be embedded into social networks, blogs and websites using either HTML or JavaScript codes.
There are two plans that are offered, a basic and paid service. The basic plan is more than enough; it offers voice, text and video chat. While the upgraded account turns YouCams into a conferencing tool that can be used to chat with three other users at once.
YouCams also has a list of instructional videos available on YouTube.
[via webware]
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Filed under: Internet, Blogging, Social Software
Lists of top [anything] are a big hit across the interwebs. They pack a lot of information into a neat list that’s easy to comb for exactly what you need. As WordPress keeps gaining momentum and popularity, more and more bloggers are posting lists of their favorite plugins that help them stay on top of their game. Instead of posting a top X list, however, DLS reader Staska decided to aggregate. By using the power of community and this list of top WordPress plugin posts from bloggers around the world, Staska created a Top 30 WordPress Plugins list by tallying each plugin’s mention from all those bloggers.
That’s a lot of lists, and a lot of aggregating.
The result is a great success, with a strong list that should have something for everyone, and commentary from Staska on the wide array of WordPress plugins that keep the blogosphere runing.
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Filed under: Web services, Social Software
Oh social web, do you know no bounds? Gimme20 is a social fitness site where members can share workout routines, track workouts and all that healthy Jazz. Props to Gimme20 for the shameless Web 2.0 logo.
So, what are you waiting for? Hop up outta that chair and get your geek in shape, dig? While your at it, you can read Download Squad on your mobile phone. How’s that for a connected workout?
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Until now, Google has primarily sold pay-per-click (PPC) ads, so-called AdWords ads: advertisers pay when someone on Google or a Google partner site clicks on the ad. Google is testing a new advertising system that allows businesses to advertise on a cost per action basis.
Filed under: Business, Fun, Internet, Web services, Social Software
Want to get a total unbiased report on a new product you are thinking about purchasing? ProductWiki can help.
ProductWiki is a product information site that is based off of a collaborative wiki format. The website is entirely maintained by visitors and users who share information or review consumer products from around the world.
The goal the team behind ProductWiki has is to create a comprehensive information resource that covers all products in depth. All products might be a little hard to get onto the site, but it’s overflowing with a range of products already, from LCD TV’s, external hard drives, tea cups, games, health and beauty products, cars and a truckload more.
When searching for an item, the site not only will give a review from the submitter, but will also show pictures, key features, and places where it can be bought. Users can choose to tag items, and write additional pros and cons based on experience they have had with the item.
ProductWiki is another great place to go to check out the items that are on your shopping list, getting great first hand results from people that actually own and use it.
[via eHub]
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Links rule the Net. How? Links bring high Search Engine ranking. Links bring popularity. Ultimately, links bring money. These are the reasons why webmasters and marketers are getting crazy over link building. How do you go about link building?…
In order to have higher Search Engine ranking, one has to ascertain the essence of using search engines. And to be familiar with the major search engines, queries behind their existence must be answered. It is the search engines…
Filed under: Business, Design, Developer, Internet, Web services, Social Software
How would you like to cuddle up to a secure online space that has the potential to help out your business with some valuable document, project and team tools?
Huddle is based off of a social networking model, without being just another social network. It allows users to network via secure online spaces combining tools that create a professional feel client service portal. Teams can come together with customers to plan out projects and documents, and collaborate on ideas.
A unique dashboard provides an overview of all activities, tasks, and documents that are awaiting review. When viewing projects, users can instantly see who’s online, and the progression of projects. There is also a handy calendar that displays upcoming tasks and overdue activities.
Huddle’s online tools include:
Huddle provides three main package solutions that are determined by number of users, file sizes, and monthly fees. Freelancers can enjoy a (converted from UK pound sterling) $10 U.S./month rate, while small businesses can expect to dish out $22 U.S./month to connect teams, suppliers, partners and clients.
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Filed under: Developer, Macintosh, Web services, Apple, Social Software
Back in December Apple released a beta version of Dashcode, a programming environment which makes it easy to develop OS X Dashboard widgets. The problem with Dashcode is that there is not much information on how to use it available on the internet. Even the documentation that comes with Dashcode provides only the most basic information and does not currently link back to Dashboard documentation.
Meanwhile, we like Tumblr here at Download Squad. It is great for posting quick snippet of content onto a blog-like web page without the need to compose a full length blog post. Tumblr provides a great bookmarklet to make this process even easier. You just click on it to post the current web page in your browser to Tumblr, or you can select some text which becomes a quote on your Tumblr.
Last week, I realised that Tumblr makes an ideal candidate for a Dashboard widget! So I decided to combine these two ingredients and see how easy it is to make a Tumblr widget using Dashcode.
Continue reading Dev Chair : Create a Tumblr widget using Dashcode
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Maggie Fox has a neat post on How Social Media is Changing Everything
“If you’ve ever wished you had the budget for a focus group, now you
do. All that’s required is reaching out to a couple of key individuals
and asking them if they would be interested in testing your product or
process and letting you know what they think, or posting about it, if
they like.
Blogs in particular and social media in general can offer incredible
insight for a relatively small investment (your time is another
matter!). When I speak to clients about investigating a corporate
blogging strategy, I often refer to it as “low cost market research”,
something I’m sure we’d all like to see a little more of!”
Belonging to the qualitative research industry, this resonates big time with me. Blog Influentials, in July 2005 had called blogs the ‘market research of the future’. Again, way back in 2005 I had said:
While nothing beats face-to-face contact, blogs can be a great space to have conversations with customers - Scoble does it every day. In other cases, customers are the ones encouraging marketers to engage in conversation - SkypeJournal is a great example of heavy users of Skype
providing constructive feedback both positive and negative,
observations and ideas. They’re even writing poetry in the form of a Skypku 
Are marketers listening and engaging in dialogue? Maybe.
Maybe not. Are marketing departments afraid of this? I think they are.
Blogs may be one such tool available to us - there are so
many more that can reveal and understand the motives and the process of
emergence in conversations as they manifest in conversations between
marketers and users. I met Jim McGee in Chicago last year and we had a
lovely discussion about how blogs might change the nature of market
research and how the notion of oral culture in organizations might help
explain the relatively slow take up of blogs in the firewall. From his post after our meeting :
“In the marketing research context, blogs are a disruptive
technology. Instead of having to generate data by way of surveys or
focus groups with whatever artifacts the process introduces, blogs
provide direct visibility into customers. Instead of having to connect
potentially artificial samples back to the actual market, now you have
to filter real market behavior, interpret it, and make sense of it.
That presents two challenges to market research functions. First,
market research staff have to develop new skills. Second, management of
market research needs to spend some quality thinking time what to do
with access to this new kind of market data.The opportunity that blogs introduce into the marketing research
equation is to create the opportunity to identify and run multiple
micro-experiments in the market. Those that succeed get the resources
to scale, those that fail to generate some useful data are quickly shut
down. There are challenges, of course, especially given how quickly
ideas spread in a connected world, but that should be offset by the
speed with which experiments can be identified and run. Worth thinking
about.”
Almost a year ago, I had recruited participants for some usability testing focus groups through my blog. Am now working with some clients, where we are building news aggregators of target audience blogs. And involved currently in a project where we are evolving a sms-blog research interface as a research tool for participants, in the Twitter convention. And we even have proof of concept now .. a recent article in the Economic Times talks of how blogs are boosting sales of bikes. Keeping track of blog conversations replacing traditional market research survey methods! Giving rise to a new breed of blogo-pologists and the field of netnography!
Much better than having professional respondents in a conventional focus group or unwieldy questionnaires which are filled up so superficially isn’t it?
Tags: market research, marketing research, qualitative research, ethnography,social media,blogs,blogging,focus groups
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