Total U.S. adults with access to the Internet has swelled to 77 percent, or 172 million people, as of April 2006.At home 70 percent of adults have online access, an increase over the 66 percent in 2005.
Read more at TechWeb
Month: May 2006
Portable Apps on a Thumb Drive
Want to use a USB thumb drive to take all your applications as well as your settings wherever you go? Check out the
Portable Apps Suite. They have many optional apps, but the standard package includes:
Portable Firefox (web browser), Portable Thunderbird (email client), Portable OpenOffice.org (office suite), Portable AbiWord (word processor), Portable NVU (web editor), Portable Sunbird (calendar & task list), Portable FileZilla (FTP client), Portable Gaim (instant messenger) and will fit on a 256Mb USB thumbdrive.
Read more at: PortableApps.com
The Art of Agile Plotting using Notecards
A great resource including printable template:
One of the oldest tools in the arsenal of writers is the modest and unassuming index card. It's used for jotting notes, sharing phone numbers, creating bibliographies, capturing ideas, making lists, and --heck-- even making indices. (Who would have thought?) But one of its primary uses, especially for people structuring stories, is in creating a plot outline. A pen, a table top, and a small stack of cards are all that's needed to turn a mish-mash of incongruent or half-baked ideas into a plot that's tight, logical and well-developed.
Have you ever come up with a concept for a story, video or presentation, but didn't know how to begin?
Read full article at D*I*Y Planner.
Google leads market, introduces Video Ads
Google continues to be the 800 lb Gorilla in the paid search world:
Google's share of the U.S. Web search market continues to edge beyond Yahoo and Microsoft, according to the latest monthly numbers released by analysis firm ComScore Networks.
The search giant's market share among home, work and university Internet users climbed from 42.7 percent to 43.1 percent from March to April of this year--up from 36.5 percent in April 2005, ComScore said Monday.
In second place, Yahoo saw its market share hold steady at 28 percent between March and April, a decrease of 2.7 percent from last year. Less than 6 percentage points separated Google's and Yahoo's respective market shares in April 2005. (From CNET News.com)
Google's innovations now include distributing online video ads which will debut later this week:
The video expansion, announced late Monday, will affect thousands of Web sites that rely on Google to post ads related to the surrounding material on a page. For instance, a news story about housing might prompt Google to display an ad for real estate agents. (Read full article)
Gartner sees declining need for tech skills
Is IT on the decline?
The need for employees with specific IT skills will decline 10% per year as companies move to commodity and virtualized systems, according to Gartner Inc.
What this doesn't address is that while specific skills may be less in demand, the demand for people who understand business as well as they do technology had never been higher.
Read more here: ITExpo: Gartner sees declining need for tech skills
Post It Trick
This is a VERY cool technique to take notes on books without actually writing within the book, dog-earing pages, etc.
I thought I might as well document one of my little "life hacks".
1. When I start a new book I stick a few post-its on the first page inside the cover. That way there's always some paper around to write notes on.
2. When I fill up a post-it I move it, either to the inside back cover or the inside front cover.
3. The added benefit of using post-its is that when I come to type up the notes (so I never lose them and can search them), the post-its stick handily to the side of the monitor.
Another trick I've adapted to the above is writing the page number on the Post It if there is a paragraph I particularly liked. I'll sometimes photo copy the pages I note on the Post It after I'm done with the book and file it for reference.