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

Post from: ProductiveWise

Video – The Three Factors That Motivates People

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:

1. Select a part of the web page they’re browsing,
2. 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

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:

Or actuality, here is the signature itself:

–
Eyal Sela
productivewise.com
twitter.com/Eyalsela
linkedin.com/in/selaeyal

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

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.

Post from: ProductiveWise

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

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

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.

Post from: ProductiveWise

Use Delicious to Deliver better Content to Your Readers

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.

Post from: ProductiveWise

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

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

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:

1. Write the a status message as usual.
2. Click the the lock icon on the left side of the ‘Share’ button, and click ‘Custom‘ (see image below).



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

3. 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

4. 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

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

Post from: ProductiveWise

Join ProductiveWise Facebook Fan Page

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

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:

1. 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).
2. 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.
3. 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

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

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’.

Post from: ProductiveWise

How to Send (Almost) Anyone on Linkedin a Message

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

• Google Reader Tips and Practices for Power Users
• 4 Steps to Optimize Your RSS Subscription List in Google Reader
• Before Google – Use Your RSS Reader as a Search Engine

Gmail

• Top 5 Gmail Keyboard Shortcuts to Boost Your Productivity
• Make Gmail More Secure By Setting It to Use HTTPS Connection
• The Easiest way to Create a New Email Message Instantly

Google labs

• 7 Great Things You Can Do With Gmail Multiple Inboxes
• Google Social Search Makes Your Search Results Personal
• A Quick Guide To Google’s New Search Features

Google all around

• How To Create Shared Collaborative Google Maps
• Discover Google Applications’ Keyboard Shortcuts by Typing Question Mark ‘?’
• Become a Google Search Ninja with Advanced Operators

Post from: ProductiveWise

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

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

Post from: ProductiveWise

Web Apps & Software for Distributed Teams

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 advancead 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 addsite: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 Search Ninja with Advanced Operators

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!‎

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

This is a guest post by Ann Smarty, a social media and search blogger and online entrepreneur.

Real-time search is the latest achievement of web 2.0. Never before was it so easy to speak to the whole world and to be instantly heard. This post overviews the 4 most popular search engines capable of generating fresh results.

It is hard to compare them to choose the best one: there are no winners in this game. They all have some benefits and should be used in particular cases:

Twitter Search

Twitter search is the most popular real-time search engine nowadays for a few good reasons:

• Indexing time: the moment the update goes live, it is already in the index;
• Huge database: everyone seems to be on Twitter by now, therefore the user base is huge as well as the number of results for any topic.

Twitter search offers a few really useful advanced search operators, among them:

• From this person [from:username]
• To this person [to:username]
• Referencing this person [@username]
• Tweets asking the question [include ? to the search results]
• Updates containing positive/negative attitude [include / to the search results]

Let me demonstrate the power of one of the above search operators by the following example: consider searching for negative reviews when researching some product/ service, for example: look for GoDaddy.com dissatisfied customers:

There are plenty of other real-time Twitter-based search engines to check out: CrowdEye, OneRiot, TweetMeme,Collecta

Facebook Search

Facebook search was announced not a long time ago, thus there aren’t as many tools and applications so far as for Twitter search but it is still something that must be given a try. Here’s a quick overview of what you can do with the new facebook search:

• search the last 30 days of your news feed for status updates, photos, links, videos and notes being shared by your friends and the Facebook Pages of which you’re a fan.
• search for status updates, links and notes of other people who are not your friends but who have chosen to make their updates public;

You can also filter results to see only those that contain links, to get only wall posts and status updates or to only search other people’s notes. Here’s an example of search results page giving you an idea of what people on Facebook think about GoDaddy:

Google Search

While Google doesn’t currently offer the real time search in the sense we’ve discussed above, I found it absolutely necessary to mention it here – Google lets you search one-hour-old results (the search option found in the side panel); so let’s call it “near real-time search”

The reason why I think it should be included here is that Google can search within any site in its index. This means, you can turn any site into a near real-time search platform. This turns particularly useful for huge user-edited sites.

Here’s a real-life example for you: I love tracking online deals because they help me save some money; my favorite tool to do that is Buxr. To find its latest updates on, say, laptops, I need:

• To search [site:buxr.com laptops] on Google;
• Then click “More options” to open the side panel and click “Past hour” to see the latest updates.

Now, the most obvious question to ask here is why not to use the site built-in search platform. Google gives many more options than any other known search platform. You can use advanced search and side panel search options to display images from the page, see not yet visited results, get only most recent updates, etc.

FriendFeed

Unlike the above three search engines, Friendfeed largely operates external data bases but it is also quite a powerful real time search tool. It combines multiple social networks to generate recent search results.

Friendfeed streamlines relevant results from a number of social networks including Twitter, Delicious, Identi.ca, StumbleUpon, etc plus numerous other sites added by its users. Its search options are quite limited though: the only thing you can do is to provide a search term and hit “Search”: there are no advanced options, sorting or filtering results, etc:

Similar tool aggregating other networks results to check out: Scoopler

Do you use any real-time search engines? Please share your thoughts in the comments!

The guest post is by Ann Smarty, a social media and search blogger and online entrepreneur.

Post from: ProductiveWise

How to Search the Web Real-Time

Google reader is probably the best RSS reader available today. Here are some tips and practices for power users (hopefully, you) to help you better manage your RSS reading time and leverage it, tweak Google Reader to use first and second level categorization, and optimize you RSS subscription list.

Use folders to prioritize your reading

At a certain point you’ve probably realize that it is just not possible to read all of the new items you get. One possible solution is to use folders to categorize your feeds. Once you categorized all your feeds, you can read prioritize your reading by urgency level.

For example, I use a folder called ‘Immediate‘ where I put feeds that I want to read the moment they publish something new because it is important for me to know about them as soon as possible. These could be work related or new trends, usually things that if no read within day or two (sometimes less), they became irrelevant.

Other folders I use are ‘friends‘, ‘Podcasts‘, ‘Premier Blogs‘, and some more. I also use a ‘must read‘ folder for things that I want to read sometime, but it doesn’t really matter when (such as family blogs or new WordPress plugins).

Eric Friedman’s post, ‘Prioritizing and Organizing Feeds in Google Reader‘, shows a similar method of using tiers to prioritize RSS reading on Google reader.

Prefix folders for easier categorization

But now a new problem arises. If you are tagging the items you read, you’ll notice that under ‘Feed Settings‘ (where you choose the folders for new feeds) there are tens and even hundreds of folders to choose from. That happens since all the tags and folders are listed in there together.

The solution is the artificially separate the folders from the tags by adding an asterisk sign (*) at the beginning of each folder’s name. This will make the folders show up at the top of the Feed Setting list, making it easier to find the right folder to put new feeds in.

Prefix feeds for Second level categorization

Sometimes, the first level categorization is not enough and you need a second level categorization. That happens when you need to recognize a specific feed among the other feeds in a folder. It is important to recognize the source of an item since it can get a whole other meaning if it was written by one of Google’s blogs or maybe you’re competitor’s blog. But that doesn’t mean you want to create a folder just for them. Yet, you don’t want to invest the effort of reading the name of each item’s source, in addition to reading its headline. After all, one of the advantages RSS offers is the ability to scan items rapidly without distractions.

So, to get a second level categorization, prefix the names of the feeds themselves so that their name will stand out. To change the name of a feed, locate it in the right sidebar (called ‘Subscriptions’), click it, and under “Feed settings” choose ‘Rename subscription‘. Add a unique prefix to the name of the feed. For example, I have prefixed blogs about writing skills with this prefixes: ^^ writing ^^

Optimize your reading list

I believe that it is good practice to subscribe and unsubscribe from feeds as needed. There is no reason to stick to websites that do not provide interesting or useful content; it is reasonable that your tastes and needs will vary over time. Therefore, I have developed a practice that will enable you to optimize Your RSS Subscription List in Google Reader by finding the feeds that are not relevant to you and unsubscribing from them.

To optimize your RSS subscription you should first start using the ‘star item‘ feature. Whenever you read an item that you find interesting or useful, star it (it also make it easier to find these items later). After you’ve been doing it for a few weeks, go to ‘trends‘ and compare the number of stared items with the update frequency of the subscriptions. Relatively, the most frequently updated subscriptions should also be the ones with the highest number of stared items. If you find subscriptions that are updated in high frequency but you did not star a lot of items in them – you should get rid of them. Why? Because the more items a source post, the more stars you would expect it to get. You can read the full post here.

Use automatic sharing to Leverage time spent reading

You can Leverage the time you spend reading by automatically sharing items. The ‘Share‘ feature allows you to publish items to be shared with your friends through Facebook or your readers through your blog or website. When you mark an item as ‘shared‘, what you are actually doing is making it public on your shared Items page (this is my shared items page, by the way).

To get the link to your public page, to as follows:

1. Click ‘Sharing settings »‘ in the left sidebar (just above ‘subscriptions‘).
2. Scroll down, and under the ‘Your shared items page‘ section, copy the link that says “Preview your shared items page in a new window“

Now you can add it to Facebook as one of the streams in your profiles. Every time you’ll mark item as sheared, all of your friends will see it in your personal stream.

To share your shared items in your blog or website – still under ‘Sharing settings »‘, click the link that says “Add a clip to your web site or blog”, at the end of the page. Follow the instructions to generate an embed code that will display your latest shared items (you can see my shared items in the news section).

Post from: ProductiveWise

Google Reader Tips and Practices for Power Users