Here is a little tip for Twitter and Facebook users.  In this post I’ll show you how you can easily setup an RSS feed to post updates automatically to your Twitter account and Facebook pages or profile.

This is very handy if you want to:

Twitterfeed Homepage

If you’re anything like me, you use Twitter not only to connect with people, but also to find new interesting articles and websites that people you follow recommend.   By linking an quality RSS feed to your Twitter account, you can “give back” some of that goodness and suggest content to your followers, without having to do anything. It’s all done automatically.

Sure, you should only do this with a quality RSS feed that you are certain your followers will find interesting so you don’t overdo it.

Here is how to link an RSS feed to Twitter or Facebook:

1Go to www.twitterfeed.com

2Create your new account and login

3Create New Feed by clicking the button in top right corner of the screen

4Define your source RSS Feed – enter the name and RSS URL.

Setting up a RSS feed

5Go to “Step two” – connect the RSS feed to your services. At the time of writing this article, you can link RSS feeds to Twitter, Facebook, Statusnet and Hellotxt.

6All done.  You now have an RSS feed linked to your Twitter or Facebook account and it will post new updates as they come in.  You can also check how many people clicked on your links from the Twitterfeed dashboard.

Google Wave–a new communication and collaboration tool developed by Google–has certainly caused a lot of buzz in the past months.  While it is still in pre-beta stage and access is limited by invitations, Google Wave clearly demonstrates it has the potential to change the way we work and communicate online.  Those who can see the capabilities hidden behind the little bit clumsy interface (remember the development is still in early stages) know Google Wave is something to monitor closely.  Those who do not “get it” on the other hand are clearly not the right audience for testing the beta version and will probably be very surprised once the technology is adopted by mainstream programmers and developers.

I believe Google Wave is a platform that will become very successful once enough people start using it.  The key is to think of it as a platform on which other great things will be built on.   Remember iPhone SDK? By giving away the tools to build iPhone applications for free, Apple AppStore has grown exponentially to the point where it now has over 100,000 iPhone applications.  Google is on the right track to similar success.

Following Itai Boublil’s post, I decided to describe how I use Google Wave in my business.

Me and my team have been using Google Wave for over a month now. Ever since I saw the first demo of what it can do I knew Google Wave is the perfect tool for our internal communication.  We design websites and marketing materials and most projects involve at least two or three people. I have structured my business so that everyone works from home. There is no central office therefore having a good communication channel is essential for us.  Before Wave we handled things by email, instant messaging or phone which was a bit cumbersome at times.

Using Google Wave simplified our internal communication and increased productivity by quite a bit. No more bouncing emails back and forth, waiting for the other side to reply … it’s like email meets instant messaging on steroids.

We use Wave as a project management tool, work sheets, internal memo board, track of payments, to-do list, link exchange plus normal -. The savings are in productivity alone but this free tool also replaced our $400 project management system.

If you have a project or a work on a document which requires input from more than two people, give Google Wave a go. You might be surprised how quickly you get used to it and how easy it is to use.

Yes it is a bit rocky at times and the speed could be better, but considering how useful it is for us even now while Google Wave is still in it’s very early stages, I think it’s safe to say it’s really going to be a huge success and is certainly worth a try.

We all know them. The email your friend sent to you and all his other contacts in address book. They usually warn you about a “dangerous computer virus that will melt your hard drive” , “win a free laptop“,  “there is a little girl either lost or in need of a new kidney” or “don’t get out of your car at petrol stations or your car will be stolen“.

95% of these emails are just hoaxes playing on human compassion.  The fact is the emails warning about computer viruses become the virus itself – using unsuspecting people who mean well to spread the rumors to everyone in their address book, clogging up mailboxes and eating up your bandwidth.

How do you know if the email is a hoax?  Ask Google.

Here is what I’d like you to do. Next time you get a suspicious email warning you about this or that, copy the entire first line of the email text into Google search and see what comes up.  It’s that simple.  I can almost guarantee the first three results will lead to sites like hoax-slayer.com, urbanlegends.com or museumofhoaxes.com. This way you can find how much truth there is to the email you just received, and perhaps let the poor fellow who just sent you the hoax know he has nothing to worry about.

So the moral is this – please think before passing on the hoax email you just received. Google the first line of email text first to see if it is a false alarm.
How do you deal with mass hoax emails?

What is the best way to find what you’re looking for when searching the Internet?

Do you use the best tools for your search?

Finding information on the Internet is easy if you know what to use and where to look. There are a few tricks I’d like to share with you to increase your effectiveness and reduce time spent on searching the Internet.

With over 100 million searches done every day on Google alone, most people automatically use this biggest search engine to find what are they looking for. But did you know Google is not always the easiest way to find the page you’re after? Depending on what do you seek, there are other ways to get the best results. There are also some search options within Google itself many people don’t know about. here are a few tips how you can increase your web search effectiveness.

In this post I’ll explain a bit about these tools:

1. Google search options
2. Delicious.com
3. YouTube.com
4. Twitter Search
5. SocialMention.com

1. Google Search Options

Google does pretty good job in finding pages that it thinks are most relevant to your search terms. There are a few commands you can use to narrow the search criteria and get even better results. Here is a list of the commands you can use in your search terms:

• OR – Search for either one, such as “price high OR low” searches for “price” with “high” or “low”.
• “-” – Search while excluding a word, such as “apple -tree” searches for “apple” where the word “tree” is not used.
• “+” – Force inclusion of a word, such as “Name +of +the Game” to require the words “of” & “the” to appear on a matching page.
• “*” – Wildcard operator to match any words between other specific words.

Some of the query options are as follows:

• define: – The query prefix “define:” will provide a definition of the words listed after it.
• stocks: – After “stocks:” the query terms are treated as stock ticker symbols for lookup.
• site: – Restrict the results to those websites in the given domain, such as, site:www.michalwurm.com. For example the option “site:.nz” will search only web sites from New Zealand.
• allintitle: – Only the page titles are searched (not the remaining text on each webpage).
• intitle: – Prefix to search in a webpage title, such as “intitle:google search” will list pages with word “google” in title, and word “search” anywhere (no space after “intitle:”).
• allinurl: – Only the page URL address lines are searched (not the text inside each webpage).
• inurl: – Prefix for each word to be found in the URL; others words are matched anywhere, such as “inurl:acme search” matches “acme” in a URL, but matches “search” anywhere (no space after “inurl:”).

The page-display options (or query types) are:

• cache: – Highlights the search-words within the cached document, such as “cache:www.google.com xxx” shows cached content with word “xxx” highlighted.
• link: – The prefix “link:” will list webpages that have links to the specified webpage, such as “link:www.google.com” lists webpages linking to the Google homepage.
• related: – The prefix “related:” will list webpages that are “similar” to a specified web page.
• info: – The prefix “info:” will display some background information about one specified webpage, such as, info:www.google.com. Typically, the info is the first text (160 bytes, about 23 words) contained in the page, displayed in the style of a results entry.

You can find more detailed information on Google search options here.

2. Delicious.com

Delicious.com is a social bookmarking website for storing, sharing, and discovering website bookmarks. It allows you store your favourite bookmarks online, organize them by assigning tags and share with others. Use of Delicious is free and the site is very easy to use.

People use Delicious to save links to pages they consider of good value. Because the bookmarks are organized by tags and the saved links are “human filtered” it makes Delicious the perfect resource when searching for interesting content. You can use it to discover fascinating articles from your industry you didn’t know about, find great pages full of useful resources or search for case studies and key facts about your industry.

Chris Brogan summed use of Delicious.com best:

So, the point is this: I use OTHER PEOPLE to find interesting information on the web, and not search engines. I use search engines to find targeted information.

I found Delicious to be an invaluable tool for organizing bookmarks and finding pages I wouldn’t find otherwise. For example when I searched to case studies and statistics about social media in business, Google brings up tons of pags, but finding the actual data is like looking for needle in a haystack. Search for socialmedia and casestudy tags on Delicious brought up the pages I was looking for straight away.

You can also see other people’s bookmarks and see what others deem interesting (for example to see all my bookmarks about social media go to http://delicious.com/michalwurm/socialmedia).

3. YouTube.com

Did you know YouTube is the worlds second largest search engine? There are over five billion videos on YouTube, making it almost one for every person on Earth. These days you can find almost anything on YouTube from video clips through funny videos to tutorials and lectures. Obviously if you just want to see a music clip of your favourite singer, YouTube should be the first place to look. But it is also a great learning resource. There are hundreds of thousands videos on how things work, software tutorials and product reviews. These days you can learn how to use a new software just by watching YouTube tutorials. If you are looking for a more academic resources I’d recommend installing iTunes and searching iTunes University which allows you easily search, download, and play education content from colleges and universities.

4. Twitter search

Many people still struggle to see the benefit of Twitter. It is a micro-blogging site where you can post short updates about what you are doing and connect with other users. It’s one of those services that is very hard to explain but once you start using it you’ll start seeing the power hidden behind it.

Let’s leave the ins and outs of Twitter for now and have a look at how you can use the Twitter search function. Twitter is very “live” site. There are 6,390,000,000 updates in the site to date (see the current count here) This makes Twitter a great tool when searching for trends, things that are happening “right now” and live feedback and opinions on products, brands, services or locations.

Do you want to know what people say about certain brand? Do a Twitter search. Traveling and want to know where’s a good place to stay? Ask on Twitter. You can also use sites like TwitterFall.com to see live tweets as they come in. Do that on a trending topic and you’ll be amazed by the volume of updates coming in.

5. Social Mention.com

Social Mention is a social media search and analysis tool that aggregates user generated content from across the internet into a single stream of information. It allows you to easily track what people are saying about you, your company, a new product, or any topic across the web’s social media landscape in real-time. Social Mention monitors 100+ social media properties directly including: Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, YouTube, Digg, Google etc.

The ability to subscribe to RSS search feed or setup social alerts for your search terms make it an incredible tool to keep tabs on what people say about your brand or your competition.

Summary and examples

Here are a few examples of what tools deliver the best results for particular type of searches.

• Use Google for your generic day to day search queries.
• Use Delicious.com to discover new content other people deem interesting.
• If searching for case studies, reports or fact sheets, try Delicious first.  If searching for a specific report and you know the report title, use Google.
• When searching for videos, try YouTube first.
• Want to learn how to use new software you just purchased? Look up video tutorials on YouTube.
• Looking for product opinions?  Try searching on Social Mention, Twitter or Google “product name review”.

These are just some of ways to search for information, I hope you find the tips mentioned here useful.

How do you find good stuff on the internet?

Hello everyone and welcome to my blog.

I’m really thrilled that as a first post I can start with a huge giveaway and a great opportunity for anyone who needs a website build or re-designed.

I run a web design studio called Digital Arts and as a small business owner I know too well times are tough for many of us.  I also believe the best way we can all get ahead is by helping each other out. That’s why me and my team came up with the following offer:

Every other month, we would like to build a whole new website for one business completely free of charge.

This includes:

• a customized professional design
• content management system
• free hosting for one year
• SEO
• Email marketing software
• website statistics
• tips on how to make most of your website.

So I’m not talking some cheap, three page website – this is a real deal. To quantify the value of this offer I can say that at the moment my company sells this package for about 2,500 USD. In saying that the value can be relative – I have seen some of my competitors charging twice as much for similar deal so it depends who you talk to.

Anyone can sign up for either a new website or a website makeover.  To keep things transparent and fair we will shortlist the candidates at the end of each round to about 10 who we think deserve it the most and then run a public poll to select the final winner.  This way you decide who should win.

There are no hidden costs and nobody has to purchase anything from us to be eligible to win.

I really hope this offer will be well received.  I’d like to support the business community as much as I can and at this moment this is the best way I can do that.  I plan on running the free makeover initiative for as long as there is an interest in it.  This means if you have missed out, you can always sign up for another round.

I appreciate everyone’s help in spreading the word – after all the more people hear about this, the more businesses me and my team can help out.

My question to you is:

a)  If you are a small business or a startup entrepreneur, would you be interested in this?   If you are, why not register at http://www.websitemakeoverproject.com

b)  Would you be willing to spread the word for us on your favorite social network?  Or do you have any ideas how to let the business world know about this initiative? Please let me know your thoughts.

Check out the Free Website Makeover at http://www.websitemakeoverproject.com

Many thanks to everyone and I welcome all comments.

All the best,
Michal