Did you know?
In October, I wrote about Google Moderator, a tool for putting together and addressing lists of questions at large events or for huge groups of people.
If you’re holding a meeting and only have time to answer your audience’s most important questions, Google’s free Moderator tool might be a wise solution. The simple tool, originally built for putting together question lists at tech conferences, lets anyone with a Google account create a “topic,” like “Questions for the boss,” throw a few sample questions up, then submit a group of emails to take part in question voting and suggesting.
The Obama Transition website Change.gov has teamed up with Google to incorporate the tool into their site.
Did you know?
This is more fun than useful but Google Earth has updated their 3D maps of New York City with higher resolution buildings. Take a look below.
To see it in action, you’ll need to open up Google Earth and head to NYC. Once there, turn on the 3D Buildings layer. The updated buildings will start to populate the screen.
Combine multiple urls into one Krunchd makes it incredibly simple to share multiple urls, combined into one short url. Some uses?
- College Students – Share resourceful websites for your papers and projects.
- Bloggers and Writers – Make linking to multiple sites easier.
- Sales Professionals – Share sales resources and information with your team.
- Legal Professionals – Collect pages that can be use as evidence.
- Creative Professionals – Share cool websites or tutorials.
Krunchd.com Peer-to-Peer Camping Add Single Spot Camping to the growing list of p2p sleeping accommodations (along with Couch Surfing and Airbed & Breakfast.) What’s their angle?
"to create travel experiences that are more unique and personal than staying at a regular camping ground."
Singlespotcamping.com Change.gov on the iPhone President-Elect Obama’s transition site, Change.gov, continues to impress with the addition of a Change.gov iPhone application. Earlier this month Change.gov added OpenID, Creative Commons licensing and the Intense Debate commenting system. What does this mean? You’ll have access to policy positions, agenda items and recent transition news while you’re on the go. You can also download the widget version of the application here.
Did you know?
Mashable asks if you’re using Google Desktop, and if not, here are five reasons to consider it.
- Google Docs Drag-and-Drop
- File Versioning
- Advanced Search Options
- Gadgets!
- Take Your Desktop to Your TV
For more info.
Great prints from Daniel Danger, really beautiful work.
Hat tip to Ken M. for putting this together!
Did you know?
Lately, everyone in the organization has received more spam because someone is sending us messages that slip through Google’s filters. Here’s some background on Gmail’s filtering system and how to use it to reduce the amount of spam you receive.
Google reveals few details about how its spam filters work, but we know they rely on a variety of techniques, some driven by their users and some driven by software. The primary user-based technique is called “community clicks”. If many users report a message as spam, Gmail’s filtering system considers it as spam for everyone. The primary software-based technique uses statistical modeling to analyze each message as it enters Gmail and decide whether it’s spam according to a database of characteristics possessed by previously received spam. This system learns over time and is generally very effective at distinguishing spam from legitimate messages.
Read more here.
The best thing you can do to decrease the amount of spam you receive is to notify Google every time you receive one. How you do this depends on how you read your mail. In the Gmail web interface, select the message and click “Report as spam”. In a desktop client like Mac Mail or Outlook, drag the message into the “[Gmail]/Spam” folder. Do the opposite if you receive a legitimate message that Gmail routed to your spam folder.
If you’re diligent about reporting spam, you should see Gmail’s filters adapt to catch more in a few days.
Tampa Bay Online has a great piece on all the new things we’ve learned over the year.
1. Dogs appear to experience jealousy and pride. Previously, only humans and chimpanzees were thought to suffer those emotions.
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2. Two pounds of a dried plant that turned out to be the oldest marijuana in the world was discovered in a 2,700-year-old grave in the excavated Yanghai Tombs in the Gobi Desert. The cannabis was found near the head of a blue-eyed, 45-year-old shaman among other objects intended for use in the afterlife.
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3. Starch grains embedded in plaque on the teeth of early Peruvians show they had a more varied diet than previously believed, including beans and a local fruit known as pacay that indicate they had settled into farming long before we thought they had.
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4. Scientists discovered a more efficient way to build synthetic genomes, which could lead to one day creating artificial life.
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5. Puerto Rican anole lizards perform push-ups and unfurl their dewlaps, the flaps of skin beneath their chins, to grab the attention of others when the forest is noisy.
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