DemoGirl

It’s almost time to say goodbye to 2007 and open our arms to welcome in 2008.  I thought of a few things I’d like to write about to close the year, but then figured I’d just make a video with my new handy dandy camera.  This isn’t a sign that DemoGirl is going to turn into more of a video blog.  No sir.  This is still a screencast blog.  It’s just fun to do different things every once in a while and I wanted to give you something very important to think about tonight as you’re chasing Jager Bombs with bottles of cheap champagne.  Happy New Year and I hope you and your families all have a safe, healthy, and prosperous ’08.

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I’m taking the week off to spend some time with my family here in blustery Southern California, but I’ll be back next week.  I hope everyone has a very happy and safe holiday.  In the mean time, if there’s anything new you’d like to see featured on DemoGirl in 2008, let me know in the comments.  See you next year! (or maybe sooner )

Jango, the awesome site that allows you to make your own customized radio stations, has just added a Jukebox widget that can be placed on your MySpace profile or blog for all of your friends to enjoy. You can add whatever artists you want to your Jukebox and customize the skin and the name. The Jukebox has a moving strip of all of the artists you’ve included. When you click on an artists image, the music will play. It’s as simple as that. I’ve been using Jango religiously the past few weeks since I reviewed it (although I do still use previously mentioned BoomShuffle when I want to listen to a more specific playlist) and I really don’t have anything bad to say about it. The music selection has improved as well as their recommendations. Here’s my screencast tour of The Jango Jukebox:

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[via TechCrunch]

Seesmic is a service that allows you to quickly create videos with your webcam and then allows other members of the Seesmic community to reply to them almost instantly. Yes, it’s like video Twitter – but not really. Twitter was made so you could let your friends know what you were up to. I suppose you could use Seesmic like Twitter and simply record yourself eating a sandwich instead of Twittering to your friends that you’re eating a sandwich, but that would be gross. Seesmic seems like it was made to reach out to a place where Twitter isn’t as useful, visual. For example, I just got a new dog (I wish) and I want my friends to see my new dog. Well, I could take a picture or record a video and then upload it to YouTube. I could also walk over to my desk, turn on my webcam, and click “record” on Seesmic and show everyone my new best friend. My friends could then instantly reply how cute he is or what a terrible mistake I’d made. They could show me their dog and suggest we go on a play date, whatever. You can also embed Seesmic videos and create links for them. That was just an example of what you could use Seesmic for, it’s really up to the individual user to decide.  Seesmic is currently in private pre-alpha release, but they’re taking requests for invitations on their homepage.  Here’s my screencast tour of Seesmic:

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Firefox 3 Beta 2 has just been released with about 900 improvements from the last beta, according to these release notes. Updates include anti-virus integration, malware protection, one-click site information check, resumable downloading, tab saving on exit, one-click bookmarking, and much more. Now, I couldn’t really show you everything included in the Firefox 3 Beta 2 release, so I decided to just give you a tour of things that you’ll see almost immediately after downloading it. I’m definitely impressed so far. Be sure to read the release notes for a full explanation. Here’s my screencast tour of Firefox 3 Beta 2:

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Personas is a Firefox extension that allows you to instantly change the look of your browser with different themes. After you install Personas, all you need to do is click on a little fox that will now sit in the bottom left corner of your browser to access the themes. There are different categories to choose from like holidays, nature, sports, etc. With one click, your browser automatically changes to whatever design you’ve chosen. Personas is pretty straightforward but until I had installed it and tried it out, I didn’t know what my browser would really look like. So, I decided to show you a few of the designs and how quickly you can change them to help you decide if you want to install it or not. Here’s my screencast tour of Personas for Firefox:

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It’s time for a screen dance! I was playing around with this webcam application earlier today that I reviewed months ago, Cameroid. It allows you to instantly snap pictures of yourself with your webcam and add frames, effects, and cool distortions to yourself. It has a nice delay feature so you can click the button to take your picture, but you still have 3 seconds to pose before it registers. I started going about my day and just randomly snapping pictures to see what would happen. Well, some of them came out strange…actually, most of them came out strange. So, I decided to put some music to them and turn them into a screen dance. It’s mostly just me making weird faces but occasionally I’ll show you something I have sitting on my desk. How exciting, right? Hey, it’s Friday, and it couldn’t have come a day to soon. Have a great weekend! If you don’t know what a screen dance is, check out my debut post here. Here’s my screen dance of…Me!

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The Internet is a magical place. You can find great places to eat, listen to music, and even find the cleanest “facilities” in your neighborhood. It’s also a place where you can help others, with little effort. Now I’m not saying that you shouldn’t put effort into helping those in need, but sometimes you may feel that you don’t have the money or the time. But if you’re reading this blog post right now, it means that you do have an Internet connection and I bet you use it to search for stuff and sometimes waste time playing games. Why not give a little while doing such things? The sites in this screencast – FreeRice, Ripple, and GoodSearch – give everything (or at least half) of what they make to charities.

FreeRice allows you to improve your vocabulary while donating rice “through the United Nations to help fight world hunger”. It’s pretty simple: You see a word on the screen with 4 possible definitions. Choose the correct definition and you’ve just donated 20 grains of rice to someone who needs it. Play as long as you want. The more you play, the better your vocabulary gets and the more you’re helping others.

Ripple and GoodSearch is where your day to day searches come into play. With Ripple, every time you search from the homepage, it receives a small amount of money from sponsors. Ripple donates 100% of that to charity. You get Google search results, but you do have to return to the Ripple homepage every time you do a search otherwise they won’t get anything. You can also click on a cause on the homepage, water, food, education, or money, and after watching a very brief advertisement, you’re done. No search involved. The advertiser just paid Ripple a small amount that Ripple will in turn donate. GoodSearch is similar but gives you Yahoo! search results. You can also choose your own charity that you wish to donate to. GoodSearch donates 50% of ad revenue to your charity. You can also see how much money charities have made through GoodSearch. If you shop online then you may want to also check out GoodShop which gives a percentage of your purchases, through select stores, to the charity of your choice.

Any way you slice it, it’s better to do a little something than to do nothing at all. Here’s my screencast tour of 3 sites that want to make a difference:

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Spokeo is a “friend tracker” that keeps you updated about all of your friends activities across the different social networks they belong to. It may even show you sites you didn’t know your friends participated in. You can sign up using your AOL, Gmail, Hotmail, or Yahoo! credentials and Spokeo will immediately search the Web for sites your contacts have signed up for using the same email address. You can also add friends from MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, StumbleUpon, etc. Spokeo doesn’t alert your friends of any of this activity. It doesn’t invade their email with requests to sign up or ask them if they wish to share this information. Basically, Spokeo believes that if you sign up for one of these sites and don’t make your profile private, then it’s fair game. I totally agree. I sign up for many services every day and I know that I have the right to make certain information private. If I don’t, anyone can access it. After signing up for Spokeo, I found one of my friends Amazon wishlists, a Picassa Web Album I never knew existed, and another friends profile on Digg. The one thing I would like to see is the option to view what your Spokeo profile will look like to other users, just so you know how much information you really have floating around out there.

Spokeo is not a social networking site. You don’t create your own profile, make friends, or leave updates about the last time you took a shower. It’s basically RSS for social networking. It’s so simple to set up and gets straight to the point. Here’s my screencast tour of Spokeo:

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[via TechCrunch]

Mahalo, the human powered search engine, has some new social features that could really help get you better and more relevant search results.  Mahalo Social, obviously named for its social networking abilities, allows users on Mahalo to create profiles, make friends, yada, yada, yada.  Really, it’s not as boring as it sounds.  First of all, now you can easily submit links to sites that you think are relevant in search results.  The links are reviewed by Mahalo managers and if you submit a bad link, everyone will know.  They’ll know because your Mahalo Social profile contains a ranking of links recommended, links accepted, and banned links.  The more links that are accepted, the higher your ranking will be.  If you submit links that end up banned, then your ranking will go down.  All of your recommended links are in your profile as well as any of your friends links.  If you add someone as a friend and they add you as well, then your links will show up on their profile page.  You can also add links to profiles from other social networking sites you belong to like MySpace, YouTube, or Facebook.  On the result pages, there’s now an option to start a discussion about the page itself.  You’ll also be given credit on the result page, should your link be accepted.  For example, there’s a page for “how to use Mahalo Social“.  If someone were to add a link to this demo then their profile would appear on the page.

I think these are all great additions to Mahalo.  I only have one question:  Where is the Mahalo page for “screencast”?  Alright, alright, here’s my screencast tour of Mahalo Social:

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