Friday, June 25, 2010

How to Easily Clip Web Pages to Evernote Using Your iPad

If you are one of the millions of new iPad owners, and you want to use it as useful tool, I recommend using the Evernote application to help you take notes and keep them online. The Evernote application works best if you can both cut and paste content of a web page as well as write notes.

One weakness of the iPad is that it is hard to select, copy, and paste large blocks of text, or an entire web page. The folks at JoeTaxpayer.com have solved that problem in an elegant way. The Evernote application on the iPad acts as a mini-browser in combination with Google.

It is a simple process. First, make a new note and type in the Google home page URL and save the note using the 'Clip to Evernote' option. The next time you need to copy entire pages into Evernote, open up that Google note and select the Google URL and go to Google's home page. Navigate to the page you want, and when you find it, open up the option menu in the lower right and choose the option to safe the page. When you are done, you can quit or you can go back to the Google page and do it again.

By the way, this technique will work with any search engine.

Tuesday, June 8, 2010

Google vs. Bing and Real Time Search

When it comes to search engines, the two most important resources are Google and Bing. Both perform well when it comes to traditional search, but only Google currently has a useful option for real time search. While I knew that from following various news and information sources about search engines, sometimes it takes a real world problem to understand the what those differences really mean.

In my case, I was at the SMX Advanced conference in Seattle earlier today, at a presentation titled SEO For Google Vs. Bing: How Different Are They? As is the case for many Internet-related conferences, many attendees were furiously updating Twitter during the presentation, and using the hashtag #smx, anyone could follow the comments coming from the presentations.

Regular visitors to this site may recall my article from last December when I discussed how much I used search.twitter.com to follow fast breaking news items, and for a few minutes, I was able to follow the sometimes insightful comments from the other attendees. Suddenly, we were all frozen out of the service because Twitter saw too much search traffic from one location and apparently suspected that there was some kind of a problem.

With my favorite Twitter tool out of action, my first reaction was to go over to Google to see if I could do the same thing. I typed in the #smx tag, selected the "Latest" option, and I was able to see the stream of tweets. Since the session was about comparisons with Bing, I went there and tried to do the same. No luck.

Later, after I spoke to Danny Sullivan and others, I realized that Bing had not real time search capabilities, at least not yet. I'd read articles earlier about the Bing real time search situation, but I never gave it much of a thought because I normally only used search.twitter.com. Now that I know Google has it, I'll use that option more. When Bing gets around to adding that capability, I'll try that too.

Thursday, June 3, 2010

The Creator of Dilbert on the Future of Free Content

Scott Adams, creator of the long-running comic strip Dilbert, earlier this month posted an article on the future of content where he proposed what he calls the Adams Theory of Content Value, that the value of content will approach zero as our ability to search for media content improves. It is worth your time to read, since it touches upon many of the issues faced by content creators, especially those who combine information or content from many sources to create web sites, blogs, online videos, and podcasts. He also talks about the role the iPad may play in making it harder to charge for online content.

At AirSafe.com and AirSafe Media, our response to this reality is to invite sharing rather than fight it. While all material we create is copyrighted, we've embraced the Creative Commons concept, allowing everyone to use the material any way they want, so long as they do so in a noncommercial way and allow anyone else to also reuse their modified material.