DemoGirl

Plinky is a microblogging service that helps you share interesting content by giving you questions to answer, which are then transformed into your mini blog posts.  These questions are called “prompts” and their purpose is to nudge you into sharing fun and meaningful content – which is important  if you’re having trouble deciding what to blog about.

When you log into Plinky you’ll immediately be shown the prompt of the day.  Today it was “Describe the coolest thing you’ve seen in another country”.  This is where you begin your “blog post”.  I posted about the Mayan Ruins I saw while on vacation last month.  You can add a map and more information like your favorite things to do or tips about the location.  After you answer the prompt you can then post it to other blogs you may have, such as Tumblr, WordPress, Blogger, or TypePad.  You can also push your post through to Facebook and Twitter.  That’s it.  Once you’ve answered a prompt, you’ve completed a blog post for the day!  Of course you can answer more prompts if you’re having fun.

There’s also a “Twitter-like” atmosphere in the Plinky community.  You can follow other users so you can see their answers to prompts, and you can favor answers you like.

These are some things I think Plinky could improve on:

When you add a location the map doesn’t automatically pin your location for you – you have to manually drag the map to the right spot.  This may be a bug, so I won’t hold it against them.  Also, there are only (at the moment) 10 prompts to answer.  That’s not enough content to keep people coming back.  There’s an option to write your own prompt, but it’s only a suggestion for Plinky and not necessarily going to make the cut of available prompts for everyone.  I’d really like to see a way for people to write prompts for their friends to answer, not for the whole community, but for specific people they’re following.  This would allow people who are following you to have the opportunity to ask things of you that they’re curious about.  Plinky just launched publicly on Thursday so I’m probably just reiterating things that are already on their to-do list.

To learn more about Plinky, watch the screencast below (hint: it looks great in HD full screen!):

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[via Webware]

As you may know, I use a lot of video in my blog posts. Well, up until now I’ve been using Viddler to display the videos and also linking to a video hosted on our server. Today I upgraded my WordPress.com space and will be using their player to show off my screencasts. I think visually, the WordPress player shows off my work in better detail, and that’s very important to me.

In this screencast, I’ll show you how easy it is to upload your own video to your WordPress.com blog. I hope you find it useful. I’ve also added a poll to this post so please let me know what you think is the best way to share my videos on WordPress.com.

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ReminderFeed is a simple tool that allows you to send reminders right to your feed reader.  It’s free to use and is pretty much hassle free — meaning you don’t need to create an account to use it.  Just type in what you need to be reminded of, and subscribe to the feed.

Just give your reminder a title, a start and end date, and a description.  Optionally, you can also add a link and include a password if you want to password protect edits to your reminder.  ReminderFeed will then generate an RSS feed that you can subscribe to and share with others.  It’s a great way for anyone to quickly set up a reminder that won’t get lost in your inbox or sent to your already overloaded calendar every day.

To see ReminderFeed in action, watch the screencast below:

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Click Here To Watch Better Quality 1m46s

First of all, let me give you a little bit of background as to why I have such beef with Evite:

It was two days before New Year’s Eve and I finally decided to send out invites for the New Years party I had planned on having for at least a month.  That part was my bad.  I’m a procrastinator, but thankfully, so are my friends because most of them didn’t reply to the Evite until the day of the party.  The problem?  Evite went down for planned maintenance on New Year’s Eve.  So here I was, all dressed up with enough food for 10 people (but also 30 people because I didn’t really know who was coming) yelling at my boyfriend to make phone calls to see if anyone was coming at all.

The funny thing is, that originally I created my invites using Pingg, which I previously reviewed here, and was really excited to NOT use Evite when my boyfriend told me that I should really use a service that people are familiar with.  I should have known better.

This is where Atomeet comes in.  Atomeet is another event/party planning service that is both free and easy to use.  You begin creating your event right from the homepage and your guests don’t need to sign up for anything in order to RSVP.  You can add fun colors and themes to your event page and guests can write on the event page wall, but that’s about it.  Do you really need much more when trying to organize something like a group dinner?

If you don’t find that Pingg or Atomeet are the right fit for your event, also check out Anyvite which I previously reviewed here.

To see Atomeet in action, watch the screencast below:

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Click Here To Watch Better Quality 3m2s

Power Twitter is a Firefox Add-on that greatly extends the feature list of Twitter. No more going to Twitter search to see if someone is talking about you – with Power Twitter you can search right from your Twitter account.

After you install it just log into your Twitter account as usual.  You’ll now see a search box for searching Twitter topics, in-line media integration for TwitPics, YouTube videos, and flickr photos, as well as a facebook tab displaying all of your friends status updates.  But wait, there’s more!  If you hover over a users profile pic you’ll see a pop-up displaying their latest tweets, shortened URLs are summarized so you know what you’re clicking on, and there’s a ReTweet button included on any updates that contain a link.  Also included is Twitter search for a specific users Twitter stream.

To see Power Twitter in action, watch the screencast below:

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Click Here To Watch Better Quality 1m47s

SiteLauncher is a Firefox Addon that helps you access your favorite sites with just a couple clicks on your keyboard.  After it’s installed you can launch the SiteLauncher manager which is already pre-filled with sites like Amazon, Facebook, Gmail, and Digg.  You can remove any of the sites you don’t have a need for and add new ones as well.

You can select your own keyboard shortcut to launch SiteLauncher, but by default it uses Ctrl+Space.  Once it pops up you just need to hit the key associated with the Website you want to access.   That’s all there is to it.  You can also set direct hot-key shortcuts if you don’t want to bother launching SiteLauncher, but you’ll need to know the keys associated with the Website you want to access.

To see SiteLauncher in action, watch the screencast below:

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Click Here To Watch Better Quality 1m42s