Let’s spruce up your corner of the web
Plink are a small internet starup founded in May 2008. They work hard and laugh a lot, especially when it’s the end of a long day.
Plinky is a service thats make it easy for you to create inspired content on the web.
How does Plinky Work ?
# They have a cozy office in beautiful, serene Lafayette, Calif, just down the street from Millie’s Kitchen, Home of the world’s best coffee cake. Sweet, buttery coffee cake. Mmmm.
# Every day the provide a new prompt (like a question, or a challenge), and everyone gets a chance to answer.
# It’s simple to add photos, maps, playlists and more. You can easily share you Plinky answers on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and most major blogging services.
# Plinky is here to help you say it in a fun and compelling way.
Certain types of content are made available through the Site and Services. “Plinky Content” means, collectively, the text, data, graphics, images.
They know you’ve got something interesting to say.
Search Engine Optimized Information
CitySquares was founded in 2005 based on the simple premise that finding local, neighborhood businesses online is really hard and very frustrating. Furthermore, small businesses are being challenged every day to keep up with the Jones’. Until recently, they had very little chance to compete with national advertisers for consumer attention. So, CitySquares provides small, independent businesses an opportunity to reach a qualified, local consumer audience through a search engine optimized profile on it’s highly trafficked, consumer-facing website. CitySquares provides its content to users in a hyper-local context, that is, neighborhoods and other relevant localities.
Local businesses are able to take full advantage our search engine optimized information architecture and fully customize and personalize their CitySquares.com advertising campaigns through enhanced business profiles, display advertising, Constant Contact email newsletters, merchant videos from TurnHere, and more. All of this is provided to the customer without complex variable pricing.
CitySquares is a privately-funded company with its headquarters in the South End neighborhood of Boston, MA. The company is led by an experienced team and funded by investors who share our vision. Our investments have been lead by eCoast Angel Network, with participation from outside investors including Jonathan Kraft, President of the Kraft Group, and Mark Cuban, owner of the Dallas Mavericks and Chairman of HDNet, among others. These individuals bring their specialized expertise to help us develop the business and improve your CitySquares experience.
Incidentally, this is a fantastic example of a brand listening to the conversation about them online. Not only did CitySquares engage in the conversation, they made a change to their product that benefits everyone.
Your Site
Yahoo is both a search engine and a directory. By submitting your site to Yahoo's human-edited directory, you may have a better chance of being found by purely spider-driven engines (such as Google). It's best to figure out exactly where your site or content may fit in the Yahoo structure before submitting willy-nilly to anything that has the word "submit" in it. Expect a "reasonable delay" when using any of these site submission options.
There are eight submission options with Yahoo; I'm going to briefly go over them one by one:
- free site submission
- free mobile site submission
- free media content submission
- Yahoo search index submission
- sponsored search
- product submission
- travel submission
- Yahoo directory submit
- Yahoo standard submission
There are eight submission options with Yahoo; I'm going to briefly go over them one by one:
- free site submission
- free mobile site submission
- free media content submission
- Yahoo search index submission
- sponsored search
- product submission
- travel submission
- Yahoo directory submit
- Yahoo standard submission
Yahoo Free Site Submission
The Yahoo Site Submit option is easy and free. All you have to do is enter the URL of the site you'd like to submit to be included in the Yahoo Search index. Must have a free Yahoo ID in order to do this (registration required).
Yahoo Mobile Site Submission
You can submit your xHTML, WML or cHTML mobile site for inclusion in Yahoo's mobile search index. Again, just submit your site's URL.
Yahoo Media Content Submission
If you have audio, video, or visual content, you can submit your content to Yahoo Search via your media RSS feed. Not as complicated as it might sound.
Yahoo Search Submit
Yahoo's Search Submit Express option is not free, but you do get guaranteed inclusion within the Yahoo search index. Pricing of this option varies. Make sure to read the Yahoo Site Submit guidelines thoroughly before choosing this option; you want to make sure it's the best option for your site since it does cost.
Search over 70.000+ databases
Navigate to the CompletePlanet.com home page, and you'll see the standard search query bar right in the middle of the page. Below that, you have a wide variety of topics from which to choose - this is a good place to start if you have a really good idea of where your particular search query is headed. Let's look at both options and see what happens.
My search for clouds using the standard search bar returned 187 "related databases." Your CompletePlanet results are a bit different than searching for the word "clouds" in a less focused search portal; instead of your search results page being full of links to a whole bunch of Web sites, CompletePlanet uses its technology called Deep Query Manager instead to search databases. Your results, therefore, are made up of various Deep Web databases.
My search for clouds using the topic database worked a bit differently. I chose the topic science in order to initially narrow down my search, then I decided to explore Meterology. At this point, CompletePlanet only returned one result for my intial search query of clouds, but it was a pretty good one - it turned out to be the Australian government's Greenhouse and Climate change page. I think that for me, I prefer narrowing down my topic from the get-go in CompletePlanet, since I felt the results were more targeted and relevant; however, I believe that it's completely your own personal preference.
At the bottom of every search result, you'll see little colored squares indicated how relevant your result is to your original search query; the highest score is four squares, so the more squares, the better. Next to that you'll see the size of that particular file and the date it was "harvested", rather, when CompletePlanet spidered that page.
My search for clouds using the topic database worked a bit differently. I chose the topic science in order to initially narrow down my search, then I decided to explore Meterology. At this point, CompletePlanet only returned one result for my intial search query of clouds, but it was a pretty good one - it turned out to be the Australian government's Greenhouse and Climate change page. I think that for me, I prefer narrowing down my topic from the get-go in CompletePlanet, since I felt the results were more targeted and relevant; however, I believe that it's completely your own personal preference.
At the bottom of every search result, you'll see little colored squares indicated how relevant your result is to your original search query; the highest score is four squares, so the more squares, the better. Next to that you'll see the size of that particular file and the date it was "harvested", rather, when CompletePlanet spidered that page.
CompletePlanet Advanced Search
CompletePlanet Advanced Search is pretty standard; you get the option to search by title, keyword, description, date, etc. I would also highly recommend that you take a quick look at CompletePlanet Search Help - it's a great introduction to what you can really do with CompletePlanet.
Why Should I Use CompletePlanet?
First of all, it's extremely easy to use, and even more simple to narrow down searches without a lot of complicated search syntax or search operators. Secondly, CompletePlanet is searching the Invisible Web; so your results overall are of a higher standard (since they are in academic, government, military, etc. databases) than if you searched for the same item in a general search engine. Thirdly, I really like how CompletePlanet's list of topics is right on the front page - it makes it easy to narrow down or broaden your search; plus, I just enjoy seeing what's out there in topics I wouldn't ordinarily be searching within. I highly recommend CompletePlanet as a great tool with which to search the Deep Web.
Word Art
Wordle is a toy for generating 'word clouds' from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like. You can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with your friends.
Wordle is being used in interesting ways to provide compelling summaries of political speeches, blog posts, twitter feed, news articles and more, but there are additional educational uses worth considering.
A few ideas:
1. Convert a sonnet or Shakespearean play; or children's book (Dr. Seuss anyone?);2. Paste the contents of an online discussion to coalesce the main ideas;3. Combine student 'Who Are You?' introductions, or 'SuperheroTraits' to develop a class composite;4. Condense survey data by dumping content of questionnaire responses into the Wordle engine;5. Combine news articles or RSS feeds on a given topic;6. Turn an essay into a poster;7. Combine blog posts over time into a simplified represetation or use it to compare the ideas of competing ideas;8. Use font, colour and arrangement strategies to appropriately represent content;9. Automate the creation of word poetry;10. As an introduction to a unit or course, combine key words; themes; curriculum expectations to provide learners with a visual overview of content;11. Convert nutritional content of one's weekly diet or of a group's menu preferences;12. Condense a Wikipedia article into it's essence;13. Paste the results of a Google search (Can you guess the keywords I used?);14. Convert social bookmark tags;15. Enter keywords from weekly weather reports to obtain a seasonal picture;16. Distill song lyrics like "Stairway to Heaven";17. Find out what you've been up to by summarizing To-Do lists;18. Represent the results of a brainstorming session or the minutes of a meeting visually;19. Show "Today in History" stories in a new way;20. Convert past or current email messages into a composite of your correspondence;
Make you file at your fingertips, anytime, anywhere.
Syncplicity backs up all your files, keeps them synced and up-to-date across all your computers and computers of people you’ve shared them with, allows you and your friends to access them online (even if your computers are turned off), and can even sync them with Facebook and Google Docs.
Syncplicity was founded with a simple vision: Your computer should empower you, not slow you down. They goal is to create a new way of managing files to liberate people from worrying about how and where their data is stored. With Syncplicity, you don’t have to be a file techie. Sharing, backing up, and synchronizing files is automatic and intuitive, so you can get down to the important stuff and use your computer in fun, creative and useful ways.
The company is led by a strong and dynamic team with substantial experience in creating and delivering solid and innovative products to the market.
It's important to know that Syncplicity is still in Beta right now but it works awesome and I can't wait for them to officially launch which should be very soon. I would be wise with how much you store with them until they launch but keep your eyes open and see for yourself how good they are. Then make a decision for yourself.
Syncplicity was founded with a simple vision: Your computer should empower you, not slow you down. They goal is to create a new way of managing files to liberate people from worrying about how and where their data is stored. With Syncplicity, you don’t have to be a file techie. Sharing, backing up, and synchronizing files is automatic and intuitive, so you can get down to the important stuff and use your computer in fun, creative and useful ways.
The company is led by a strong and dynamic team with substantial experience in creating and delivering solid and innovative products to the market.
It's important to know that Syncplicity is still in Beta right now but it works awesome and I can't wait for them to officially launch which should be very soon. I would be wise with how much you store with them until they launch but keep your eyes open and see for yourself how good they are. Then make a decision for yourself.
