iContact – Free Fridays #16

iContact is more of a “one to watch” than a fully fledged application at the moment. It’s a desktop application available for Windows which can be used to access your GMail or Google Apps contacts database.

I say it’s not fully fledged as it lacks one very very important feature. It’s read only so you can’t edit your contacts yet. The developer does have this on his to do list and the ability to change and add contacts via iContact will be in the next release.

iContact Main screen

In the meantime though it’s still a worthwhile application, especially if you’ve just recently imported a load of contacts into GMail and things haven’t worked out quite as expected.

iContact Preferences Pane

The interface is very clean and the sensitivity of the search can be refined in the preferences. You can choose the sort order of the contacts and a handy feature is the option to display contacts that only have email information in a different colour, helping you manage duplicates.

Hopefully this will develop into a fully fledged application in the very near future with built in de-duplication and the useful record merge function found in Apple’s Address Book programme.

You can download a copy of iContact for free at www.dataload.com/icontact/

Filed under: Free Fridays, Free Software, Information Management , contact management, gmail, gmail contacts, google apis, icontact

6 Great Uses For Google Alerts

Google Alerts is a great system that sends you an email you whenever a new page containing a word or phrase you have chosen to follow enters their search index.

You can create up to 1000 alerts on as many words and phrases as you like. You can also determine how often each alert is sent: “as it happens”, once a day or once a week.

And finally you can also filter the source of the content to specific part of the web:

• News
• Blogs
• Web
• Videos
• Groups
• Comprehensive (i.e. all of the above)

I usually choose comprehensive and then adjust the settings if there’s just too much information coming in.

Here are a few suggestions as to how Google Alerts can help you keep on top of things.

1. Simple reputation management

The most common use has to be for monitoring what people are saying about you, your clients or your competitors.

I have an alert set up on several client company names and receive a once a week alert on this. It helps me to see where on the web these clients are mentioned and measure the effectiveness of publicity campaigns.

2. Measuring search optimisation effectiveness

If you set up an alert on the title of an article you have written, an “as it happens” alert will let you see how long it takes for it to enter into the Google index.

For most of my blog articles, this is usually in about one hour whereas on certain other web sites, it can take a week. Alerts also let you see where else on the web your articles are mentioned (or stolen, see 6)

3. Monitoring the launch of new products

For my sins as a web designer I’m interested in tracking developments in the latest versions of web browsers. Google alerts keeps me up to date with new releases of all the major browsers and lets me track the opinions of commentators on the same subject.

4. Trend spotting

If you have a hunch that something is going to be big or want to follow the development of a story, Google Alerts can help you with this as well. Over time you’ll start to notice the volume of alerts on particular subjects rise and fall and you may also be able to determine what caused a story to snowball.

5. Alerting you when hard to find items become available

If you’re looking for an out of print book or a classic pair of trainers, Google Alerts does the business, but patience is the name of the game.

6. Content theft

My bug bear. It’s a sad fact that as soon as you post something on the web, someone nicks it and publishes it as their own in order to have content on their web site so they can keep visitors coming and generate advertising revenue.

How much you can do about that is debatable, but it’s at least helpful to have an idea of who is doing it.

So How Do I Create A Google Alert?

Creating a Google alert is really easy.

Just go to www.google.com/alerts

If you don’t already have a Google account, you’ll need to set one up. If you do have one and you’re already signed in, just enter the word or phrase you want to track, set the frequency of the alert and set the comprehensiveness of the filter.

Use quotes for exact phrases to avoid being deluged with emails. e.g. to monitor the term “Liz Hurley” enter it in quotes rather than as Liz Hurley without the quotes.

That’s all there is to it. You’ll soon start to receive updates on any new content that Google finds.

Managing Google Alerts

To add more alerts, edit or remove existing alerts, just go back to www.google.com/alerts

But there’s an even easier way to manage your alerts than that. At the end of each email alert that you receive, there is a link with the option to delete the alert, change the settings for that alert or set up another alert.

If you’re using Google Alerts I’d be interested in hearing about the ways in which you use the service.

Filed under: How To Manage A Website, Information Management, Search Engine Optimisation , alerts, google, news, notifications, reputation management

Adobe AIR Used For Documentation

I was wondering how long it would be before someone did this.

Ext JS have released the documentation for the latest version (Ext JS 2.1) of their JavaScript library as an Adobe AIR download.

This makes a lot of sense and illustrates some of the great strengths of AIR.

All of the Ext JS documentation is already available online, created using HTML and the Ext JS library, so packaging this up an an AIR application wouldn’t have taken much effort. People tend to like working with documents offline so it adds a new advantage for Ext JS over other libraries. But unlike other more traditional means of distributing documentation, this is automatically updateable.

The other key advantage is that the documentation very closely replicates the documentation on Ext JS’s web site so you can happily choose whichever way is most convenient to you at any given time.

Filed under: Adobe Air, Information Management , adobe, air, documentation, extJS 2.1

Shifd

Shifd.com (pronounced Shift) is a very simple, very useful web application that arose out of a 24 hour coding competition and which is going to be very successful.

It’s a web application, it’s a browser toolbar plugin, it’s a mobile application and, via AIR, it’s a desktop app as well. Originally it was hooked up to RFID reader that recognised your mobile and synced your all your devices with your account. But the general release has stripped out that functionality in order to give the application wider appeal.

The desktop AIR app is the part I’ll focus on here, but first an overview of what Shifd actually does.

At it’s heart, Shifd is a hub for snippets of your information. It lets you collect and organise three types of information. Notes, Places and Links. Why? So you can note down and have access to these scribblings wherever you are and via whatever medium is available or most convenient to you at the time.

Filed under: Adobe Air, Free Software, Information Management , Adobe Air, air, google maps, iphone, jquery, new york times, nyt, ria, shifd, yahoo maps

4Q Free Web Visitor Survey – Free Fridays #12

This weeks (yes, I know it’s been a few weeks) free software is an online survey tool that enables you to collect opinions on what people think about your web site.

It’s very easy to implement, it’s very easy for the visitor to use, it’s free and it’ll provide you with invaluable feedback that can make a real difference in improving your web site.

4Q is provided by Avinash Kaushik of the Occam’s Razor blog and Web Analtyics fame and a company called iperceptions.com. You can sign up at 4q.iperceptions.com but let me explain a little about how it works first.

What Does 4Q Do?

The survey take about 10 minutes to set up and most of that time is spent waiting for the account activation email to arrive.

It’s based on four key questions that look at why people have visited your site and if they found what they were looking for or managed to achieve what they set out to do.

When a visitor enters your website, they are asked of they want to complete a quick survey when they have finished their visit. If they say yes, they can carry on and when they finish browsing, the survey is there for them to complete. If they say no, they won’t hear about they survey again.

You can switch the survey on and off at any time and you can also set it so that it only asks a certain number of visitors e.g. every 5th person etc.

To see an example of the survey in action, visit www.webglossary.co.uk and answer yes to doing the survey. Don’t worry about how you answer the questions, this is just a test site that I’m running the survey on.

Four Key Questions

Your visitor survey will ask people four key questions after they have visited your site and close their browser.

These are basically:

1. Why are you here?
2. Was it successful?
3. If not why not?
4. Were you satisfied?

These are the essential questions that will give you insight in to why people actually visit your web site and whether or not they were happy with the visit. This is the kind of information that normal web analytics cannot provide.

For example, imagine someone comes to your web site and looking to join your organisation. They might look on half a dozen pages on your website, then give up looking and go away. Web analytics can show you that the person arrive via a search engine, stayed for 4 minutes and looked at 6 pages. That could be regarded as a good visit. But the fact that they didn’t find what they were looking for makes it an unsuccessful visit.

Conversely, someone could come to your site looking for your phone number, visit the home page, stay for 10 seconds and write down you phone number. In terms of web analytics that could be deemed an unsuccessful visit. They didn’t stay and the results will show a 100% bounce rate for that visitor. But they left because they had found what they wanted.

This is why the good old Customer Satisfaction Survey is still necessary and 4Q enables you to easily implement one.

Setting Up 4Q

When you create your survey you just have to choose some options from a list of pre-made answers for question 1. These include things like, “Ask An Expert”, “Compare Products”, “Research” etc.

Once you’ve made those choices, you save your survey and receive access to one line of code which you can either drop into the footer of your website code or add to one particular page.

If you don’t maintain your own web site you can just email the code to your designer and they can very quickly add it to your web site.

It’s very easy to do and the breakdown of the results is very user friendly as well.

Filed under: Free Fridays, Free Software, How To Manage A Website, Information Management, Promoting Your Website and Organisation, Web Analytics , 4q, online surveys, surveys

Top 6 Thunderbird Extensions – Free Fridays #10

If you’re not yet acquainted with it, Thunderbird is Mozilla’s desktop email client. I’ve been using it for a couple of years now as an alternative to Outlook because it’s more lightweight and seems to handle large volumes of mail better.

Mozilla’s philosophy is to build products that are lightweight on initial installation, which you then have the choice to extend later by downloading additional plug-ins which they call extensions.

These are the 6 extensions that I’ve found most useful over the years. All of the extensions mentioned run in current version of Thunderbird 2.0.0.9 (20071031)

Lightning

Lightning provides calendering and task management for Thunderbird. You can multiple calendars to help separate work and private life and subscribe to or import external calendars.

It has all the Day, Week and Month Views that you’d expect of a decent calendar programme and if you set dates for your tasks, they will also appear in the calendar.

Thunderbird In Month View

Thunderbird In Week View

Download Lightning here addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/2313

Provider For Google Calendar

The Google provider for Lightning enables it to not only subscribe to your Google Calenders, but to also write back information to Google. So if you an an event in Thunderbird, it’ll synchronise back to your Google calendar and vice versa.

At the moment the Google Provider for Lightning is only able to sync calendar events, not tasks. All of your tasks will have to be stored in a local calendar.

Download: addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/4631

Duplicate Remover

As people change their email address or move around from company to company, you inevitably end up with some old or duplicate contact records in your address book.

The Duplicate Remover extension runs a check on all of the contacts in your address book and when it finds potential duplicates it presents them to you side by side with the option to delete one of them.

You can choose to ignore the suggested duplicates, edit the information in both or delete the suggested record. Unlike Apple’s address book, there’s no merge function, but I’m sure that’s top of their list for extending functionality the functionality.

It’s fairly quick, but of course that’ll depend on how many contacts you have, but you shouldn’t need to run it that often.

Download: addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/2505

Address Book Side Bar

One thing that is missing from the default installation of Thunderbird is a pane which enables you to quickly glance through a list of all your contacts and choose which ones to send the email to.

The Address Book Sidebar fulfils that role and can be called up whether you are creating a new message or not.

Download: addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/70

Signature Switcher

If you use Thunderbird for work and private email or if you have to respond in different roles at work Siganture Switcher is a very handy tool that let’s you create a number of different signatures for signing off your emails and then choose which one you use at then end of each message.

But it goes beyond simply being able to manually choose which signature to append to a message. It can also be configured to automatically choose which signature to use based on who you are replying to or the recipients of a mailing list you are using to send out the email.

Download: addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/611

MagicSLR

If you use Thunderbird to collect mail from more than one account MagicSLR is a handy little toll that enables you to hit one button and it send and receive all of your mail for all of your accounts.

Download: addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/902

Toolbar Buttons

As you get more familiar with Thunderbird you’ll probably want to change the tool bar options to include the functions that you use most often. There are loads of functions available, but not all have a button, so you’ll need the Toolbar Buttons extenison.

Download: addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/2377

Filed under: Free Fridays, Free Software, Information Management, Reviews, Thunderbird , contacts sidebar, duplicate remover, extensions, lightning, mozilla, task management, Thunderbird