I was looking for an iPhone app that would let me use my voice to send text messages when I came across HeyTell. I was actually searching on behalf of a friend, so I was surprised and thrilled to come across an app that is changing how I use my iPhone and how I interact with friends.

HeyTell does one thing, and does it well. It lets you send instant voice messages to other users. Think of it as a kinder, gentler, warmer alternative to text messaging.

There are so many uses for Heytell:

• Use it while you drive. Wait, no! Don’t! Um… We’ve all heard about the dangers of text messaging while driving, yet many of us (most of us?) still do it. HeyTell lets you send a voice message to other HeyTell users with the touch of one button. And if you leave the app open, you can hear the response without so much as a glance at your phone. Try it as a passenger, please.
• Use it as an alternative to voicemail. Sometimes you know ahead of time that your going to get someone’s voicemail when you call. And you know you’re going to have to listen to an annoying, dispassionate voice  give you directions for leaving a voicemail as though it were 1980. HeyTell is super-fast. Hold the button, talk, let it go, and your message is there.
• Use it if you’re blind or visually impaired. Or if you have trouble with the technology or text size for any reason. You can even assure your grandma that this is not a scary app.
• Use it to connect with your friends in other countries. Phone calls are expensive, and you can’t always manage a Skype call. With HeyTell you can leave a free voice message without having to worry about the time zone. You can leave a message for your mom letting her know you’re safe so she hears it before she wakes up and hears about the latest natural disaster or cultural revolution!
• Use it as an alternative to texting to save money. Tired of sms overage fees? Don’t want to spend the money for your kid to have an unlimited plan? HeyTell is free. Really.
• Use it because you’re all thumbs. Fat fingers? HeyTell is a graceful option :)
• Use it for random acts of kindness. Make someone’s day. Leave a HeyTell message for your friend just before she has to go into an important meeting telling her how much she rocks. It’s a nice thing to do.

A few things to know:

• HeyTell looks to your phone contacts for people to voice message.
• You can connect it to Facebook. Almost scary note: when you invite a Facebook friend to use the app, it posts the invitation to their wall. It will look to you as though it’s public, but it’s not. Other users don’t see the post on your wall, nor do they see it on the invitees wall, even if they’re a friend.
• You can opt to show your location to people you’re messaging. A toggle button turns the top half of your screen into a map. Be sure to turn this off if you don’t want to broadcast the location of your home, or of the place you happen to be at that moment.
• When the app is open, you get a relatively unobtrusive “ting” noting an incoming message, and the message plays automatically. If the app is not open, or completely closed, you get the same ringtone as you get for a voicemail (This is on the iPhone. Might be different on Android)

HeyTell is free, and available for iPhone and Android. If you’re not convinced, go watch the ~1-minute demo on their website.

In-app extras for purchase at $1.99 each include Message Wipe, Emoji (extra icons), and Voice Changer. (Fun for kids. Yeah, kids. Ahem.) Group broadcast is also available for $2.99.

Be sure to check out the reviews. Then try it out — let me know if you think this could be a game changer too.

Thanks to Susan Price for the most enjoyable test session!

Time Machine is a fabulous backup program. It’s easy, beautiful, and pretty much dummy-proof. If you’re a Mac user, there’s really no excuse for not doing regular backups any more.

But the hourly backups can get to be a bit much. The first few seconds of a backup can really slow down, or even interrupt whatever else you’re working on. And a particularly large incremental background can slow everything down.

I could never figure out why Apple didn’t include a scheduling feature into Time Machine. Every so often I’d think “they must have included it — I’ve just missed it” and dig around trying to find the elusive feature. But no. It’s not there.

Enter Time Machine Editor.

Install this tiny program, turn off Time Machine, and set your backups to take place on a schedule that works for you. You can simply change the intervals. That’s what I did — I’m now backing up every 4 hours. It’s easy enough to tweak if I want something different. You can also choose to back up on certain days

and/or at certain times. Then move the slider to “on” and you’re all set. It works as seamlessly as the built-in Time Machine app. No fuss, no muss.

Oh, and it’s free.

I don’t know who wrote this gem. I couldn’t find any credits on the download page. Whoever you are — thank you, thank you, thank you!

Wordle is a cool new application that lets you take any text — whether it’s a few words or a whole essay — and turn it into a tag cloud. I’m partial to this color scheme, but there are several to choose from, as well as a bunch of fonts and a handful of different layouts.

I’m having *so* much fun with this. Here’s my bio, taken directly from the LaunchPad Coworking business plan, as it appears in Wordle. (click on the image for a larger view)

When I first heard about OpenID, I thought “great – one central place with only one ID to remember. Then numerous OpenID sites opened, and I realized my assumptions were wrong. Still, I thought, it’s good that we’re working on more secure ways to access multiple sites. Then I went and signed up for an OpenID, found nothing particularly secure about it, and realized the rest of my assumptions were wrong, too.

OpenID is not centralized, and it is not about security. In fact, it’s arguably less secure than getting a separate login for each site you visit.

Here’s how it works:

• You go to an OpenID provider. There are lots of them springing up. Here’s a list of OpenID providers.  You can even run your own OpenID server on your own domain.
• You sign up, and get your own URL & password.
• When you go to a site that supports OpenID, you’re automatically redirected to that URL, where you say “yes, it’s me”. Different providers handle things differently, but the ones I’ve encountered ask you for a password.
• Once you affirm that you are you, and that you want to log into this other site, you’re sent back to that site with your identity confirmed.

So basically, the site you’re registering for is saying “we’re not going to worry about your name and password – we’ll trust that your OpenID site has handled all that and let you in.” You still need to register for the new site if you want any information about you saved.

Why is this less secure? If everyone switches over to OpenID, I’ll have one login name (URL) and password, so if someone guesses or steals it, I’m really screwed. If someone has that, they can “authenticate” every login without my presence. You could get multiple OpenIDs and passwords, but that would kind of defeat the purpose.

So… why are you using OpenID?

Somehow I managed to miss Apple’s May 30 announcement about the launch of iTunes U. It’s ok, though, because it was great fun to discover it on my own. The Center for Religion and Conflict at ASU; hundreds of courses on architecture, physics, linguistics and philosophy from MIT; Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders from the Standford Technology Ventures Program. There’s a tremendous amount of content here – some audio, some video.

These are entire courses. And it’s FREE. Seriously. Free. As in No Charge. How cool is this? I watched my first class in an “Introduction to Astronmy” course from Michigan Tech on my iPhone while traveling last weekend.

I find it so encouraging to see this kind of knowledge-sharing happening. No scarcity model here, that’s for sure.

Some link brought me to an article in "Yahoo! Tech". I had never been there before, but immediately got an offer to take a survey about it. I agreed. I like taking surveys like this – I feel I’m an under-represented demographic :)

Even though I specified that I had never visited before, I was asked my opinion of various features of the site. Bad enough, but look at this page… look at those options! Do people really feel this way about Yahoo! Tech? And aren’t the options a bit heavily skewed toward the positive? (Click to enlarge)

In my recent post about Reactee, I mentioned that I enjoy playing with new applications of technology that may seem silly or even useless at first. Wiffiti is another one of those.

With Wiffiti, you have a screen. You can show that screen on the Wiffiti site, full screen on your computer, or embedded in any web page. You have a name – people text @name to your SMS address (a five-digit number) and their message gets broadcast to the screen. Several messages show at a time, floating around the screen, getting smaller as they age.

Try it here – send an SMS message to 25622. Start the message with @jules, then type your message. It’ll show up right here :) This screen is live. [update: odd... publishing this post cut off a whole chunk of text after the embedded screen. More of the review & a bunch of screenshots showing usability problems are after the jump.][update 2: if you're looking at this post in a feed reader, you may not see the screen - click through to the actual blog to see it.]

Nothing earth-shattering here. Twitter had similar screens going at
SXSW. Still, it’s kind of fun – I’m having a party this weekend and
I’ll set up a laptop showing messages. If I were really ambitious, I’d lug my projector down here and show the messages on the side of my house. Sadly, I am not that ambitious.

Clearly there’s not a whole lot going on on these screens yet. Someone’s going to get clever with it, though, just watch :)

The mapping feature is neat, but I haven’t been able to view screens by
location yet – the map just keeps loading and loading. I also haven’t
been able to load up a new background. I put some new photos up on Flickr with a "gomoll" tag, but Wiffiti isn’t seeing them yet.

Wiffiti is cursed with a clever name and awful spelling. It’ll be
amazing if I publish this post without getting it wrong at least once…

Now, onto usability. I tried to be clever in setting up my first screen, but came up with surprising results…

I wanted people to text @titude. Clever, huh? I never could make it happen. Here’s my first signup attempt:

Obviously, I got confused with the nickname, screen title, and screen code, because I ended up with titude as the screen title (which of course makes sense now) and directions to text to @JulieGomoll. That won’t do – my name is too easily misspelled. And where does my "screen code" appear?

But I figured I knew where things went now, and tried again. Here’s my second signup screen:

But wtf? It’s still not right! Where’s @titude?

@titude appears nowhere :( But… Julie Gomoll as the name, @Jules as the text message. That’ll do for now.

I really do want to figure out how to leave a nicer signoff – I see them customized on other peoples’ screens. Let me know if you figure that one out. In the mean time, go back and text my blog!

At long last, I’m running Vista on my MacBookPro. My previous posts about installing windows (part 1 and part 2) and  installing Vista described a disastrous and ultimately failed attempts to install Vista Home Premium on my iMac. The short answer: if you’re running Parallels Desktop for Mac, the only Vista that will work is the big, fat, most-overpriced Ultimate version. Don’t even think about using the upgrade model.

So I reluctantly sprung for yet another copy of Windows. As if there weren’t already enough flavors of Windows Vista (there are 7, not including upgrade versions), I opened the clumsy packaging to find I have to choose between two install discs — 32-bit and 64-bit. Since I have a brand new beefy MacBookPro and the latest rev of Parallels, I went ahead and assumed I could use the 64-bit install disc. Yes, I should’ve checked first. I don’t remember the error, but my Mac wasn’t one bit happy with it. I barely got into setup, had a nasty crash that seemed to even affect Parallels. I didn’t even bother looking up what might have gone wrong. I just reinstalled Parallels and used the 32-bit disc. It installed without a hitch. Given my track record, getting Windows installed on the second try is pretty good.

Why Parallels thinks I have a floppy drive, I don’t know. It’s running fine on 512MB of RAM, which is way less than it takes to run it on a PC. Gotta love that :)

My quickie review of Vista – it’s slow. It’s really testy – it asks permission for everything, often several times while installing a single piece of software. I don’t know who said this – I’d love to attribute this quote to the orinator… “Vista is XP in a skirt.”

Here’s a screen shot (click to enlarge to 1440 x 900) of my MacBookPro running Parallels in coherence mode. Coherence mode lets me run windows and mac programs side by side without having to deal with the windows desktop. My Mac doc runs along the left side and the Windows task bar along the bottom. (this is my preference — you can leave your doc at the bottom – it’ll run below the Windows task bar.) I’m running VPchat (Windows only), Adium (Mac only) and Twitterific (Mac only).

Yes, I named my Vista virtual OS Parasite Rex, after the most excellent book of the same name. Parasite Rex : Inside the Bizarre World of Nature’s Most Dangerous Creatures – it’s fascinating, extremely readable science.

I’ve helped several people get their blogs set up over the past few weeks, and thought I’d share with you the basics. I’m mostly familiar with Typepad, Blogger, WordPress, and SquareSpace. Everything suggested here is doable on those platforms without knowing any html, css, or php. I’m sure most other popular platforms will have most of the same functionality, but of course I can’t promise that.

Setting Up — Content

Here’s what I consider the minimum set to get your blog going:

On each post

• The date. While the date is important, the time of day isn’t really necessary unless you plan to be exceptionally prolific. I leave mine on for silly, personal reasons, thank you very much :)
• An obvious permalink or trackback.
• Email this. You definitely want the ability for readers to email your post. You might not be able to specify this within your blogging system. Don’t worry, you’ll be able to get it along with those Digg, Del.icio.us, Reddit, etc. links you see everywhere when you get set up with Feedburner a bit later.

Sidebar elements

• Subscribe. Somewhere at the very top should be a link to subscribe in a reader. I also like having a “subscribe via email” option. Lots of people are still intimidated by feeds, but don’t hesitate to subscribe via email. Some platforms have their own feeds, but I recommend Feedburner here as well (covered after the jump).
• Search. I use Google because I trust it and so does most everyone else. As with all widgets, you’ll need code your specific platform. Here’s the code for Google Search in Typepad.
• Recent posts. You certainly want to show readers what you’ve written about recently. But I’ve never found recent comments helpful. If they’re aren’t many, you look like you have no buzz going on. If there are a lot, you end up with comments out of context, which isn’t helpful either.
• Categories or Tag Cloud. If you limit yourself to a handful of categories or tags, it probably makes sense to have a list for navigational purposes. If you tend to have more tags (within reason, of course) I think the tag cloud is really useful. The fact that the size of each tag increases with each reference makes for a great navigational aid. And, with a quick glance at a tag cloud, you can get  real feel for the content of a blog. I’d dig further into a blog with a huge TECHNOLOGY and a small PORN, for example, but wouldn’t bother if the cloud showed a large PORN and a small TECHNOLOGY. Honest!
• Archives. Yes. Show your archives. How else will anyone get to your old stuff?

After the jump: Feeds 101, Publicizing, Metrics, and Blog Networks

Feeds 101

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. RSS Feeds aren’t nearly as scary as they sound. One way to get blog content is to go find a blog and read it. Another way is to let the blog come to you. You do this by subscribing. An email subscription is just an RSS feed sent to your mailbox. When you’re subscribing to or setting up a feed, you’ll sometimes be asked to choose between RSS 1.0, RSS 2.0, or Atom. These are just different versions of the RSS protocol. Read more about RSS.

Feedburner

Some platforms offer their own feed service. Typepad, for example, offers one that you can add to your page by simply checking a box. This will also work perfectly well for you. The advantage of using Feedburner is you get a bunch of other good stuff from them, even with the free version. You get:

• Stats — basic stats about subscriptions for free, more detailed stats in the pro version.
• Access to Feedflares — that’s all the groovy “Digg This” goodness you crave.
• A “Subscribe via Email” widget.

Feedburner is a good deal. Setting it up isn’t hard, but it does get a little confusing at times. Here’s the basics:

1. Go sign up for Feedburner and do like it says — enter the url of your blog.
2. Here you’ll be asked to choose RSS 1.0, RSS 2.0, or Atom. Make your life easy. Choose Atom. It’s widely supported, and will be the kindest to your content, especially if you plan to embed videos or other media types.
3. You’ll need to name your feed — keep in mind, it’s case sensitive. I named mine JulesSays, and I regret it. I usually do everything lower case, so I forget I did it differently here. The address will rarely if ever show up anywhere publicly, so don’t sweat the case.
4. Now you have a feed. Click on the blue feed name, and you’ll be at your dashboard, where you set up the rest of it. Click on the Publicize tab to get at all the widgets.

You’re going to have to do quite a bit of back and forth between Feedburner and your blog at this point. In some cases you’ll have the option to create a widget for your specific platform. In other cases you’ll have to copy code and insert it into your template.

Feedburner Widgets

You can do all this in any order.

• Go to the Chicklet Chooser on the left. I like the small Feed icon myself, but that’s personal preference. What they call “browser friendly” widgets are separate icons for each possible feedreader, giving you a long (ugly) list of icons. With the single-link widgets, the user is unfortunately subjected to an extra click, but I think it’s worth it for a cleaner look. (I know I’ve read about a way around the extra click, but now I can’t find it… can anyone point me there?)
• Go to Email Subscriptions. Here there are widgets for Typepad and Blogger, and code for the rest of you to put in your sidebar.
• Be sure to check out the subheads under Email subscriptions – there are options to customize the subscription email and change the branding elements and look and feel of the feed.
• There’s a feed count widget you should only use when you have a significant number of subscribers. Sadly, I don’t yet have enough subscribers to warrant this widget :(
• Creative Commons — that’s the kinder, gentler, open-source copyright you’re seeing more of these days. I use it and support it.

Switch over to the Optimize tab

• Active Smart Feed (so your subscription link recognizes any feedreader)
• Click on FeedFlares — these are links that are going to appear after every post. I’m not sure why you wouldn’t want these on both the post and the feed, but you have to opt into both. Don’t go overboard with the flares – chose the ones you use or you know others use.
  • you definitely want your readers to be able to Email this — that’s a no-brainer
  • you may not find all the flares you want on the main list — reddit and magnolia, for example, aren’t there — you need to look in their catalog to get them.

Google has recently bought Feedburner, so watch for changes to all of this.

Don’t forget to subscribe to your own feed via your feedreader and email so you can keep an eye on how things look.

Publicizing your posts

Bookmarking and Indexing services

I have a routine I go through after each post. You’ll need to sign up for a bunch of services to make this efficient.

• Onlywire. Go get an account here, and you’ll be presented with a long list of bookmarking services, including the big ones like del.icio.us and mag.nolia. Use that list to go sign up for all that are relevant to you. I recommend you come up with a publicity nickname and password that you use for all of these. Basically, you’ll be having OnlyWire log into all these services and bookmark your posts. You’ll tag them, and others who use those services will find your posts when searching for content containing those tags. Do this for an individual blog post, i.e., a permalink – not your generic blog url. How useful is OnlyWire? Well, those bookmarks bring me a handful of traffic every day, so it’s at least working a bit.
• Ping-o-matic. Only a bookmark needed here for your generic blog address, i.e., not a link to a direct post. It will ping a lengthy list of indexing services for you. Both this and pinging Google just hasten the indexing process that otherwise might not happen for weeks.
• Ping Google. Again, just your blog address here, but do it after each post.

After a particularly good post, you’ll want to submit to news sharing and cool-site-finding sites, such as

• Digg
• Reddit
• Sphere
• StumbleUpon
• This could be a long, long, long list, I know. These are the ones I like. Probably Reddit brings me the most traffic of all of them.

Blog Networks

I am, admittedly, new to blog networks. I signed up for my first one, MyBlogLog, just yesterday. I had been hearing all sorts of awful things about the spam you get as a member, but apparently they’ve recently done an overhaul and that’s no longer an issue. So my explanation here is as an ultra-noob :)

Basically, you sign up as a member and get a profile page where you can list your web site (s). Here’s my profile page. You can go there and make me a friend or contact. You can also click on the link to my blog and join that community. I’m not sure yet what the relative benefits of each are yet. I put the widget on my blog over there on the lower left. Now, whenever a mybloglog member visits my page, their picture shows up. Likewise, my picture shows up on their blogs. I’m seeing new traffic from it already :)

Metrics

This is easy. Go immediately to Google Analytics. This is very, very cool. It’s a chunk of code you’ll embed in your blog (on mine, it’s in an invisible typelist in my sidebar) that gives you statistics on your blog. Page views, unique visitors, where they’re from, how long they stayed, which posts were most popular… there’s just an enormous wealth of fun stats here. And it’s free, until you get really really popular, at which point you won’t mind paying a few bucks for it, right?

So, that’s what I’ve taken my friends and colleagues through to get their blogs going. What are your 101 tips?

Consider this a pre-review. If Zoho Notebook is anywhere near as awesome as this video purports, I’ve finally found my idea clipping/note-taking/collaboration tool. I didn’t realize until I saw this that that’s even quite what I need, but I’m psyched to try it. It lets you:

• Create multiple types of content
• Embed any content type
• Publish notebooks, pages, or objects
• Track changes
• Share documents
• Collaborate using an interactive white board

I’ll let you know how it goes. Watch the video – it’s a great demo. It’s just over 5 minutes long.

Update: I started playing with Zoho Notebook – so far, so good. I kept reading about a Firefox Addon that lets you right-click on selected text and automatically send it to your notebook, but I couldn’t find a download for it anywhere. I fired off a support note (which I was able to do from right in the notebook – nice) and got a reply within an hour. The link was apprently on the login page, which I wasn’t seeing since I was already logged in. Oops! That’s the second time I’ve encountered that weird UI glitch – happened with notifications on PBWiki, too. The quick reply (and apology, believe it or not) was much appreciated. Get the Zoho Notebook Firefox Addon here.