links for 2009-04-03

awesome site for product manuals etc.

Do you really need another toolbar? In this case, yes. The DiggBar has its pulse on a huge Internet community. And it easily appears and disappears on a whim, unlike a permanent toolbar. Here's why it's significant and how you can use it.

Woot

Web application Namechk finds available usernames or vanity URLs on more than 80 web sites—so you can own your online presence.

AWESOME WOOT!

Windows only: Free application Skype Call Recorder creates MP3s of any Skype conversation with a couple of simple clicks.

Freaking cool!

Woot! – Gmail Labs has released a great new Search Autocomplete feature today that offers search suggestions for all kinds of Gmail searches, from simple search-by-contacts to more advanced search queries—like for specific attachments.

thank god! that really bugged me

Twitter Gadget for Gmail is a Twitter client specially designed for Gmail. OY

Props to @waltpsu Web site ALARMD Internet Alarm Clock wakes you up to a YouTube video, Last.fm radio station, or web-hosted MP3 of your choosing after you set the alarm on its giant display.

major props to @waltpsu for finding this awesome link

Way to go @garyvee

HarperStudio has signed a seven-figure, 10-book deal with Gary Vaynerchuk, a 33-year-old Belarusian-born wine retailer from New Jersey, who, except for a talk show appearance here and there, is basically unknown in mainstream media circles.

But in the world of the Internet, he is a Twitter phenom, with 145,000 followers hanging on his every tweet. What began as a daily video blog about wine has become a self-help, business-advice juggernaut, with "Garyvee" as chief engineer. As he describes himself online, "I love people, and the hustle." The first book in his series, "Crush It! Turn Your Passion into Profits in a Digital World," lands in stores in September.

Mainstream media is in an orgiastic frenzy of coverage about Twitter. Everyone's Tweeting, from celebrities to CEOs according to CNN, The View, Today, the NY Times, the Wall St Journal and just about everyone else. Each of them covers Twitter like it's an overnight phenomenon that came out of nowhere, although Twitter has been gaining traction for three years and now has 9 million members.

Attention, for makers of media, was once measured in circulation or ratings, back when attention was measured by meaty metrics that were immediately translatable into dollars. You’re a daily newspaper and you beat your competition bad enough to spike your circulation—well, that’s more cash in your pocket immediately. (And you can start charging higher ad rates to your advertisers.) You’re a TV station or a radio station or a cable station and your ratings go up; you can get more from your advertisers to reach your bigger audience.

Sideline is an Adobe® AIR™ desktop application built with the Yahoo! User Interface Library (YUI). It allows users to create and group custom queries by topics of interest.

With the redesign, the search box has moved to the right sidebar of the interface (only for a small subset of users at this point), where Stone claims it’s a more ‘natural part of the Twitter experience’. I agree, and it shows that the company realizes very well that real-time search is a killer feature they should be nurturing and monitoring very closely.

G20Meltdown is one of the main protest groups. One of their organizers said that Twitter was a key tool to mobilize people and shift them around because it lets people send and read tweets through their cell phones.

In the microblogging world of Twitter, this is your Congress at work. In bursts of 140 characters or less, Twittering is now all the rage on Capitol Hill. At last count, 121 members are using mobile devices to send updates, or tweets, like the tidbits of information above (taken from actual congressional tweets).