My Latest Articles on RWW

For those of you who don’t follow Read Write Web, but occasionally check my site (hi family!), here’s a sampling of my latest articles from Read Write Web:

Facebook’s Lifestream: Nothing to See Here: A new post on the Facebook blog announces the arrival of "a new way to share with friends" - that is, they’re offering a way for you to import content from non-Facebook sites into your Facebook Mini-Feed and into your friends’ News Feeds. This new option is being touted on the blogosphere as Facebook’s "new lifestreaming feature." That is, by far, a grand overstatement of the service, which currently pales in comparison with its competitors…Keep Reading

Real People Don’t Have Time for Social Media: Let’s be honest here: we’re all a bunch of social media addicts. We’re junkies. Whether it’s a new Twitter app, a new Facebook feature, or a new social anything service, we’re all over it. But we may not be the norm. The truth is, being involved in social media takes time, something that most people don’t have a lot of. So how can regular folk get involved with social media? And how much time does it really take…Keep Reading

Content is Becoming a Commodity: Over the weekend, it seemed that everyone in the tech blogosphere contributed to the discussion around fractured blog comments; Robert Scoble even went so far as to say that the "era of blogger’s control" is over. What all these discussions hinged on was whether or not a web service called Shyftr had the right to appropriate bloggers’ RSS feeds and build their brand around our content (a practice they’ve now modified due to this outcry)…Keep Reading

How to Get Customer Service via Twitter: There has been a lot of talk lately of companies monitoring social media, be it Twitter, blogs, or social networking sites, for mentions of their company name and responding to customer service issues. Some of this interaction has been in the Twitter community, with Comcast being one of the more active participants as of late. Although in some cases, customers twittered their frustration after failing to receive the support they needed through traditional methods, in many cases, Twitter was the first place the customers vented their frustration, and then were surprised when they received a response from a support rep or company spokesperson…Keep Reading

5 Ways to Find More Friends on Twitter: It seems like everyone is on Twitter these days, but are you following everyone you should? With so many users, it can be hard to find the right people to follow - you might even miss finding some of your very own friends on the service, especially if they joined later on, after you did your initial search for friends. To help you out, we’ve provided five web apps that can help you locate some of the best people for you to follow on Twitter…Keep Reading

How Important is Offline Access, Anyway?: In today’s world, you’re never too far from an internet connection. In developed countries, broadband access is available in more places than ever, and even poorer countries have internet cafes sprouting up left and right. Modern web workers and business travelers even take extra precautions to maintain always-on connectivity - packing air cards in their laptop bags or buying laptops that already have built-in EVDO access…Keep Reading

Breaking the Techmeme Habit: Techmeme is a great place to stay up-to-date with the current tech news in the blogosphere, showing the most popular and current news items of the day. The site also offers a Leaderboard section which features the current top 100 bloggers and news sources. However, Techmeme is often under fire from bloggers who feel that it doesn’t deliver a diverse enough selection of blogs and voices. Whether that’s actually true or not is up for debate, but in the meantime, we thought we would look at other ways to stay on top of the the latest news in tech, sans Techmeme…Keep Reading

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Time.com just released their annual blog index featuring their list of the 2008 Top 25 blogs. The blogs were picked based on poll results ranging from 1 (abysmal) to 10 (indispensable.) Strangely, their list featured 11 blogs with an average of 5 or below. These are top blogs? I don’t think so.

For some better choices, I have to point you to a few other sources instead. Coincidentally, this news from Time.com comes out on a day where several bloggers have put out their own personal lists of blogs:

• Corvida of SheGeeks posted her A-List here.
• Steven Hodson of WinExtra adds to his A-List here.
• And Louis Gray posts about 5 More Blogs You Should Be Reading, a follow-up to his previous 5 Blog Candidates to Tomorrow’s Techmeme Leaderboard.

I can’t imagine narrowing my list down to 5 or even 25 blogs top blogs, and it seems, thanks to lists like those above, I’m finding even more great blogs every day. Of course, I highly recommend both Corvida (a Grand Effect blogger!), Steven, and Louis - some of my fav A-Listers!

And to complement their offerings, I can only point to the link bar above and the other Grand Effect network bloggers. In addition to SheGeeks, we have David of xfep.com, Martin of gHacks.net, MG of ParisLemon, and Frederic of The Last Podcast.

I’m so proud that my A-List is only a click away and all available from the top of my blog!

Wow! I’m really excited and surprised that our little tech blog network, Grand Effect, has now been covered on Mashable! And all this before we’re even done building our homepage! Thanks, Mark, for the shout-out. Stay tuned - over the next few months, we have big plans for Grand Effect. You’ll soon see a new homepage, a combined Grand Effect RSS feed, profiles on our members and their sites, and much more.

Thanks for checking us out!

Grand Effect network member and social media blogger, Corvida of SheGeeks, sent me this cool badge today. The badge was her way to say thanks to all the bloggers who have supported her lately as she develops her…err…awesomesauce blog!

Thanks, Corvida!

If you haven’t checked out her blog yet, I highly recommend it to anyone interested in web 2.0 and social media: shegeeks.net.

Or just subscribe here: http://feeds.feedburner.com/Corvida.

Our little tech blog network keeps growing - just last month, we welcomed social media blogger SheGeeks to Grand Effect. And now, we’re welcoming not one, but two awesome bloggers to our network: MG Siegler of ParisLemon and Frederic Lardinois of The Last Podcast. Both bloggers provide insightful looks at tech, new media, web 2.0, and the blogosphere. You can subscribe to them here:

• The Last Podcast - RSS feed 
• ParisLemon - RSS Feed

As far as Grand Effect goes, now that we have a good member base, we’re going to update the homepage, provide a combined network feed, and put together our ad packages for those interested in partnering or sponsoring our content.

As always, if you’re interested in becoming a Grand Effect advertising partner, you can reach us at our main address: advertising@grandeffect.com.

Read more about this news from our other Grand Effect bloggers: SheGeeks and The Last Podcast.

In case you haven’t had time to keep up with Read Write Web, here are some of the recent articles I’ve written over there, which you might enjoy. Short summaries with direct links to the articles are provided below:

Five Methodologies to Deal with Email Overload: These days, it seems everyone has an opinion about how to deal with information overload, especially when it comes to email management. There are numerous methodologies, best practices, tips, and tutorials available, but are any of them really effective? We’ll explore that question as we delve into the top five email management methodologies. Keep Reading…

The Internet Will End in 30 Years!: Have you heard the latest doomsday scenario? In thirty years, the internet will stop working! Apparently, a bug similar to the millennium bug will affect Unix-based systems, like those that run the tubes, in the year 2038. The bug, being dubbed the "2038 bug," arises because Unix-based systems store the time as a signed 32-bit integer, in seconds, from midnight on January 1 1970. And the latest time that can be represented in that format, by the Posix standard, is 3:14 AM on January 19, 2038. After that, times will wrap around and be represented as a negative number…Keep Reading…

Social Networks Will Be Tomorrow’s iTunes: We all know by now that social networks aren’t a passing fad. They’re no longer used solely by early adopters, young adults, or tech enthusiasts - social networks are now mainstream. However, a recent UK study conducted by media research company, Entertainment Media Research, reports some figures that point toward the fact that social networks could do even more. In fact, social networks have the potential to be the content distribution platforms of tomorrow. See you later iTunes, I’m gonna sync with MySpace now…Keep Reading…

The Conversation Has Left the Blogosphere: We’ve seen a lot of new aggregation services and lifestreaming applications come into play recently, and we’ve questioned whether they’re adding to the conversation or just adding to our information overload. (See our coverage on FriendFeed, for example). And today, MyBlogLog even added even more lifestreams to subscribe to. The truth of the matter is, like it or not, the conversations that once existed solely in the blogosphere have now moved on. People still comment, but in a lot of cases, those comments aren’t on found on the blog itself. So the question is, has the conversation become diluted among all the different services and applications? Or is it just adding layers to the original topic? And most importantly, how can you keep up? Keep Reading…

The Best Tools for Visualization: Visualization is a technique to graphically represent sets of data. When data is large or abstract, visualization can help make the data easier to read or understand. There are visualization tools for search, music, networks, online communities, and almost anything else you can think of. Whether you want a desktop application or a web-based tool, there are many specific tools are available on the web that let you visualize all kinds of data. Here are some of the best…Keep Reading…

Goodbye, Enterprise - Hello, Socialprise: Here’s another word to add to your lexicon: "Socialprise." It’s meaning is somewhat obvious: social tools + enterprise = "socialprise."  It’s a new term, but one we hope sticks around, since it’s currently representative of one of the biggest shifts in business today. We covered some socialprise tools before, in discussing Worklight, Google Sites, and HiveLive, but here’s a new avenue for social tools in the workplace: Social CRM. A company called InsideView is bringing the social web to CRM, and they’re not the only one to do so…Keep Reading…

Steve Jobs Was Only Half-Right: People Do Read - Even Kids - They Just Do It Online: When Amazon introduced their e-book reader, the Kindle, Steve Jobs made a strong proclamation regarding the book industry that received a lot of attention: "It doesn’t matter how good or bad the product is, the fact is that people don’t read anymore… The whole conception is flawed at the top because people don’t read anymore." As it turns out, he was only half-right. People read, even those in the younger generation, they just prefer to do it online…Keep Reading…

HiveLive Partners With Marketer, Responsys: It’s More Enterprise 2.0: HiveLive, a B2B social software platform provider, brings the social web to businesses by providing them with customizable tools like user profiles, blogs, discussion forums, wikis, and RSS which they can skin, edit, and secure easily, and without any coding. The platform is based on a building block called a "Hive," whcihc can be configured to support a range of community activities, like concept brainstorms, product feedback, design reviews, voting centers, and much more…Keep Reading…

Mobile Web Use Growing Faster than Ever: Wireless devices are everywhere these days. Wi-Fi hotspots are are popping up in more places and aircards protrude from the laptops of the mobile workforce. Computing is changing, too. Cloud computing will move applications and storage away from the desktop to remote servers. If anything, this drive to push data off the PC and onto the web has been in some part driven by the increasing mobility of internet users. Mobile access to the web is pushing internet adoption rates up while also providing more people the opportunity to work away from a stationary PC. So who is going mobile? Some new studies from PEW Internet & American Life Project and iPass shed some light on this topic…Keep Reading…

Goodbye, P2P! P4P is Coming: P2P, or peer-to-peer, is the protocol currently used by many file sharing networks for moving large files over the internet. Now, a new protocol, P4P - aka Proactive network Provider Participation for P2P - is being introduced by Verizon. P4P’s goal is to reduce backbone traffic and lower network operation costs. Will P4P bring us the bandwidth we’ve been waiting for? Keep Reading…

Office Live Workspace vs Google Docs: Feature-by-Feature Comparison: Today, Microsoft announced that the Office Live Workspace beta is publicly available for everyone to access. The site, a free web-based extension of Microsoft Office, lets you access your documents online and share your work with others. Some say that the service’s launch is a direct response to Google’s entry into the web office space with their Google Docs online service. If that’s so, then the question now is: did Microsoft just trump Google Docs? Or does Google Docs still rule online office suites? Keep Reading…

Grand Effect is a small tech blog network I recently started with the help of another founding member, David Peralty of eXtra For Every Publisher. Our focus is only tech news - whether it’s computer tips, web apps, software, blogging, or social media, you can find it here on Grand Effect. We’re not trying to be the next big blog network, we’re just a few guys and gals who blog about tech.

We’re kind of picky with our membership, so we have chosen to start small, but we’re going to stay small, too. This way, Grand Effect will always be a community, and not a conglomerate. Our readers will benefit as well, because they will know that they can always find great content on the Grand Effect network members’ sites.

So the big announcement tonight is that the Grand Effect network now has a new member. We would like to welcome SheGeeks (aka Corvida) to our network.

Corvida’s blog focuses primarily on social networking and social media, offering reviews, advice, and commentary -  and she doesn’t just blog about this stuff, either - she’s an active participant in the community, too. If you want to get clued in on the latest Twitter news or the hottest new web app, you are sure to find it on SheGeeks. I highly recommend this blog! If you want to try it out for yourself, you can subscribe here.

As far as Grand Effect goes, we’re still slowly building up the network and working on the back-end. Sometime later this summer we hope to have a complete network of blogs covering all aspects of technology.

If you’re interested in becoming a Grand Effect advertising partner, you can always reach us at our main address: advertising@grandeffect.com.

After a couple of different names and a varying member list, I’m proud to present to you the (almost) finished version of the Grand Effect tech blog network. We’re not a network in the sense that we’re planning on growing to include a whole bunch of websites, like traditional blog networks do. Instead, we’re offering a few quality blogs for you to browse through, all accessible from the handy-dandy network bar at the top of our websites. (RSS readers - this is where you click through to see what I mean!) We will grow this network slowly over time, but will never have more members than fit on the network bar. We hope you’ll take the time to visit the other sites in the network as they appear.

You’ll also notice the new and improved design for my site, www.sarahintampa.com. I’ve finally made the move to WordPress from TypePad and it’s not as easy as you think! Without David’s help, I would have been lost when it came to truncating permalink slugs to match TypePad’s 15-character-max structure. That would have been a lot of broken links! (For future reference, the trick was to run this SQL: alter table wp_posts modify post_name varchar(15) to truncate them, then alter table wp_posts modify post_name varchar(200) to set it back to the WP default.) Fixing post images is still in the works, so forgive the broken links in the archives. It’s coming.

In the meantime, feel free to visit other sites in the network, and rest assured, with this project finally wrapping up, more great sarahintampa.com posts will go live soon!

Catch up with my other posts:

Keep Your Resolutions with Wellsphere

Wellsphere is a perfect website for those of us who have trouble keeping our New Year’s Resolutions. At Wellsphere, the goal is to build online communities where people encourage each other to “get active, eat better, and unwind.” As we all know, that’s easier said than done. Keep reading….

LongJump: Database in the Cloud

LongJump, a company based out of Sunnyvale, California, has introduced a Database-as-a-Service (DaaS) product that offers you an easy way to build a database application backend for your website and business. Keep reading….

YouTorrent: Torrent Meta Search Engine

Although the name is clearly meant to recall that of ubiquitous video portal YouTube, YouTorrent upon first reading sounded more like an accusation than anything else: You Torrent. Although some of us hesitate to admit it, we do torrent. Keep reading….

Just a reminder, I post on other blogs, too! Check out some of my latest posts on Channel 10:

10 Useful Plugins for Windows Live Writer

Online Scrapbooking

Zune Hack - Zune Contact Cards

Witty for Vista

Anagram for Outlook

And see my latest contributions to ReadWriteWeb:

Share Your Travels with Driftr

Hoosgot Revives the Lazy Web