DemoGirl

I was at the park with my kids recently, and my daughter was immediately drawn to a cute, pig-tailed little girl.
The girl’s mother walked over to me and handed me her daughter’s business card.  I guess this business of making playdates is a serious thing.  I didn’t have anything but an old receipt to write our information on, so it’s no wonder the woman didn’t call me.

Thanks to a tip from Lifehacker, I can now head to the playground sporting flashy new business cards I created for me and the kids at BusinessCardStar.com.  With this Web site you can quickly whip up business cards and print them at home.

The site is free to use and you don’t even have to sign up, unless you want to save your projects.  If you are going to be printing a lot of cards, you might want to have BusinessCardStar do it for you.  It looks like 500 one-sided cards will cost you about six cents each.

Check out the screencast below: (best viewed in HD in full screen):
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P.S.  No, I didn’t really create business cards for my kids, but I am going to make some for myself.

Yes, the economy is bad and most people are cutting back quite a bit these days, but sometimes you just have to give in and buy a new pair of socks or pick something up for your Mom for Mother’s Day. CouponTweet is a cool site that might help you save a few bucks when you do have to open your wallet.

There are plenty of coupon sites out there, but CouponTweet is an easy way to locate all kinds of coupons and share what you’ve found with your pals.

There’s no sign up — just go to the site and search for coupons.  More importantly, you can easily tweet a coupon you have found so that your twitter followers can get in on the deal.

Although I’ll still use my old coupon sites to find  deals, I now have an easy way to share those deals with others.
To see CouponTweet in action, click on the screencast below (best viewed in HD in full screen):

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I was visiting Go2web20.net this morning and saw mention of a bookmarking service called Speedtile.
This handy little tool makes browsing through your bookmarks very easy on the eyes.  I admit it, I’m a lazy bookmarker.  My bookmark folder is a mess and half the time I don’t give my bookmarks intuitive names so they can be easily located.

Speedtile gives you a visual clue about the sites you’ve bookmarked and even has a nice layout for categories you want to use for your bookmarks.  Signup is free — just need your email address and a password and you’re in.

You can manually add bookmarks to different categories by simply entering in the URL.  If you add the firefox plugin, you can add a bookmark to your Speedtile page with a simple right-mouse-click.  When you head back over to your Speedtile page, a handy little screenshot of your bookmarked site will be visible.

Speedtile doesn’t yet offer a way to import your old bookmarks, but their Web site says they are thinking about adding this feature.  This is actually good news for me because I need a fresh start.

If you want to see Speedtile in action, click on the screencast below (best viewed in HD in full screen):

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I’ve been meaning to do a screencast of myebook for a while now.  Well, it’s spring break and I decided to take some time and get down to the basics of myebook.

This site allows you to easily publish and share your own content online as well as read ebooks published by other people.  You might be working on a novel, putting together a book of photography, making an escrapbook of your kids or even creating a record of your genealogy — all of these things and more can easily be created in myebook and then shared with friends or strangers.

It’s very easy to add videos and images into galleries and then all you have to do is drag them for placement in your ebook.  It did seem a bit clunky when it came to entering basic text, but I didn’t have a problem when copying data from an odt file.

Overall, the site is cool and I could see many uses for it — including spending way too much time browsing interesting ebooks created by strangers.  I do like the idea of sending someone to my myebook site rather then sending them my manuscript as a plain old text document.

To see myebook in action, watch the screencast below (best viewed in HD in full screen):

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ConvoTrack does one thing, and it does it well:  It tracks any conversations going on about whatever Webpage you’re viewing and displays them in a sidebar pop-out.  All you need to do is install the bookmarklet and you’ll be on your way to seeing what everyone is saying on Twitter, Friendfeed, digg, and on blogs.

If you don’t want to install the bookmarklet you can also simply append the Website URL you want to track to http://convotrack.com.  So, in order to track conversations on DemoGirl, I would simply use http://convotrack.com/http://demogirl.com.  No installation needed!  You can also share the link with friends or co-workers.  It’s a simple tool that will save you from using Google or Twitter search to find out who’s saying what, about your latest blog post.

To see ConvoTrack in action, watch the screencast below (best viewed in HD in full screen):

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[via TechCrunch]

I have a problem.  I’m addicted to real estate sites.  I’m constantly checking on what my home value is or searching to see if anyone has bought the house across the street.  If you are actually looking to buy a house or sell your house, though, Dwellicious may be a good tool for you.

Dwellicious  — like Delicious for real estate — is a real estate bookmarking site that helps you keep track of that house you saw on Craigslist or Zillow last week.  If you had an account with Dwellicious you would simply have bookmarked it –  it would have been added to your Dwellicious page which you could share with your mother who would criticize your taste.

Dwellicious is set up to work with many popular real estate sites, like Zillow, Yahoo, Craigslist, Trulia and many more. The cool thing about the site is that bookmark listings on your Dwellicious page are automatically updated whenever the property data changes — change in price, availability or the addition of photos.

Go ahead and check out the Dwellicious screencast below (best viewed fullscreen in HD):

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PageTweet allows you to shrink a URL for sharing on Twitter and other social networking sites, but also allows you to add your own 140 character message to the actual link that you’re sharing.  Your message doesn’t appear in your Twitter updates with the link, it appears on the actual site – allowing the people who click on the link to see why you brought them there in the first place.

There is nothing to sign up for and you don’t need to enter in your Twitter username and password either.  Just paste the long URL into the appropriate field on the PageTweet homepage, add a nickname (again, doesn’t have to be related to Twitter), and enter in your 140 character or less comment.  Click on “Create PT” and you’ll be given a link to share wherever you please.

When people click on the link they’ll see a toolbar at the top of the page you are sharing which displays your comment, the source of the link, as well as the number of hits it’s received.

Since it doesn’t appear that you can create an account on PageTweet, you’ll have to bookmark the link in order to keep track of how many people are viewing your link.  Actually, no sign-up is fine with me…

To see PageTweet in action, watch the screencast below (best viewed in HD in full screen):

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[via MoMB]

If you find yourself constantly bookmarking articles you find online to come back to later, then “I Need To Read This” is a handy application that you’ll probably love.  It allows you to easily find articles that you want to read later, without cluttering your bookmarks folder.

There’s not much of a learning curve here – just add the two “I Need To Read This” bookmarklets to your bookmarks toolbar.  Whenever you find yourself too busy to read an interesting article or blog post, just click on the “I Need To Read This” bookmarklet.  Done.  It’s save in your account.  When you’re ready to read an article you saved, click on “Read an Article”.  An item from your saved list will appear.  You can continuously click on the “Read an Article” button to jump to the next item.

To see I Need to Read This in action, watch the screencast below (best viewed in HD in full screen):

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[via Lifehacker]

zeaLOG is a life tracking service that helps you to track just about anything you can think of in your day to day activities.  Whether it’s how many glasses of water you drink or how many times you dine out at a restaurant – zeaLOG will help you keep track.

It started out harmless enough – I created a log to track every time I go to the gym.  I also created one to track how many Diet Cokes I consume in a day.  Then, somehow, I found myself tracking how much water I was drinking, calories I’m consuming, and hours of TV I watch a day.  It’s a little addicting.

To create a zeaLOG all you need to do is enter in what you want to track.  Then choose the unit of measure (hours, ounces, pounds, etc.) for what you’ll be tracking.  For example, if I was tracking how much gas I was putting in my car I would enter in gallons here.  Then choose how you want to make your entries – by checking them once completed, by adding an amount every time you do something, or the current value of something you’re tracking.  This part really depends on what exactly you’re tracking.  You then have the option of making your zeaLOG public or private and you can allow others to join.

Every time you do something that you’re tracking, simply enter the data into the profile page for that activity.  If others have joined you then you’ll see their data as well.  It’s all nicely laid out in a chart and people can leave comments as well.

If a lot of people join then you may notice an overloaded chart like the one above, but you can change the date range and even remove people from the chart to get a better view.

At the moment, zeaLOG has me hooked.  I’m trying to make an effort to go to the gym more and trying to decide if I’m watching too much TV.  Only time will tell if I continue to log in and enter in my progress.

To see zeaLOG in action, watch the screencast below (best viewed in HD in full screen):

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[via VentureBeat]

I was browsing the Download Squad Web site today and they mentioned a nifty outline application called LooseStitch.

LooseStitch is a Web-based application that lets you easily create outlines and share them or allow others to work on the outlines with you.  You don’t really have to sign up — just create an outline name and provide your email address and LooseStitch will give you the URL for your outline.

Once you’ve created your outline, it is easy to start adding items.  You can set due dates for items, mark items as completed and easily shift the order of your outline items.  I really like the feature that allows you to invite other people to work on the outline.  This seems like it would work great for collaborating with my co-workers.

LooseStitch also gives you a link that you can embed in your own Web site or blog.  Your outline will appear and each time you update your outline on LooseStitch, those changes will automatically show up on your Web site or blog.  One thing I did notice is that when the outline is embedded in  your Web site, the items that you have “completed” do not appear crossed off as they do on the LooseStitch page.

It seems to me that there are lots of great uses for LooseStitch — working on your novel or term paper, planning your grandmother’s 90th birthday party, or collaborating with your colleagues on a project.  If you want to pay a bit of money ($24.95/year) you can get a pro account.  The pro account lets you manage all of your outlines from a single window.  You can also attach images, pdf files, audio and video — up to 100MB.

To see LooseStitch in action, watch the screencast below (best viewed in HD in full screen):

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P.S. Please ignore the ugly little window in the bottom right during part of the screencast.  My mistake after a long day of work.