How to read Kindle books without buying a Kindle

The Kindle ebook reader is a lovely device that some people love. However that love comes at a price. The cheapest version cost less than $100, and if you buy one, you have to put up with the hassles of learning how to use it, keeping track of, and maintaining it.

You can avoid the expense and hassle of buying a device by downloading a free Kindle application that will let you use your computer, tablet, or smart phone to read Kindle books.

Why is all this good stuff free?
Amazon.com, the company behind the Kindle, isn't in the charity business. While the Kindle devices generate revenue, over the long term they will make most of their money through the paid content, including books, that can be displayed on the Kindle device or on one of the free Kindle apps you can download.

How do I get this free Kindle App?
Simply go to Amazon.com at http://www.amazon.com/gp/kindle/kcp and download the appropriate Kindle app for your device. You can get an app for the following devices:

- Windows PC
- Mac PC
- iPhone
- iPad
- Android
- Blackberry
- Windows Phone 7

Once the download is finished, you can use your Amazon.com account to log into the online Kindle store to either buy content or to download free content. You don't have to have a Amazon.com account to read books and use other content, there are several advantages. One of the biggest ones is that you can download a sample of a book and evaluate it before you decide if you want to buy it.

Magic Kindle Powers
Since the Kindle app is free, you can download it for every device that you have. There are two ways that Amazon makes this a convenient option. First, if when you purchase a book, you can download it and read it on every device where you have a Kindle app. Second, if you make notes or bookmarks in a book on one device, when you open up the book on another device, all the notes and bookmarks transfer as well.

Try these free books
You don't have to get your books from Amazon. You can read .mobi format ebook file on your Kindle reader. Check out these two free ebooks from AirSafe.com's partner Speedbrake Publishing.

Parenting and the Internet
The AirSafe.com Podcasting Manual

5 ways to use Google Docs to run your business

Google Docs has three great things going for it: it's free, it keeps getting improved, and it is flexible. The first advantage is obvious, and the other two are well illustrated in a short video from Sharon Vaknin of CNET News. You may also know her from Geek and the City

The following are the key points about Google Docs you can pick up from the video:

1. Easy uploading: You can upload files of almost any format to Google Docs, and also drag and drop files from your hard drive to the Docs home page. You can also upload an entire folder (like your My Documents), into Google Docs, and it would keep your folder and subfolder organization intact.

2. Insert photos directly into a document: You can insert a photo into a document by dragging and dropping files from your hard drive or from the web.

3. Add comments: This is a great option if you are collaborating with someone on a document. You can highlight a block of text, add a comment, and that comment, along with the name of the person who wrote the comment, will appear in the sidebar, where other collaborators can reply to that comment. You can even send the comment to a specific collaborator with a Twitter-like capability by typing "@" followed by the person'sname. If you move the highlighted text, the comments will move with it.

4. Easy file backup: With a few keystrokes, you can download all of your Google Doc files into your hard drive, and even specify what kind of format you want to use. For example, you can save a document file either as a Word file or an OpenOffice file.

5. Helpful Google Rappers: While not technically a part of Google Docs, you can go to YouTube to see Google employee rapping about how to use the help functions in Google Docs.

What to get when starting a new online effort

If you are thinking about creating a new online presence, and intend to create something that would be attractive to a wide audience, it usually helps to plan it so that people can relate to what you are doing in several different ways. Doing just a web site, or just a podcast, or just a Facebook page isn't enough. With a little bit of planning, you should be able to get something useful up and running in a day or less.

What to add and how quickly?
Ideally, you would have all your content created and ready to go on day one, and a very clear idea of what you want to do online. Realistically, you may have only some of the content created, and only a vague idea of where you will end up even a few weeks down the road. My suggestion is to prioritize what you do by how important it will be to you later. A few years ago, that meant getting a domain name. Today, you probably would still need a domain name, or at least a user name or other identifier that would end up in the URL of services like YouTube and Twitter.

Case study - MoneyBahn.com
My latest project was creating a web site promoting financial education and investment services. Based on my experience with the airline safety site AirSafe.com, I understood that to get and keep an audience's attention and to attract traffic, it helped to have several different elements to an online effort, including widely used online resources like web sites to resources like Twitter and Facebook that may be used only by a portion of my target audience. While few would likely use every resource, my goal was to have a range of options for someone to choose.

I wanted to start with three new online resources: a web site, a Twitter account, and a YouTube account. I also wanted to pick a domain name that could also incorporated in the user name of the Twitter account and the URL of the YouTube account. After a short search, I found that MoneyBahn.com was available for a domain name, so I went ahead and had the site created. I then created a new Twitter account and YouTube account with MoneyBahn as the user name.

With these key elements in place, I was assured that the most likely resources I would use to promote the new web site (Twitter and YouTube) would have URLs that would include the 'MoneyBahn" portion of the web sites domain name. With these new elements in place, I could not concentrate on creating more content. To see how that is shaping up, you may want to visit the main site at MoneyBahn.com, or sites Twitter account and Facebook page.

Restricting Blogger links to the home page

For those of you who have sites on Blogger, one of the great advantages is that you don't have to know HTML or any other programming language to have a site up and running in minutes. While you can use Blogger-supplied code (called gadgets) to add or subtract extra content into a sidebar like blogrolls, polls, or a search box, you don't usually have any options when it comes to where those widgets will be seen. Typically, once a Blogger gadget is added, you will see the content of that Gadget
in the sidebar of every page on the site.

If you have a handful of links that you only want on the home page, one option is to use the HTML/Javascript gadget (my favorite for adding plain text links) and to change how that gadget operates so that it only shows up on the home page. This involves changing the template that controls the look and feel of the site. By adding a couple of lines of code, you can change this gadget so that it is only visible on the home page.

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Note:If you haven't done any kind of web site or blog coding before using HTML, and feel unsure about changing the code, either find someone who can do it for you or practice this on either one of your inactive Blogger sites or on a site that you put together for testing changes like this.

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The following instructions are taking from an article on the Blogger Tricks site:

• Sign into Blogger dashboard and click on the Design link for your blog, click on the Add a Gadget on your blog's layout, and then select the type of gadget you need (for example HTML/Javascript). Add the content that you want, and save your changes.
  
  
• Next, you have to add a small piece of code to that gadget so that your content only displays in the Homepage. Just clcik to Edit HTML and then select the box next to 'Expand Widget Templates'. Now would also be a good time to save the template just in case.
  
  
• Find the HTML/Javascript gadget, which should start with code that looks like <b:widget id='HTML1' locked='false' title='' type='HTML>
  
  
• Just below that line of code, You should see a "b:includable" tag that looks like <b:includable id='main'>
  
  
• Under that line, add the following: <b:if cond='data:blog.url == data:blog.homepageUrl'>
  
  
• Just before the line </b:includable> tag, add the line </b:if> to close the "if" statement.
  
  
• Save your template and test your blog. If everything went well, you should only see that gadget on the home page.

The same Blogger Tricks article also shows you how to do this for other types of gadgets, and also how to do this so that the gadget content shows up everywhere except the home page.

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.

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.

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.