DemoGirl

I finally got my invite for Pinterest this week and I’ve been having so much fun exploring all of the beautiful pinboards that early users have created.  It’s easy to create your own boards — when you come across something that strikes your fancy simply use the bookmarklet to “pin” it to your board.

If you find something you like on another person’s board (there is plenty to like) you can let them know by “liking” the item or “repinning” it to your own board.

I’m thinking Pinterest is going to be a great help for me in planning Molly’s upcoming bridal shower:)

I do have 10 invites — so let me know if you want one.

View the screencast here: 

TechCrunch posted a story today about Google Moderator being available on YouTube and I decided to test it out.   The learning curve is not very steep — just go to your channel modules, enable moderator, post a request for ideas or suggestions and then wait for your subscribers to respond.

DemoGirl gets a lot of screencast suggestions every day, but we don’t usually see the same request from two different people.  Molly is often busy with custom work and weeding through all these suggestions can be time-consuming.  This is where I think Moderator on YouTube might be useful  — by providing us with a way to have our readers help us determine what people want to see covered here.

Check out the screencast here: 

If you have a suggestions, check out our Moderator series on YouTube:  http://www.youtube.com/user/demogirlmo

I’d like to get rid of an extra five pounds that have been stalking me lately so I went in search of some free help.  My search led me to SparkPeople — a diet-management site that has apparently been around for a while.

The first thing I noticed when I went to the site was the word “free” — not just a  trial and I didn’t have to enter my credit card information anywhere.  After entering a few tidbits about my weight and goals I was welcomed into a community  of people who are trying to do the same thing as me.

There are loads of tools that help you track what you are eating and what your caloric and fitness goals should be.  You can contact other SparkPeople members through SparkMail, or set up appointments with their calendar. SparkPeople also offers various teams and message boards to help you stay motivated, and you can set up a blog to write about your progress.

I apologize if all this is old news to you… but for those of you who haven’t seen SparkPeople yet, check out the screencast below:

HotPrints gives its users an easy and inexpensive way to create photo books from your Facebook or Bebo pictures.  And now the company is offering you one free HotBook per month.

The free books are ad-supported, but the ads will be inserts that you can remove — they wont be printed next to your photos.  But if you don’t like the idea of ads included with your book, you can pay $2.99 plus shipping.

A Facebook app will allow you to drag and drop photos from your own albums or from albums of your Facebook friends.  You can play around with themes, backgrounds, covers and borders.  I was able to put together a book in just a few minutes.  I’m not sure if I’ll go for the free version or skip the ads and pay a few bucks.  But either way, the books seem like a good deal to me.

To see HotPrints in action, click on the screencast below (best viewed in HD in full screen):

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[via: techcrunch]

I stumbled onto a cool Web site called iCyte.  The site offers a nifty little browser add-on (for firefox and IE) that allows you to grab Web pages and save them to projects in your iCyte account.  You can also highlight portions of a site if you find something particularly interesting.

After you’ve created some “cytes”, as they are called, you then have access to those pages even if the original Web sites no longer exist.  You can group your cytes under different projects, and you can share those projects with friends or colleagues.  If you want a quick view of all of the cytes you’ve saved, you can enable the sidebar in your browser.

As the holiday season gets closer, I could see myself using iCyte for projects like gift ideas and holiday recipes.   Or I might use it to quickly share multiple sites with colleagues.  Either way, I think iCyte will make its way to my toolbox.

To see iCyte in action, click on the screencast below (best viewed in HD in full screen):  [wpvideo p3WIoJOy]

[via:  Jane's E-Learning Pick of the Day]

We here at DemoGirl have been working to get a fresh site up, but sometimes the collaboration process is a bit laborious.  I’m thinking things might move along a bit more if we use something like Notable.

Notable provides users with the tools to quickly give or receive feedback on a Web project.  You can sign up for the free service, or choose one of the paid accounts.  Once you are signed up you can quickly capture pages or images — either with their Firefox plug-in, an upload or simply by using your browser — and save them to a workspace.  You and the people you invite (or you can make the workspace public) can then start adding notes about the project.

Notes can be added to the screenshot by simply selecting areas with your mouse.  You can also add feedback to the code or just the copy of a site or application.  Comments can be made on the overall project or just on specific notes. And you can keep track of who is providing the feedback to your project.  Notable seems like it would fit the bill for the small project we are working on — plus, it might be easier for Molzy to use Notable to tell me that my design scheme sucks.

To see Notable in action, click on the screencast below (best viewed in HD in full screen):

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[via: techcrunch]

Google Labs recently launched Fast Flip.  It aggregates news stories from many popular sources and presents them in a format that is very east to navigate.

Readers can sort stories by different categories, sources, topics or search terms.  Navigating through the articles is as simple as clicking arrows on the page or using a keyboard.  Google Fast Flip is also available for the iPhone and Android devices.

I found that the pages loaded extremely fast — and if you use your keyboard to flip through articles, navigation is even faster.

To see Fast Flip in action, click on the screencast below (best viewed in HD in full screen):

[wpvideo 6py5SbMI]

[via:  Jane's E-Learning Pick of the Day]

Whether you like it or not, the simple act of shopping does have an impact on our environment.  Green Any Site is trying to make it easier for you to offset some of the damage by donating some of your purchase price to charity.

The process is easy enough… install the Green Any Site bookmarklet and before you add items to your cart, click on that bookmarklet.  You can then finish your shopping and Green Any Site will receive a percentage of the purchase price through affiliate/referral programs.

Green Any Site donates 100% of the affiliate money it receives to a featured environmental charity.  In the future the site says that users will be able to vote on which charities are featured.

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

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Thanks to a tip on KillerStartups, I decided to check out DooID.

The site offers some great features that can help you make a really nice Web business card.  Two features I could see myself using are the widget you can add to your blog and the email signature you can grab.

It only took me a few minutes to set up the profile and you can choose a theme from DooID’s offerings or create your own.  The site also allows you to lock up some data so that only people with a guest password can see that information.

One part of the card will contain links to your pages on various social networks and visitors can subscribe to a feed that will include all of the info from the networks you are displaying.
I liked the newscloud option — you can connect up with your Twitter account so that when you post to Twitter, your updates will automatically show up in your newscloud.

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

[wpvideo qZi4dC84]

I have to admit that I don’t have a Wii and I’ve never played Guitar Hero or any other game of that ilk. But every now and then a girl needs to take a break from work and online music game JamLegend provides a fun alternative to waiting on the front porch for the FedEx guy.

JamLegend is a game that seems to have one mission — to drive me insane. I normally shy away from video games; I’m afraid I might sit for hours in front of a screen just trying to better my score. I decided to ignore the inner-voice that was telling me to “stay away from games” and I’m glad I did.

You don’t have to sign up for an account in order to play JamLegend. Just choose a song and then pound out a 1, 2 or 3 on your keyboard along with the beat. Sounds easy enough… but beware, it is a bit addicting. The site makes it easy to share songs with your friends on Facebook, Myspace and Twitter. You can duel your friends or join the live showdowns. You can even upload music from your own library

If you have a few minutes and you want to forget about the voicemail light blinking on your phone, check out the screencast below (best viewed in HD in full screen):
[wpvideo pRmmPmYW]