Tech Thoughts

Mozilla "Crowdsource Crowdsourcing" Kicks Off

2010-07-26T14:05:00.001-07:00

Today, volunteers from California to Sweden came together to discuss how to improve crowd sourcing, responding to a call from Mozilla Labs for volunteers to "Crowdsource Crowdsourcing." We are practicing what we preach here. Pretty much everybody had a say in our initial discussion. Pascal Finette of Mozilla Labs got us going by telling us we should split up into three groups. From there, we took over. We got into the groups we wanted, then each group chose its own way of communicating and decided how to proceed until all the groups reconvene in two weeks.

For example, my group, which is trying to define best practices for crowdsourcing, decided to sign up for and participate in some crowdsourcing sites, and to report back on Thursday with initial findings. A second group is analyzing past Mozilla Labs Design Challenges to figure out what went wrong and what went right. The third is diving into crowdsourcing theory. We plan to fuse our findings when we get back together.

We have a wide variety of interests and backgrounds here, with an entrepreneur, a biophysicist, an electrical engineer, a couple of psychology majors, and, of course, many designers and programmers. I am a computer science major at Chico State who is all about usability. I blog at coleman.posterous.com. Roei Yellin is an Israeli entrepreneur working on a crowdsourcing startup. Matt Evans is Mozilla's QA DIrector. Jan Dittrich is studying for a Media Arts & Design B.F.A. at the Bauhaus University in Weimar. Abraham Taherivand has an Information Systems BS and an Information Management and Engineering MS. He has done a ton of things in innovation, which you can learn more about at his website h ttp://www.taherivand.net. Jimmy Chion (www.myhippocamp.us/) has a bachelors's degree in Cognitive Science Stanford and is now near completing a Master's in Mechanical Engineering. Chao Xu is majoring in Computer Science and Mathematics at Stony Brook University. Piyush Kumar majored in Electrical Engineering and minored in Computer Science for his BS and is going to get an MS in Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. Ryan Bubinski is studying studying biophysics and computer science at Columbia. Peter Organisciak is working on an MA in Digital Humanities at the University of Alberta and is going on to study Information Science at the University of Illinois. His thesis is on the motivations of crowdsourcing participants. Zach Williams is a Psychology major at Tarleton State University in Texas, with a passion for web design and user experience, which you can see at his beautiful website http://zachwill.com/. Joao Menezes (joaom.tumblr.com) studies Graphics/Interaction Design at UNIVILLE University, Brazil. He has participated in several Mozilla projects. Ola Moller studies Social/Digital Media & Concept Development at Hyper Island in Stockholm. He has led and participated in two creativity crowdsourcing projects in Sweden, which you can learn more about at his websitehttp://olamoller.se/. Eugenia Ortiz (who goes by Euge) is another student. She is big on User Experience. Learn more about her athttp://www.eugeniaortiz.com.ar/. Ajay Roopakalu is a computer science major and applied mathematics minor at Princeton University. He blogs at http://jrupac.wordpress.com/.

This is how you crowdsource crowdsourcing: gather volunteers from every part of the world and many backgrounds, let them organize themselves, and watch the magic.

Posted via email from Coleman's posterous

The World is Speeding Up

2009-05-28T14:14:00.001-07:00

The world is speeding up. I say that because tech is speeding up, and tech drags the rest of the world into the future. In the last few days, Google has announced the next web, basically. They made the one we have one, except for Facebook. Google Search is maybe the only web app that blew up a few years ago and continues to be a big deal today. They make all the apps that are pulling people into web apps, like Google Docs. Picasa Web Albums even is pretty big now. There is enough going on in tech now to write views from 30,000 feet daily. That's why I'm starting to do it now.

Posted via email from Coleman's posterous

Posterous | Re: markets are our only hope

2009-05-27T19:05:00.001-07:00

Politics is Over
I just can't get interested in politics any more. The only way I see to accomplish any thing good is privately.
Once everything is private, every person's life will be exciting. When you are responsible for every bit of your life, each decision becomes more important, and also becomes a better decision. There will be less anger towards others, since they will become irrelevant to your happiness. The habit of self-correction will spread to every act. Self-improvement will be rapid. The very act of becoming more responsible will decreases problems with society and other public issues.
This page is a window into the future its text describes. It is made up of parts made by many individual, independent actors. Look at a mainstream news site. The Washington Post, for example, has, on one typical page, Ads by Google, Search by Google, Comments by Pluck, Who's Blogging by Sphere, and "Get The Post's take on whatever you're reading -- anywhere on the Web." powered by Mywebpost. Oh, and did I mention a model of the concepts in the article by evri and links to related articles by AggregateKnowledge? Finally, and most ominously for papers there are jobs listings...by SimplyHired. All the Post itself handles is links to the rest of their site, and irrelevant advertising by their internal ad group, which will soon die either thanks to replacement by AdSense, or its parent's replacement by Google News. Oh, and Google News is just one of many competing news aggregators, the best of which, TechMeme just became a two-man team, after having become Tech Web, Page A1 by the work of one person. Ayn Rand and Nietzsche's super person is here, and he is every one. So no one's angry any more, because everyone's powerful and no one is holding any one back.
All work now is creative. For example, a webmaster used to be a handcoder of vanilla HTML. Now he picks the best of the web's tools for use by a huge website. That job has gotten better, and billions more callings have been created. Creator of a Related-article finder, creator of a concept-understander program are but two. What's yours?
The change is bottom-up and top-down, empowering the meritorious upstart and emptying the pockets of the unproductive corporate giant, leaving one huge meritocratic middle class. One class means no class.
Care to join?

Posted via email from Coleman's posterous

markets are our only hope

2009-05-27T18:25:00.001-07:00

Anything that doesn't work is just not private enough. The tech sector is the most productive thing in the world. It is the "biggest legal creator of wealth in the history of the world." The government didn't have anything to do with it. It has improved, and will improve, life, far more than anything ever has. Here is one huge problem tech can fix: Mexico. The only thing that will ever fix Mexico is increasing its GDP. The only thing that can grow its GDP is private investors. So far, they are the only good thing in mexico. They are productive, peaceful. They keep Mexicans in Mexico, because they provide jobs in Mexico. The maquiladoras are what has vaulted Mexico's economy to where it is, and the continuing creation of business in Northern Mexico will make it a paradise. Even the security is private, and it has to be. The Obama Administration refuses to send the Army, so private contractors will have to do. The web has democratized violence, but it hasn't spread killing power evenly. The best weapons are still in America's hands. American mercs will make the world peaceful and prosperous and there is nothing any one can do about it, although they will try their best. One example of the democratization of violence is iRobot. It is consumer/military technology company that makes the PackBot, which neutralizes IEDs in Iraq, and the Roomba, which neutralizes cat pee smells in your living room. iRobot makes a hackable platform, a robot that you can make do anything. What keeps mercs from using it and outclassing the Mexican narco-state and the Mexican sissy-state at once? UAVs are easily replicable. Not to mention, this stuff would be incredibly fun. It's where all the money is, and all the adventure. The world market stagnate until it floods the third world, making beggars consumers, and killers producers. Another huge world problem is education. Same story: privatize. Quality goes up, access goes up, peace spreads, money spreads. It is a well-documented fact that wherever money goes, violence flees. This private world will allow every one to do exactly what they want, and be rewarded better than they ever have. Specialization will rule the age. The world will need one comment analyst, and one it will have. When the whole world is annexed by the Web, each part of the Web will be faster and stronger, and it will have to become faster and stronger in the process. As tech spreads and reinforces itself, violence will decamp. Everyone will have a great life, so they will have no reason to fight. In fact, they will have reason to cooperate like never before. 10 billion people will each have their own comparative advantage, and trade will make up 100% of economic activity. People will be so incredibly interdependent that war will be unthinkable. People will be able to stop worrying about things that hurt, and concentrate on making every one feel better. As every person gets rich, leisure will quickly near perfection.

Posted via email from Coleman's posterous

Comment system

2009-05-03T16:01:00.001-07:00

Comments are a fast-growing part of web content. Often, the comments on an article are more interesting than the article itself. Crappy comments and spam crowd out good comments, though. Comment software often allows people to rate comments and mark spam, but this still leaves a lot of duplicates. Usually, there are about five points made in all the comments for a given article, even when there are 1,000 comments. We need CommentMeme. Actually, we need a new way to write on the internet.

You should be able to highlight any part of a comment and rank it up or down. higher ranked parts would become more prominent. This way, you would see the best comments first. This would still leave a lot of duplicate comments, though. You would need software to recognize that the comments are all about the same thing. Or you could let people merge comments that are the same. For example, you could drag one comment onto another to show they're part of the same meme. You could also hide lower-ranked comments. For example, if one comment said "Firefox is the best because it is open source," and another said "Firefox is the best because it is the most customizable," readers would recognize that they are both about the same thing. They could vote up whichever one was a better way of putting the idea. Then the higher-voted comment would become more visually prominent than the lower-ranked one. One way to do this would be to show each group of comments on a certain topic, like Firefox's extensibility, as a stack, like a plain 3d cube. All the topic-cubes would be laid out like a city. The largest cubes would be the ones with that the most people agreed on, as signified by the number of "likes" and duplicate comments on that same topic.

The other important fix is to make comment "liking" more granular, so you can like a paragraph, a sentence or even a phrase by highlighting it and

you would end up with a kind of automated, crowdsourced editorial. for example, the website buzzilions.com aggregates customer reviews and extracts phrases that are often used in reviews of a certain product. For example, the review for one monitor lists "sharp image" (said 11 times) "vivid colors" (also said 11 times.) In this way, you get an automatically-generated summary as well as more details in the customer reviews themselves, which are ranked from most helpful to least helpful. So right now, the best CE reviews are written by consumers and edited by software.

I got this idea from looking at whitehouse2.org, where policy suggestions, called priorities, are listed and ranked like articles and pictures are on digg. I said "Consolidating priorities could not only eliminate duplicates but could also be used to make each priority more complete and interesting. For example, there is "Invest in clean energy and create 5 million new green jobs and "Subsidize Green Energy like Solar and Wind" These are asking for the same thing, but in different ways. It's interesting that the first one is endorsed 3:1 and the second one is split. You should merge the two priorities and rank the descriptions, so there would be one priority called "Invest in clean energy and create 5 million new green jobs""

Pandora Plus

2009-04-27T13:43:00.001-07:00

I want to tell Pandora that I like good classic rock songs, very good funk/classic r & b songs, and only the very best jazz or classical songs. Right now, it wants to play songs from only one genre. I play a customized classic rock station. It has evolved to suit my tastes pretty well, and has started to play some other types of songs I like, like 90's rock, which I guess is pretty close to classic rock. But it will never play some of the songs I like, like Baby Love The Supremes, Reach Out (I'll Be There), Crazy, Gnarls Barkley, Hey Ya by Outkast, Underdog by Spoon, Oops Upisde Your Head by the Gap Band. It should be able to tell that I like popular songs. For example, in classic rock, my favorite genre, my top 10 are the Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, Bad Company--the 10 biggest classic rock bands. So when I make a funk station, why doesn't guess I would like the very most popular funk artists, like Rick James, the Gap Band, etc.? It could infer that the first station you create is your favorite, so you will like lots of songs on it. However, the next station you make will probably be your second favorite kind of music, so it should only play the very best, like an all-time top 40 of R and B. I don't think I care so much which instruments are played, but how well they are played and how well the whole package is produced, which I think you can infer from which songs are the most popular.

News Aggregators

2009-02-26T15:42:00.000-08:00

News aggregators are the future of news delivery. The few we have now, like TechMeme and Google News, are much better than newspapers in every way. All they are missing is personalization, so that they are as customizable as feed readers, but with more comprehensive, de-duplicated coverage of the reader's favorite topics. Another thing aggregators are short on is feature stories. Almost everything is the day's news items, without many in-depth examinations of the topics at hand.

start page

2009-02-08T14:16:00.000-08:00

We all go to the same sites everyday for the most part. So Google has automated this process by making a start page of your most frequently-accessed pages. It posts thumbnails of your favorite pages. The problem is, all these thumbnails tell you is what site they are. The pictures are too small to show you the content on the page you want. So you have to click through to open the entire page, jerking you away from the start page. Say you clicked on gmail. What if you get to the inbox and then there are no interesting messages? It would be nice if you could just see what messages you got on your home page without going to Gmail itself. Of course, there are personalized start pages that offer gadgets that do just that. The problem with those is that you have to manually add widgets. Why not take the best of both worlds and automatically populate your start page with widgets for your favorite sites. The first page would be based on the pages you visit the very most. The second page would have the second-most visited pages, and so on. Now that we have the best of the two kinds of personalized start pages, how about something new that neither one has. What if widgets were automatically made from pages by plucking out the important information. For example, a techcrunch gadget would show the most recent posts. There is software that automatically makes mobile versions of sites, which is very similar. To take this one, final step further, what if it recognized what kind of content each widget contained, and organized the feeds from each source into a kind of unified inbox for your rss feeds, twitter, and gmail.

Anarchy is just an Idea

2008-11-20T21:48:00.000-08:00

There is no such thing as anarchy. It never happens. One power structure doesn't collapse without another simultaneously rising. According to more radical libertarians, Somalia should be a perfect country, because its government collapsed and they had a fresh start. This is basically what they advocate for the U.S. It doesn't work, though. In fact, such a radical transformation is just inefficient, like reinventing the wheel. Getting stopped at checkpoints along the road every couple of miles, constantly worrying about who will take power next...it's a mess. If no one else, American libertarians at least should stick to the U.S. This recession is a great opportunity to cut taxes and government programs.

Awesome Bar to Genius Bar

2008-11-11T20:32:00.000-08:00

Imagine if the browser's address bar was even smarter than the awesome bar—a genius bar, I guess. As you type, it recognizes your intent. Type “browser's address bar,” and, like the awesome bar, it shows matches in your history. It also shows search results, like the omnibox in Google's Chrome. As you type, the search results dwindle. Type this entire post, and this post, and others related to it, would pop up. However, if you were just quoting this post, and you continued to write your own post, all search results would disappear. The genius bar would automatically add footnotes, and turn the quote into a link to the search for the quote. As your essay gets longer, the bar becomes a large text input area, complete with text formatting options that would pop up above the essay. Once your essay reached the bottom of you screen and required a new page, the awesome bar would now be a full-fledged word processor. By default, writings would be public. You could just drag the whole thing to a sidebar of contacts, though.Click on the person you want to send it to, and a contextual menu pops up--send it to the person, chat with person, call person? Much like FriendFeed aggregates and improves receiving information, the unified writing interface would help sending information. One UI expressly for writing beats all the disparate ones that are tacked on to web sites and apps. A good example of this idea in practice is Posterous. This service lets you write an email, then make it a blog post by sending it to post@posterous.com. This makes your email client more useful, which is good because people usually keep their email client open all the time. It saves people from opening another app to blog, which makes good sense. I rarely blog, so even logging into blogger is a little inconvenient, as it is not routine for me;it is not as integrated into my workflow. Right now, my incoming messages are split between google reader and gmail, while my outgoing messages are split between comments on blogs and personal messages on gmail. Ideally, this would all be one service, which I guess FriendFeed is.

Bureaucrats per Acre: a new metric

2008-11-09T17:46:00.000-08:00

Imagine a Wikipedia that could only be edited by people in New York City. Each article would be less peer-reviewed, and many topics would no longer be covered at all. Now imagine a Wikipedia that only people in the state of New York could edit. It would be better, undoubtedly, but not as good as one open to the whole U.S., much less the Wikipedia that actually exists, which integrates expertise from the whole world. Local governments, like cities and counties are hopelessly crooked and unresponsive, because there are too few people watching them. States are better, because they have more people watching them (the whole state) and they de-duplicate government functions somewhat. The U.S. Federal Government is the best legislative body the world has ever seen. It is very closely watched, as the turnout in this years election proves. It houses some of the most effective, efficient government agencies ever, such as the U.S. military. Topping all these forms of government would be a world government. It would, of course, duplicate functionality less than any other kind. Having one police department instead of 1,000's allows for more specialization, innovation, efficiency, and incorruptibility, thanks to the increased spotlight such a force would endure. It would also be needed in volatile places like Iraq, which increasingly needs policemen more than it needs a military presence. It would have the added advantage of bringing enough minds to bear on issues that are location-specific, such as floods or snow. There would be a state of equatorial coastal communities, a state of mediterranean coastal towns, a state of tropical tourist towns, and so on and so forth. Then the unique problems of each of these types of cities could be tackled by a larger group of citizens than ever before, working closely, when before they didn't work together at all. Of course, this is a long way from happening, and I can't say when it will, but I know who will make it happen: America. As evidenced by our world's-best federal government, we are the greatest innovators in governance. We will start having fewer states, that make more sense. Then, as we annex countries like Iraq and Afghanistan, we will make them part of that system immediately. Ultimately, US hegemony will mean less taxes and better government.

The Collapse of the Political Parties

2008-11-09T17:37:00.000-08:00

While the Democratic Party seems stronger than ever and the GOP weaker, they are in fact both weaker now than before. This is borne out out by more voters identifying themselves as independents. Both the parties, and all the special interests that have supported them are circling the wagons in preparation for the attack of everyone. They are collapsing into the same policies. Look at the very bipartisan immigration reform bill. Bipartisan is supposed to make something good, but it is often bad, and the reason for the big bipartisanship push is that the partisans (Republicans and Democrats) are both weaker, and together they are stronger. Immigration may be the straw on the camel's back that makes us a more representative democracy forever. The Feds are spending more than almost anyone wants. The only people who support this waste are special interest groups, like big corporations and unions. Big corporations are shrinking by the day, and unions are history. So far, Americans have realized that liberalism doesn't work, and corporatism doesn't work, so they are desperately casting about for something...different. Obama isn't it, which people will soon realize. By then, we will have started to see a decent alternative, namely, small government at home, big government abroad, to paraphrase George Will.

idea for an iPhone competitor

2007-08-25T20:46:00.000-07:00

The iPhone is great because of its advances, its big multi-touch screen in particular. Competitors need to out-iPhone the iPhone to beat it. The screen should be stretched to 4.3". To mitigate the increase in the size of the device, you could make the occupy the whole front of the device, even more than the iPhone's screen does. While some may find that putting power-sucking screen behind your thumbs, at the edge of the device is pointless, it would serve two purposes. One: it would make the experience more immersive, like the light some TVs emit to match what's on the screen. Secondly, the edges of the screen on the sides also serve as a dedicated navigation area on sites where content doesn't stretch to the edge of the screen. Continuing with this concept of "dead space" at the edge of the screen, these margins could be the boundary between the page you're looking at and the previous one in history. You would swipe from left to right to go back a page, but if you wanted to open a new tab, you would swipe from right to left, which would bring up your most often-accessed sites. Put a power button on top. Give it 16 GBof flash memory. Connect to Sprint's 3G network by making an MVNO that buys minutes from them. Include Wi-Fi. Throw in GPS-connected GMaps. Create a Gecko-based browser compatible with Google Toolbar. Pare down the OS so it runs fast on a low-power processor, like the new AMD 1W processor. Have the device boot to iGoogle. Have Google subsidize the whole thing.

Review of Windows Vista

2007-06-27T13:17:00.001-07:00

Windows Vista

A small improvement with a big price

Windows Vista looks better than Windows XP. That's its only major advantage. Apart from that, searching for files and programs with a mere click on the Start button is nice, and Microsoft also throws in the ability to search from any window. The only other notable thing about is its price: $120 and up for versions featuring the better looks.

Rated 2/5 on Jun 27 2007 by Coleman Foley

LouderVoice Review Tags: operating system

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Review of Windows Media Player 11

2007-06-26T13:42:00.001-07:00

Windows Media Player 11

Good media player with a touch of style

Windows Media Player 11 matches iTunes' key features--such as search results appearing as you type your query, and album art-- but puts them in a more intuitive package. The play/pause button is the size of a coin. The close, maximize and minimize buttons are larger too. These little touches make the program a little more enjoyable to use. It arguably looks a little better than iTunes, too, rounding out its set of slight improvements to Apple's winning formula.

Rated 4/5 on Jun 26 2007 by Coleman Foley

LouderVoice Review Tags: audio, media player

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Review of Mozy Remote Backup

2007-06-26T13:26:00.001-07:00

Mozy Remote Backup

Slow online storage

Mozy automatically backs up files and folders you choose, at times you would like it to--such as when you are not using your computer. It is fairly easy to set it up for the first time, as it automatically selects the My Documents, My Music folder, and others for backup, but you have to navigate a Windows Explorer-like file tree to choose other files and folders you want backed up.

Then the wait begins. Mozy moves your files to a safe location--but very slowly. Sometimes the process fails altogether. You can pay nothing to back up 2 GB, or $5 a month for unlimited space.

Rated 3/5 on Jun 26 2007 by Coleman Foley

LouderVoice Review Tags: backup, offsite backup, online backup

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Review of Google Desktop

2007-06-19T20:09:00.001-07:00

Google Desktop

Solid Overall; A Boon to Widescreen Users

Google Desktop gives you a sidebar, an area at the edge of your screen where you can place a clock, a calendar, and more. The analog clock makes checking the time easy. The calendar is what you would expect, and it also displays upcoming events you have scheduled (using Google Calendar) in a list. You can search your computer using the search box. If you don't want to use the sidebar, you can tuck the search box at the bottom of the screen and get rid of the rest of the gadgets. The search returns results faster than Windows' Find feature does. This is useful for finding and playing an mp3, or finding a program without searching through the Start menu. Overall, the program is very useful, especially if you have a widescreen monitor, because then you can take advantage of the extra space at the edge of your monitor to view data you choose.

Rated 4/5 on Jun 20 2007 by Coleman Foley

LouderVoice Review Tags: konfabulator, sidebar, widgets

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Review of Google Reader

2007-06-18T21:29:00.001-07:00

Google Reader

Top-of-the-line Feed Reader

Google Reader aggregates RSS feeds. Adding feeds is easy, and navigating them is a joy. You can view all items, or only those from a specific website. While viewing an item (a summary of a story) in a feed, you can press j to move on to the next item, k to return to the previous item, or s to star the item. Starring is handy; it's like bookmarking, but doesn't require a toolbar, so you can use it at any computer. You can share items, too, by emailing them or putting them at a URL Google Reader provides. This URL will display all items you share. You can also embed your shared items in a blog.

Google Reader is a lens to view the Internet through. I do most of my reading on the Internet through Google Reader and find it an efficient way of browsing the news in any browser, from any computer.

Rated 5/5 on Jun 19 2007 by Coleman Foley

LouderVoice Review Tags: feed aggregator, feed reader, rss aggregator, rss reader

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Review of Google Calendar

2007-06-18T21:07:00.001-07:00

Google Calendar

Quick and Easy Calendar Software

Calendars are handy. Web-based calendars are extremely handy, as Google Calendar shows. Google Calendar is easy to use and simple, but one feature stands out; you can add events to the calendar by typing them in natural language. For example, you could schedule walking your dog at 5 PM tomorrow by typing in "walk dog 5 PM tomorrow." The event would then show up on your Google Calendar on the date you indicated, at the time you specified. You could also set it to remind you by email and by text message.

Additional options include adding public calendars, such as baseball teams' season schedules, to your calendar. You can do this quickly. Finally, if you use Google Desktop, you can download a Google Calendar gadget that shows your calendar, your agenda (your upcoming events) and allows you to add events using natural language as mentioned before. This program is convenient, and a boon to web users.

Rated 5/5 on Jun 19 2007 by Coleman Foley

LouderVoice Review Tags: calendar, google, online, web-based

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Review of Nokia N800

2007-06-16T21:26:00.001-07:00

Nokia N800

Big-screen browsing on a pocketable device.

The Nokia N800 has a 4-inch touch screen, which enables you to do almost everything by touch. Just a few keys populate the left side of the device, including a back button and an application switching button. These are handy when you put the browser in full screen. Even when using this mode, though, text is sometimes too small, so you can press a button on top of the device to zoom in on a page. Next to that button is another one that toggles full screen mode. Another button allows you to zoom out from pages. You will be zooming and scrolling for hours because the battery lasts a long time. You can also burn the battery up calling people, because the free Gizmo Project software, which you can download, allows calling, even to landlines and cell phones. Another useful service available on the N800 is Rhapsody, the subscription-based music streaming service. You must download and install the program to find and play music. The software is reasonably well-suited to use on a small touch screen-only device. The buttons are big enough to thumb through. The touch screen experience is more frustrating on the browser, where it can be hard to aim your thumb well enough to land on links you want to hit. Pressing links is another issue altogether. You have to tap them quickly or they won't open. Otherwise, this device performs beautifully. Thumbs up.

Rated 5/5 on Jun 17 2007 by Coleman Foley

LouderVoice Review Tags: internet tablet, pda, touch screen, umpc

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Google Page Creator: Easy to Use Web Page Maker

2007-05-26T19:23:00.000-07:00

You can make a good-looking website easily using Google Page Creator. After signing up (or signing in with your Google account), you can choose a template and insert content. The default template gives your site a professional look. Updating your creation is easy. Just go to the Page Creator site and choose which page to edit and you're ready to work on your site.

Software Package for Businesses

2007-05-25T14:50:00.000-07:00

Google Apps for Your Domain offers Gmail, Google Calendar, and Google Talk (an instant messaging client) with twists that businesses will welcome. When you use Gmail as part of this package, your email address can end in your domain name. You can also create a website that uses your own domain name, which doesn't take long at all and is quite easy. Google hosts all of this, and it is all free.

Foxit Reader

2007-05-25T07:44:00.000-07:00

If you would like to open PDFs more quickly, Foxit Reader will help you. It opens PDFs much faster than Acrobat Reader. Forget about dealing with update reminders, too, because this program doesn't give them. If this sounds good, you are well on your way to using this program. You can download and install Foxit Reader quickly. Then, you will have to manually set Foxit Reader as your default PDF viewer. Just open the program and click "Ok" to use it to open PDFs.