ProductiveWise

Use Visual Cues to Identify Non-Interesting Content in Your RSS Stream

Eyal Sela — Sun, 29 Aug 2010 07:38:49 +0000

One of the advantages of RSS is that it lets you skim through big amounts of content. To make it even easier, you can insert visual cues to the names of content sources. That way, your eye will identify the source of the headline even before you start reading it.

Example

I'm subscribed to some big websites that publish several posts a day. The thing with big websites is that they tend to publish things like "time wasters" or popular topics, and not just high quality content (in my opinion, of course). To identify them faster, I add a series of hyphens before and after their name, like this:

—————————– site's name ——————————–

You can do the same with very important websites (but remember to use a different visual cue, like the plus sign '+' or the ampersand sign '&' ).

I've explained the idea behind changing the name of RSS feeds, and how to do it, in the section 'Prefix feeds for Second level categorization' in Google Reader Tips and Practices for Power Users.

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Use Visual Cues to Identify Non-Interesting Content in Your RSS Stream

Don’t Use Images in Gmail’s signature!

Eyal Sela — Mon, 09 Aug 2010 08:02:28 +0000

About a month ago Google add a new feature to Gmail – rich signatures. Among other design capabilities, the new feature lets you add images (or icons) to your signature. Now, there is a really big problem with the way images are added to the signature.

Images might change

Instead of just uploading an image and adding it to the email, when you create your rich signature you are asked to give a link to the image (see screenshot below). The link is of a web address, not a location on your computer. When you send an email, the link is a live link.

This mean that whenever someone opens an email you sent, the image is retrieved from it's original location on the web. If the image changed in the meantime – your recipient will see the changed image, and if it no longer exists – he will see no image at all.

This is a Huge problem! You can't really be safe when using images in your signature: If you host the images on your servers – you will have to keep them alive forever, and if you link to someone else's image (say, on Flickr) – they might decide to change it or remove it one day.

I discovered it the hard way

After using a rich signature for about a month, I noticed that one of the images I used have changed on all the emails I sent(!). It changed to a huge, gray image saying that the the trial period of the image hosting has ended! this happened because I used a link I got from a chrome extension that takes a screenshot and automatically uploads it to the web. It seams that the image was only hosted for a short time. Of course, I did not know that the image is not beeing actually added to the emails I send…

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Don’t Use Images in Gmail’s signature!

Video – The Three Factors That Motivate People

Eyal Sela — Fri, 23 Jul 2010 10:42:19 +0000

The video below is a nice animation of a lecture by Dan Pink. It talks about the things that motivate people, and especially knowledge workers (my wording). The interesting thing it reveals is that in activities that are highly cognitive (versus mechanical), it is not money that motivates us, but the following three factors:

Autonomy - the ability to be self directed, that is, control our activities rather than being managed.
Mastery – the urge to be better at stuff we do. The example given in the video is of people who play instruments just for fun, and not for money.
Purpose – making a contribution to something transcendent.

I think that the most interesting practical suggestion in the video is this:

Pay people enough so that monIey is not a consideration anymore, and then making sure the three motivation factors are satisfied.

Image by by laverrue

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Video – The Three Factors That Motivate People

Guest Post – Get Ready for Shopping Season: Collect Deals in Your Gmail Inbox

Ann Smarty — Tue, 20 Jul 2010 06:29:20 +0000

When you’re trying to organize a particular area of your life, perhaps shopping, your finances or stock orders, it can be a huge help to have technology on your side. Just recently I’ve been trying out Google’s Gmail filters, and I’ve found that if you use them in a certain way (in conjunction with FireFox and its addon), you can come up with some cool ideas.

One of the most fun ways to use Gmail Filters is to use it for organizing coupon codes and hence creating shopping lists.

Set-up Gmail Filters to Email Yourself and Filter Deals and Coupons

Gmail filters are designed to organize your inbox, so that different types of email get sent to different folders. You might have come across this type of thing when you’re teaching your email client to recognize what’s junk mail and what’s not. Filters mean messages don’t go into your inbox and clutter it up, and help you to carry out the right task, when you need to do it. Implement these two steps and you’ll never miss a trick…

It’s quite simple to set up a Gmail filter. Just open up Gmail within your browser, choose settings > filters > ‘create new filter’. From there you can choose to make your very own ‘DEALS’ list (or something like that), which essentially involves you emailing deals you plan to use to yourself. This way, you could even email deals to yourself from your cell phone, and it will go into your filtered mailbox ready to be reviewed later on.

First let's create a filter:

From: your email address
To: your email address
Subject: DEALS (or whichever label you wish to give it)

After the first step, you can then use the various settings for different options. For instance, you can choose these emails to bypass the inbox completely (not checking this option will mean the message appears twice; once in your inbox and once in the filtered box too), and automatically star each email (to then unstar it once the deal is reviewed / used):

Use "Email Yourself" FireFox Addon to Collect Deals in Your Inbox

If you’re not already using the Mozilla FireFox browser, I highly recommend you install it and transfer your bookmarks over. It is incredibly useful for the simple reason that you can install plenty of cool add-ons. In this case, the Email Yourself! addon provides users with the ability to:

Select a part of the web page they’re browsing,
Send the summary of the page in an email (with the link and page title) to yourself.

Now, edit the add-on settings (navigate tools > add-ons) so that the add-on uses your own Gmail address, and the subject title to match what your filter recognizes. The default for Email Yourself! is ‘Sent via Email Yourself!’ so you could keep it as that, but it could be anything, for example ‘DEALS’ (in this specific case).

Basically, you are sending an email to yourself via the add-on, so you want your Gmail filter to recognize the specified name. From then on, you’re free to test out the add-on tool.

For example, using my favorite coupon collection from PromoCodes or CouponSherpa, easily select the deal details (like coupon code and the amount) you want and email the deal yourself using the tool:

Now, whenever you need any deal, just enter the "DEALS" folder within your Gmail and find the collection of your selected deals. Go shopping and save now!

coupon image by striatic

Post from: ProductiveWise

Guest Post – Get Ready for Shopping Season: Collect Deals in Your Gmail Inbox

Tips and Examples for using (the new) HTML Signatures in Gmail

Eyal Sela — Fri, 09 Jul 2010 06:58:02 +0000

Update 7 August 2010: Don’t Use Images in Gmail’s signature!

Gmail now natively supports rich signatures (with images, font size and colors, links and so on) . Just go to 'Settings' and customize your signature under the 'Signature' section. Here is an image of my new signature:

Some tips

Finding icons: Want to find icons to put next to your details? Here is a special Google search (opens in a new tab) that will help you find small icons. Just type the name of the services you're looking for in the search box, and you'll get icons size images you can copy and add to your signature.

More than one signature : Note that you can set up more then one signature if you have more than one email address associated with your Gmail account.

Track website traffic: If you have a website, you can monitor how many people get to it from the link in your signature. To do that, you need to tag the link, so that Google analytics (if that's your analytics application) will recognize the visit source. For example – to tag the link in my signature, I could add this tag:

http://www.productivewise.com?utm_source=MailSignature

To monitor clicks to your site, just replace the base address in the example above, and add the link to your signature.

But there is a problem with using images

Note, that until the recipient actively allows images in the email to be download, your signature might look somthing like that (tested on Outlook 2007):

That is, instead of the icons you've added to your signature, they might see just a placeholder….

Post from: ProductiveWise

Tips and Examples for using (the new) HTML Signatures in Gmail

How I Use Gmail Multiple-Inboxes Lab Feature to Manage E-mail Overload

Eyal Sela — Fri, 25 Jun 2010 09:47:49 +0000

Back in February 2009 I wrote a post about a new lab feature that Google added to Gmail – multiple inboxes. After more than a year of using this great feature, I'd like to share how it helps me manage my e-mail (overload).

What is a Gmail multiple inboxes

Gmail multiple inboxes allows you to have more than one ‘inbox’ in your default Gmail view. You can have up to 5 additional panels and set them to display labels, your starred messages, drafts or any search you want next to your inbox. To learn how to set it up read my previous post about it.

My views: main inbox, non-work, daily stuff and newsletters, to-dos and drafts

My views are separated mainly based on their importance and urgency levels. Note that about 90% of the e-mails I get are automatically directed to their view using Gmail's filters. See a screenshot of my inbox below:

click the image to enlarge

main inbox – most important and urgent

The main inbox view contains e-mails that didn't go to any other view. Hopefully, these are the most important and urgent to answer our deal with.

Non-work – important but less urgent

This view gets e-mails from family members and friends, messages I get on Facebook, Aardvark answers, calendar notifications and so on. The point here is that it's OK to delay the answer to these e-mails if necessary. Usually I will get to them the same day they were sent in, or one day later. But if I read them (or only their subject) and decide not to answer right away, they will stay out of the main inbox and will not interfere with more important e-mails.

Daily stuff and newsletters – Less important, not that urgent

Newsletters and other e-mails that are sent to me automatically, go to this view. It includes Linkedin updates, mailing lists I'm subscribe to (only if they don't have an RSS feed, of course. If they did, they would go straight to Google Reader), meetup notifications, new twitter-follower announcements, and so on.

To-dos – not urgent

The To-Do view usually gets e-mails I sent myself (from work, from Google reader and the like). These are e-mails I want to deal with when I have some free time. I will usually empty this view once every few weeks.

Drafts

As the name imply, the drafts view contains e-mails that I have started to write but did not send. It will usually be empty. I find it comfortable to have the draft e-mails in front of me when they exists, otherwise I tend to forget about them.

Got any questions about this post or you want to share your own e-mails processing methods? Feel free to share them with us in the comments.

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How I Use Gmail Multiple-Inboxes Lab Feature to Manage E-mail Overload

Some Tips About Web Stuff – June 2010

Eyal Sela — Fri, 04 Jun 2010 19:19:37 +0000

Find where your friends are with Foursquare without a smartphone

don’t have a smart phone but you want to know where your friends are? No problem. You can sign in to Foursquare from your desktop computer and find your friends. Then, go to foursquare’s mobile website (still from your desktop computer). There, you’ll see all your friends’ check-ins. That’s it. Quite simple, but it requires breaking a functional fixation that make you think that you can’t consume location data if you can’t provide location data…

Rename folder on Google Reader

You can now rename folders in Google Reader simply by clicking the little arrow next to them in the subscriptions list (On the left-hand side of the screen). See example in the image below.

(Found on DownloadSquad).

Links shortening tip

If you’re not using the Bit.ly sidebar to shorten your links, here is a another easy way to do it. In the address bar, insert j.mp/ just before the full address you want to shorten. Click enter and you will be redirected to Bitly’s website where, you will find the shortened link. see example image below.

(found on The Steve Rubel Stream)

Finding top websites and ranking information

Google is publishing a list of the top 1,000 websites with DoubleClick ad planner, a tool that helps you plan your media campaigns. you can see it in The 1000 most-visited sites on the web. Note that they have excluded some of their websites (see the top 11 in the image below) .

You can also use DoubleClick to find an estimation of the number of visits to a specific website and other ranking information. Go to DoubleClick ad planner and in enter the address of the website you are interested in (you don’t have to log in to get information).

Post from: ProductiveWise

Some Tips About Web Stuff – June 2010

Use Delicious to Deliver better Content to Your Readers

Eyal Sela — Fri, 14 May 2010 19:40:52 +0000

Delicious is a social bookmarking website that lets you save your bookmarks online and share them with others. It can be a great tool to share links on your website as well. If you're in charge of your organization's website, you might want to consider using it to display relevant content.

how it works

To use Delicions you will first need to sign up. Then you can start adding links, along with some meta-data such as tags and notes about these links.

Part of your organization's web presence

Using Delicious as a link aggregator has some prominent advantages. You can add links no matter where you are (even if you're not at work, for example). It is really easy to share these links because they are not bound to your bookmarks bar. Tagging the links makes them easier to find and categorize. Finely, you can embed them in your website using two lines of JavaScript code.

Share links on your website

To share your links with your readers, you can display a snippet of your latest links on deciduous using a Linkroll. Go to Linkrolls to get a script you can easily embed in your website. You might want to customize how it looks like first (see example in the image below).

display options for the delicious embed script

If you are already using an RSS aggregator to display content in your website, you can add your delicious RSS feed to that aggregator. Find your RSS feed at the bottom of the "bookmarks" page when you are logged in to delicious.

Save links to delicious with a browser extension

Delicious extensions let you save new links with a few clicks. To get an extension for your browser, go to Browser buttons for saving bookmarks in delicious.

When you find a website you like, clicks the 'Save as bookmarks to delicious' button. It will take you straight to the submitting form and we'll extract as much information about it as possible. All you have to do is add notes and tags (if you wish to) and click save.

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Use Delicious to Deliver better Content to Your Readers

How to Send a Message to the Guests of an Event Created By a Facebook Fan Page

Eyal Sela — Sat, 27 Mar 2010 12:47:26 +0000

A few months ago when I created an event through one of my fan pages on Facebook, I discovered that I could not send a message to the guests list. After some searching and consulting with friends I found the solution on Facebook’s FAQ page:

As the admin of a fan page, you cannot message your guests. You have to appoint someone else to be the admin of the event. Then, he will be able to send the guests a message for you.

(I have no idea why that is, of course).

To appoint someone else to be the admin of your event, simply look him up in the guests list and click of the ‘Make Admin’ button next to his name.

Image by Spencer E Holtaway

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How to Send a Message to the Guests of an Event Created By a Facebook Fan Page

How to Not Spam Your Facebook Friends Who Don’t Speak Your Native ‎Language

Eyal Sela — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 08:21:43 +0000

People who have friends on Facebook from different countries encounter a problem – in what language should they write their status messages? If they use their native language, their friends from other countries will not understand anything. On the other hand, if they only write in English, for example, then it might be difficult for some of their friends to understand it. Here is the solution for multilingual Facebook friends:

Create a friends list of all the people who doesn't speak your native language, and filter out the message that they can't understand.

Let's see how to do this. [For the sake of this post I will use Hebrew as a native language, and English for friends from other countries].

Create a list of people who doesn't speak your language

To create a list of friends do the followings:

Click 'Friends' on the left sidebar.
Click the 'Create a List' button (it is right on the right hand side of the 'Friends' title at the top of the page – see image below).
Create a list of friends on Facebook
You should now see a pop-up window titled 'Create New List'. Give the list a name (for example: 'doesn't speak Hebrew') and add all of your friends who doesn't speak your native language to that list.
Click 'Create List' once you are finished.

*Note that from now on, whenever you friend someone who doesn't speak your native language you have to add him to the list*

Filter out messages not in English

Now, all you need to do when you want to write a status message in your native language, is tell Facebook not to show it to the people who can't read it. Follow these steps to do it:

Click the the lock icon on its left hand side of the 'Share' button

Write the a status message as usual.
Click the the lock icon on the left side of the 'Share' button, and click 'Custom' (see image below).
In the pop-up window that opens, under 'Hide this from', type the name of the list of people who doesn't speak your native language.
under 'Hide this from', type the name of the list of people who doesn't speak your native language
Click 'save settings' and once the pop up window closes, click the 'Share' button.

That is it. Only people in the list you specified will not see this status message. The rest of your friends will.

Make these your default settings

If you wish to make these your default settings (that is, that by default People in this group will not see your messages, unless you specify otherwise) – go back to step three in the previous section and check 'Make this my default setting' at the bottom of the window. *note that these settings will apply to all the status messages you have ever written, not only to new ones!* I suggest following the last section in Amit Agarwal's post How to Cross-Check Your Facebook Privacy Settings to make sure the new settings works correctly.

Post from: ProductiveWise

How to Not Spam Your Facebook Friends Who Don’t Speak Your Native ‎Language

Join ProductiveWise Facebook Fan Page

Eyal Sela — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 21:47:54 +0000

I’v opened a Fan Page for ProductiveWise on Facebook. You’re invited to join it.

ProductiveWise on Facebook

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Join ProductiveWise Facebook Fan Page

The ‘Top-Notch Technology and Media Blogs’ Search Engine

Eyal Sela — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 09:19:18 +0000

I often find that Google isn't quite tuned in to my search needs. Although I would rather that it only searched sites I know and trust, I often get results from sites that don't look trustworthy or aren't of high quality.

That is why I've created a custom search engine that only searches the best technology sites – The 'Top-Notch Technology and Media Blogs' Search Engine.

Try it out

What's in a custom search engine?

A Custom Search Engine (CSE) is a Google service that lets you create a search engine that only return results from sites you've predefined (create your custom search engine here). In the 'Top-Notch Technology and Media Blogs' Search Engine I've added the following sites: Gigaom; Lifehacker; Readwriteweb; Mashable; Labnol.org; Makeuseof; Downloadsquad; and some other sites.

How to use it

You can use the custom search engine in one of the following ways: – You can drag the Top-Notch Search Engine into your Favorites and use it whenever you need it. – Or Add it as a gadget to your iGoogle. – Or embed it in your website using the following code: <mce:script mce_src="http://www.gmodules.com/ig/ifr?url=http://www.google.com/cse/api/015720876466678303127/cse/rfvhyaxh8tk/gadget&synd=open&w=320&h=75&title=top+notch+technology+and+media+blogs&border=%23ffffff%7C3px%2C1px+solid+%23999999&output=js"></mce:script> If you think I should add other websites to the search engine, please write them down in the comments below.

Post from: ProductiveWise

The ‘Top-Notch Technology and Media Blogs’ Search Engine

Video – How to Find the Right People For a Job With Linkedin

Eyal Sela — Sun, 17 Jan 2010 17:45:08 +0000

Linkedin can be a great tool to find the right people for a job, a project or for one time help. In fact, it is that good that sometimes you get too many results and can’t see the forest for the trees. In this post I’m going to explain how to use Linkedin’s advanced search features in order to find people for specific tasks.

Let’s assume you’re looking for a PHP developer for your company. Here’s how you can use linked in to find people to hire:

In the search box type in PHP and hit search. The results will display people who mentioned the word PHP in their profile (note that people who are in your network show up first).
Refine the results by selecting or typing-in a location in the Location box on the left. Now, you will only see people from that location.
To further refine the results, in the groups box choose a group such as “Job networking” (of course you will have to be a member of that group in order to see it). That way you will get back people who are searching for a Job.

I made a video that illustrates how to do that, see it below:

Post from: ProductiveWise

Video – How to Find the Right People For a Job With Linkedin

Tip For Heavy Chrome Users – Drag a Website’s Address to Save It in Your ‎Bookmarks

Eyal Sela — Sat, 09 Jan 2010 20:34:10 +0000

Heavy Chrome users might find it a bit difficult to manage all their bookmarks, because there is no easy way to place a new sites in a specific folder. Here is a little tip that will help you manage your bookmarks:

You can save a bookmark simply by dragging it to a folder.

I’ve created a 30 seconds video that explains how to do that. check it out below.

(If you got this post through e-mail or RSS and you can see the video, try watching it in the original post.)

Post from: ProductiveWise

Tip For Heavy Chrome Users – Drag a Website’s Address to Save It in Your ‎Bookmarks

How to Send (Almost) Anyone on Linkedin a Message

Eyal Sela — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 20:33:22 +0000

Sometimes, finding the right person on Linkedin is not enough. The reason is that only paying users with premium account can send messages to people outside their network (That is, if you are not already connected to someone, you can’t message him).

Now, if it happens to you often, probably the best solution is to pay to upgrade your account. But if you don’t think it will pay off, here is a little built-in hack that can help you overcome this limitation.

The solution

In short – to send almost anyone on linkedin a message, simply join a group he or she is a member of.

Explanation

When you join a group on Linkedin, by default the members of the group can send you messages. Although you can turn this option off (see image below) people usually don’t tend to change default settings. Therefore, usually you will be able to send message to all the other members of the group.

But how will I find what group he is on?

Simply scroll down to the end of the profile of the person you’re interested in. There, under ‘Groups and Associations’ there is a list of the groups this person is a member of.

And then what?

First, you need to submit a request to joint the group. Once you’ve been accepted, you will notice that the link ‘send inMail’ at the top of that person’s profile has changed to ‘send message’.

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How to Send (Almost) Anyone on Linkedin a Message

Roundup – Gmail, Google Reader, and other Google Tips and Practices

Eyal Sela — Sat, 28 Nov 2009 13:31:10 +0000

Over the past year I’ve written several posts about different Google applications. These include Google search, Google Reader, Gmail, Google Maps, and more. In case you’ve missed some, here is your chance to catch up with some great Goolge practices and tips (note that some of them where published on MakeUseOf.com):

Google Reader

Gmail

Google labs

Google all around

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Roundup – Gmail, Google Reader, and other Google Tips and Practices

Web Apps & Software for Distributed Teams

Eyal Sela — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 17:13:53 +0000

I’ve recently explained on MakeUseOf.com how to use Google Maps as a tool for distributed teams. In this post I am going to review other tools that support and improve the work of distributed teams. The tools will help you improve the way you share files, communicate, and work collaboratively with people not near you.

File sharing

One of the basic needs of a distributed team is the ability to share files. For ad-hoc teams, who do not work together on a regular basis, Drop.io is a great solution. Drop.io is a private sharing and collaboration web app. It lets you instantly create a mini site, called ‘a drop’, into which you can upload any type of file. You can annotate the file with comments or sections of text and use the chat feature for synchronized work sessions.

Teams who do work together on a regular basis should use Dropbox for file sharing. Dropbox is a software (yes, the kind you download) that creates a synchronization folder on your computer. The folder syncs any file in it with the Dropbox server (making the file always available online) and with a similar folder in your team members’ computers. This allows you to share files just like you would do if you were sitting in the same office and using the same server – in shared folders.

For a more cloud-based collaboration, use Google sites. Setting up a Google site is easy, and it can serve as an assistive tool for projects management and knowledge sharing.

Communication

Try as you might, you will never be able to avoid the need for synchronized work with team members (i.e. meetings). For that task, probably the best solution is Skype, the free voice and video calls software.

If not all the team members use Skype, you can use Tinychat for audio or video meetings. Just enter Tinychat, launch a session and send others the link. All the participants can immediately broadcast from their webcam or microphone, without any downloading. Each session also have a chat room.

To see an example of such sessions just pick one of the public chat rooms currently running in ‘Rooms‘.

Screen sharing

Alongside your call, you can use various tools to make it more productive. ShowDocument is a screen sharing tool that enables co-browsing on document and websites. Create within a single click an environment where you can show others a document, a webpage, or a YouTube video. People with whom you share the session will see your scrolling, mouse pointing and drawing.

For a bit more stable and rich screen sharing you can download Mikogo. Mikogo is an online meeting, web conferencing & remote support tool. It lets you share your screen with up to 10 participants in simultaneously.

Text editing

For instant simulations text editing you can use EtherPad. It is a plain text editor with a very high response time for instant writing tasks.

Alternatively, you can just use Google Docs (which requires all the participants to log in).

Scheduling

Finally, don’t forget to schedule the meeting with an online meeting scheduler, such as When Is Good or Doodle.

If you liked this post you might also want to read 6 Web Apps to Instantly Capture, Share, Display and Meet

image by oldcockatoo

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Web Apps & Software for Distributed Teams

Become a Google Ninja with Advanced Search Operators

Eyal Sela — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 22:25:46 +0000

Do you ever feel that if you could only tell Google a bit more about what you're trying to find, the search results would be much better? Well, as you probably know -

Google has some advanced search operators that help to refine search queries. You can use them to better focus your queries by specifying things like which sites to search, use placeholders, search for exact matches, and more.

Here is a quick guide to Google's advanced search operators.

Starting with Google's advanced operators

Double quotation marks (" ") for exact much:

When you enclose a phrase in quotation marks, Google returns only pages that contain that exact phrase. The results have to contain all the words and in the exact same order as you wrote them. Search for "The first Twitter user", for example, and you'll only get back pages that contain exactly that phrase. This advanced search feature is one of the most useful in my opinion.

**Asterisk (*) is a placeholder for one or more words:**

adding * replaces any number of words in your query. Example: let's say you want to find articles that teach Google search practices, like this one. You could use the following query for that task:

"how to Search * with Google"

The quotation marks will make sure that you'll get back pages with that sentence in them. But since there's Asterisk in the query, you'll find different versions of it. So, you might get back this sentence: How to Search Faces with Google, this one: How to SearchEffectively with google, or any other variation that matches the query. See the results in the image below or try the query yourself.

(site:) limits the search to specific domain(s):

when you encounter a website that does not have a search box, you can use this operator to search it. Simply add site:www.example.com to the query, where www.example.com is the site's URL. This will tell Google to search only pages within www.example.com. Example: to search information about libraries in Harvard University we can use this query (note that there is a space between the address and the word 'libraries', which is the term we want to find):

site:http://www.harvard.edu/ libraries

Try this query yourself.

You can also use site: to search across websites under the same top level domain (such as .gov or .edu). Example: you can find really interesting information about how government related bodies in the US use twitter, with this query:

site:.gov twitter

The results will include webpages under the .gov domain that related to twitter in some way. See the results in the image below or try the query yourself.

The plus sign (+) disables synonyms:

Google automatically searches for synonyms and similar words to those in your query. To limit this, add + right before the word(s) you which to keep the same (no space between the + and the word). Use the or sign (|) for either one of several possibilities: you can make your searches much more effective and efficient by using the | sign (find it on the same key as the Backslash sign- \). What it tells Google is to search either one of the words attached to it. (Note that you can use OR , with capital letters, instead of using the | sign.) Example: you can combine the following four different queries:

"the Facebook guide"

"the youtube ‎guide"

"the linkedin guide"

"The gmail guide"

Into a single query:

‎"the Facebook|youtube|LinkedIn|gmail guide"‎

See the results in the image below or try the query yourself. Do you have other search tips? Share them with us in the comments!

Post from: ProductiveWise

Become a Google Ninja with Advanced Search Operators

Search Twitter with Google – It’s Great!‎

Eyal Sela — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 11:47:46 +0000

If you’ve ever tried Twitter’s search, you’ve probably found that it’s not very good. Indeed, Other Twitter search alternatives exist, such as Trendistic, Tweefind, Tweetzi, and Twazzup. But wouldn’t you rather just use Google for the task?

To search Twitter with Google, all you need to do is add to the search query a limitation that tells it to search only within Twitter (and not the whole web). To do that, simply add the following string to the query:

site:http://twitter.com

So, for example, to find mentions of this blog, we’ll add the word ‘productivewise’ to the query, as shown below (notice that there is a space between the search term, productivewise, and the sit URL) :

site:http://twitter.com/ productivewise

The results are displayed in the image below.

Click this link to search Google with the above query (opens in a new window).

Search within a specific twitter user tweets

You can also search only within certain user’s tweets by using the link to that user’s profile (and not to Twitter as a whole). So, to search within my profile, you would use this query:

site:http://twitter.com/Eyalsela

Click this link to search Google with the above query (opens in a new window).

Post from: ProductiveWise

Search Twitter with Google – It’s Great!‎

Video – Jimmy Wales speaks at GarageGeeks – October 2009

Eyal Sela — Sat, 24 Oct 2009 03:42:11 +0000

I took this video of Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, at a GarageGeeks meetup. The image is bad but the sound is good. Enjoy.

Jimmy Wales speaks at GarageGeeks – October 2009 from Eyal Sela on Vimeo.

Post from: ProductiveWise

Video – Jimmy Wales speaks at GarageGeeks – October 2009