Episode 56: Our Fave Five Resources for 2007
February 1, 2008
Kim and I took a look back on 2007 and listed our Top 5 Tech Resources. I have to put in a disclaimer here and tell you that these are not the ONLY resources we found and used during 2007. These are just the ones we used the most and/or liked the best! Luckily for us, George Smyth of The One Minute How-To podcast joined us…and we even let him get a word (or two) in edgewise. We even discovered that we shared some favorites!
I started our Top 5 off with my #1 resource: PC World Magazine. I get tons of online tekkie-type newsletters and have been getting several from PC World for the last couple of years. This year, I took advantage of a 2-year print subscription special (I’m cheap so it had to be a special….). If I thought the online newsletters were great, I was totally bowled over by the print magazine. Hey, I’ve gotten magazines in the past but never one that I actually sit down with, highlighter in hand, and mark up! There’s a lot of info in the print magazine that’s also in the online newsletters. As a matter of fact, the article in the print magazine reference a link where you can find the same info online. I really don’t feel like I’m paying for information that I was already getting for free either because there’s plenty of good stuff that I just don’t get in my e-mail inbox.
If you’ve ever listened to her, you know that Kim is a big supporter of Social Media. Sites like MySpace, Linked-In, Ryze Business Network and her personal favorite, Facebook, have made it a lot easier to share business tools, skills, and develop personal relationships with clients and other business resources who may be located in parts of the world that aren’t traditionally accessible. Kim’s been able to pursue joint business ventures with other like-minded business people through her participation in various social networks. As a matter of fact, it was through Linked-In that she and I got together.
George really loved another of my top resources: Sharp Keys! A cool tool I found on PC World, Sharp Keys is a registry hack that allows you to remap the keys on your keyboard. Why would you want to do that? Read the post I did on Sharp Keys and you’ll see why George and I both love it!
Kim discovered some open source software this past year that empowers website owners. The tekkie term is CMS (for Content Management Systems) and the tools are programs like WordPress and Drupal. Lots of business owners have not only had to pay big bucks to web designers to create and maintain their websites but have been at their webmaster’s mercy whenever they wanted to change something. Enter the blog. Once a tool for creating personal online journals, the blog has developed into an important business tool to help businesses interact with their customers and they’re so easy to use that you don’t have to be a professional to post information to your blog site. Is this putting The Blog Queen out of business? Heck no! Somebody has to teach business folks how to create a professional looking blog with the right type of information!
If you’re online, you’ve got e-mail. I have a love/hate relationship with it myself. I can’t work without it since so much of the communication I have with clients is via e-mail but I often found myself spending way too much time opening and closing my local e-mail client (I used to be a Thunderbird user). That changed when I started using Gmail as my universal e-mail client. For those of you who don’t know (and I didn’t until I read about it in PC World…), Gmail allows you to send/receive e-mail from up to five non-Gmail accounts…all from within Gmail! I know some people only have one e-mail address but I’m not one of them. I have different e-mail addresses for different websites that I maintain. I have a personal Gmail account. I have my Views from the Coop account and of course I have my business account for 2 Smart Chix. Yes, I have more than 5 but the ones I use the most are all set up in Gmail. I never have to download any e-mail (6 GB is a lot of space to store messages) and since I’m on the ‘net so much of my time, it’s easy to click into my Gmail account to check or send e-mail. One word of warning, however. If you’re on a mailing list (Yahoo, Google, etc), Gmail filters out your own posts so you won’t get a copy in your inbox. I don’t know why and for a long time, I thought I was either doing something wrong or the the e-mail list I was on didn’t work right. Once I found out (after a LOT of searching) what was really going on and actually logged in to see that my post was there, I felt a lot better. I still get posts from other members, just not from myself!
Kim started using another Google tool in 2007: Google Reader. Watching the news on TV can be pretty depressing since you’re often bombarded with images you’d just as soon not see. With Google reader, Kim just added all the RSS feeds for the news she wants to get and like Gmail, she can get it all in one place. She doesn’t have to change channels. My friend, Dr. Kathy King of Transformation Education, recently invited me to try out Google Reader and even though I haven’t checked it out yet, now that Kim’s given it HER seal of approval, I’m gonna have to try it for myself!
OK, so I’m one of those people who has to write stuff down….or it didn’t happen and it probably never will. For that reason, I’ve always kept a “To Do” list but since I started using Vista, I’ve been keeping myself organized with the built-in Windows Calendar feature. Kim tells me it was there in XP, too, but I just never discovered it. Believe it or not, I discovered this nifty little feature all by myself when I was first starting to play around in Vista. It’s kept me from paying late fees, missing appointments and forgetting to revise websites…and even send out invoices! The coolest part is that it doesn’t have to be running. I just set my preferences to pop-up reminders of appointment and tasks even when the calendar itself isn’t running. Cool!
Now, we all know that Kim’s the Blog Queen but not everybody does. Toward the end of 2007, Kim discovered Alex Mandossian’s Teleseminar Secrets and is working toward creating her own teleseminars to share her blogging expertise with the world! She’s currently attending a session of Alex’s Teleseminar Secrets and has been motivated to start her own teleseminars in 2008. Due to a schedule conflict, I don’t get to attend the teleseminar sessions with her, but I do get to download the audio and text files to review later. Even though I haven’t listened to all of them, I can tell you that they’re very comprehensive. Alex and his staff do a great job of not only explaining the teleseminar process but they also end each module with an extensive Q&A session that lasts a lot longer than the time you get to spend with your doctor!
Both of us put Blog Talk Radio on our list of resources we discovered in 2007. If you’ve been a listener to VFTC for long, you know that I lost the web conference room I was using courtesy of Rob at Co-opworld (now Cagora) when business dictated that he was no longer able to offer the service fee-free. I will always appreciate being able to use the web conference room and interact with my listeners live. It’s just so much more fun when you know there’s somebody out there listening! Last year, I looked at a lot of options and just couldn’t afford most of them and the ones I could afford didn’t offer me the features I really wanted. My friend and colleague, Kim Bloomer, was also in the same boat I was in after losing her courtesy web conference room. She discovered Blog Talk Radio and told me about it. Kim and her co-host, Jeannie, host two animal related shows on BTR: Animal Talk Naturally and ATN Gone Wild. Beside VFTC, I co-host Transformation Education on BTR with Dr. Kathy King. The best part is that Kim and I have that ability to interact with a live audience both online and over the phone. Listeners can join us live, or listen later. We don’t have to worry about recording, either. Blog Talk Radio does it for us. They also archive our shows so if you missed it live, you can listen to it there. Of course, we also get to download and edit our shows to post here on Views from the Coop!
We really enjoyed having George on with us to talk about our 2007 and even though we hardly ever let him say anything, he hung around for Part II: Our Plans for 2008. We hope you will, too!
Posted in Views From The Coop
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