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Articles from American Pai

You 2.0 2008-02-23 07:46:15 It can be overwhelming when you consider the magnitude of your digital life today. In the past, you just needed to know your name, social security number and perhaps some other basic information such as your phone numbers and home address. Today, thanks to the amazing Internet and all that it has to offer us, we have an ever-growing mountain of “stuff” to remember or manage. How does one do this without going nuts or losing great big chunks of precious time? I will try to share some thoughts on how to make your digital life more managable and thus all the more enjoyable. Ultimately, it will mean more free time for your offline life. These articles will be part of my Quality vs Quantity series which will adhere to the “Less is More” school of thought. Think ZenHabits meets LifeHacker with a sprinkle of twitter fairy dust (No, nothing to do with Robert Scoble!) Here’s my You 2.0 map from MindMesiter that will give you an overview of what I plan to cover. I ...

Create Your Own LinkedIN Network for the Enterprise 2008-02-21 20:43:39 LinkedIN is a fantastic networking service for business contacts, but wouldn’t it be even more useful if you could build your own version of this service within your own enterprise? Obviously, you would start with the relationships internally among all employees and then have links to their external contacts outside your firewall to other companies, social networks and other email systems. Everything would evolve from within your internal Outlook or other corporate email system and ultimately extend to external email systems such as Yahoo, Gmail and more. Well, you can do this and start for free thanks to Visible Path which has launched an innovative new service that does exactly this. Seeing is believing and a picture is indeed worth a thousand words so checkout their 2 minute screencast. I think you will be impressed as I was with what they do. I truly believe that they are onto something big here which will all be part of the future of the Internet and the Semantic web. Anoth ...

How to Export Your Contacts from Plaxo 2008-02-21 04:19:11 I’ve loved Plaxo for many years and I’ve enjoyed the widespread attention they’ve finally garnered thanks to the success of their Pulse feature and social aggregation. However, it has always been a confusing for most people who want to simply export their contact information out of Plaxo without using the sync feature. For example, sometimes you just want all of your contacts in a csv file. Well, here’s how you do it folks. Log into your plaxo online account. Click the Address book tab Click on the Add Sync Points link at the bottom of the screen The Sync Wizard screen will apear (see image below): We’re not going to sync anything. We just want to export our address book, so just click the second click here link. The following screen will appear: Simply select the file format you want, such as the .CSV file for Microsoft Outlook and then download it to your system. That’s it. You’ve exported ALL of your contact information without synchroniz ...

Feed Me, Seymour! 2008-02-20 17:10:38 Just about everyone knows about RSS and how to aggregate their feeds, so I won’t get into that here. I just wanted to share something that you might not realize that you could do with your Google Reader (if that is your RSS reader of choice, of choice). I will demonstrate how easy it is to share all of your own personal feeds from your blogs, twitter, utterz, Flickr, etc. As you know, Google Reader allows you to share anything you read by simply clicking Share at the bottom of the post you’re reading. It will then appear in your Shared Items folder: OK, that’s all basic stuff so far. Here’s where the fun stuff happens. Click on the Feed Settings button Select New Folder Enter My Feeds You will now have a new folder to store all of your own personal feeds. Now let’s start adding your feeds. Click the Add Subscription button and start with your own blog(s) by entering their feeds (feedburner being the best, of course) Add any of your micro-blog ...

I.T. Happens! (No. 2) 2008-02-20 15:24:25 Opening Night for Social Butterfly: The new musical based on Twitter and social media ...

I.T. Happens! (No. 1) 2008-02-20 15:19:30 If Real Life were like Twitter ...

Dream on Dreamer 2008-02-20 03:48:56 We are living in exciting times in 2008 and all eyes are on the incredible technological future that awaits us all. However, I enjoy looking back as much as I do looking ahead. It’s especially fun to see what people from the past thought was coming in regards to technology. Jim Rasenberger, author of America, 1908 wrote a fascinating piece for the January, 2008 issue of Smithsonian Magazine. As Rasenberger contends, in 1908 it seemed that anything was possible. This illustration of a man with wireless telephone is from Harper’s Weekly in 1908, 100 years ago! Isn’t it amazing? History is replete with visionaries and dreamers who helped invent our world today. Obviously, they needed men of courage and action in order to turn those crazy ideas into the reality we enjoy today. Don’t you wish you could jump one hundred years into the future to see what the world will be like then? The possibilities are endless and as boundless as the limits of our imagination. We a ...

Create Web Apps for free 2008-02-17 15:56:30 Zoho Creator offers a free and extremely easy way to create your own web applications in no time at all. You can keep them private for your own use or share them with others. It is similar to Zoho DB & reports in that you can create databases with tables and queries, but Creator goes much further by providing the ability to add customizable forms as a frontend to your databases. They also have their own scripting language called Deluge Script for those that want to dive deeper into building their web app. They also offer a Zoho Creator API that can satisfy even the most advanced developers. The good news is that you don’t need to learn any scripting language to create many useful web applications in a matter of minutes. You can even access these web apps via mobile devices which is very slick. They now offer SSL encryption for extra security, which makes creating web apps for the enterprise an extremely attractive option. Here’s a 3-minute demo: Sample Web App Here&r ...

Social Networks for Book Worms 2008-02-15 13:48:47 Yes, even book lovers have their own social networks these days. The two best sites appear to be Shelfari and Library Thing. All others don’t stack up (ha ha..er..um sorry). Here is a quick review: ***New*** BookBump is described as the iTunes for books. The interface is the best around but it doesn’t have all of the web 2.0 sharing features that Shelfari and others are offering. Still, if all you want to do is manage your book collection and you don’t care about sharing book collections with others, then BookBump could be the right service for you. Here is a screenshot of its excellent user interface for managing your book collection: ***Pai’s Pick*** Shelfari has a nice look and feel and offers many features all for free. Your book collection is displayed cleverly on a virtual bookshelf (hence the name). There are several types of collections or shelves you can create: Books I’ve Read Book I’m Reading Books I Plan to Read Books Owned Books Wi ...

How to save big bucks on mobile phone bill 2008-02-14 20:57:07 I recently spent a great deal of time with our company’s account representatives for our mobile phone cariers, AT&T and T-Mobile. I learned some eye-opening, jaw-dropping yet simple tricks that will reduce our company’s monthly mobile phone bill by hundreds of dollars. The changes to make are simple little things that truly add up to a great deal of savings. Here are some ways that you can help your company reduce their monthly mobile phone bills by a significant amount by simply making a couple of minor changes in the way you use your company provided cell phone.   Directory Assistance (411) Companies can save substantially if every employee uses Google directory assistance from their cell phone instead of calling 411 which charges for every call made that way. It’s approximately $1.79 plus airtime per 411 call made from a mobile device which adds up quickly if a company has many employees on their plan. It’s free to use Google directory assistance vi ...