Crowdbooster Killing Freemium

Crowdbooster Killing Freemium, Gives Free Alternatives Crowdbooster??is killing there freemium model, according to Ricky Yean??this is because we started falling behind on our promise to give you the highest quality service and we hated it.??Naturally they don’t want to leave their free customers – who may be unlikely to ever pay – hanging. So they made a list of services where they can get their analytics fix without bogging down the system.https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AiA_xls996Kw… Changes coming to Crowdbooster: replacing freemium with paid-only subscriptions – Crowdbooster Blog We have recently made the very difficult decision to discontinue Crowdbooster’s free service and replace it with a paid subscription at $9 a month starting on March 1, 2013. We understand that this is… View or comment on Dani??l Crompton’s post »

Pocket Revamp

Pocket RevampI like the changes to Pocket – formerly Read It Later. It’s starting to look decent. http://getpocket.com/a/queue/ View or comment on Dani??l Crompton’s photo »

Clean Out Your Blog Drafts

Dani??l Crompton shared Mack Collier’s post with you. Clean Out Your Blog DraftsYou can only learn by doing, so post your unpolished drafts and get valuable feedback. It’s a Build-Measure-Learn cycle for your blogposts. via Chris Brogan

Mack Collier People are telling me they are cleaning out their drafts and publishing them after reading this. Blogging is like anything else, you get better the more you do it! Done is better than Perfect when it comes to blogging I’m enjoying reading Ekaterina Walter’s new book Think Like Zuck, which is about the five keys to business success that you can learn from Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. In the book, Ek… View or comment on Dani??l Crompton’s post »

Google+ URL Shortening pro-tip

Jesse Wojdylo Goo.gl URL Shortener – An Amazing ToolI know most people on here probably have Google Analytics installed on their websites and they miss the opportunity to use this tool with their Google+ page and posts. ??I would suggest using the Goo.gl URL shortener as you can keep up with the clicks to a specific post or page. ?? One feature I would love to add to Goo.gl would be to save a specific link so it does not get buried. ??For those who have never used the service you simply place a URL into the convertor… View or comment on Dani??l Crompton’s post »

Create Documents from GMail Conversations #blogging

Using GMail daily I hadn’t noticed the item Create a document in the menu before yesterday, I decided to try it out and I really like it. The function allow you to turn an entire conversation into a document which is stored into Google Docs with the push of a button.

^{GMail menu}

The quoted text contains all the included markup, altough it doesn’t include the sender details, it removes all the quoted text it recognizes. What it doesn’t do is truncate the text below the “sig dashes” (“signature cut line”, “sig-marker”, or “sig separator”), which is what I expected.

I create many post based on conversations I see on mailing lists, or other place. This feature makes it easier to collect all the text of the conversation, as the sender is not included it is necessary to through source text to attribute the quotes to the correct person.

Nice feature!

Image source: VentureBeat, me

Proof of Concept: Google Docs Mail Merge Form with Text and HTML #wordpress

I needed a way to be able to shamelessly plug the posts I recently bundled into the booklet “Write Something” again.In a similar way to the last time I did it in Proof of Concept: Google Docs Mail Merge Form

As I explained before I have set up a system to automatically mail somebody when the enter their address in the form, my issue was that I wanted to add a unique blogpost which they would only be able to get by signing up. Naturally I wanted to style it in the same way the posts are styled in this blog. Again I turned to the documentation, specifically the Class MailApp which I was using to send the mail. Using this documentation I had a starting point. I wanted three changes to the current script:

1. keep the plain text
2. add HTML message
3. add inline images

Proof of Concept: Google Docs Mail Merge Form #wordpress #updated

I needed a way to be able to shamelessly plug the posts I recently bundled into the booklet “Write Something“. I want to build a list, and offering something which adds value for the subscriber is a good way to do this. There is a host of good material which you can use to help, so I won’t elaborate on that in this post.

I have a hosted WordPress.com blog, which means that I can’t run a local script to collect the mail addresses and mail them, so I turned to Google Docs’ Form functionality for the entry form, naturally I give them the option to download the booklet there, and I wanted to send the subscriber a message to thank them. In the Google tutorial: Simple Mail Merge they explain how to do a mail merge using the Script Editor. I wanted to go a little further and have it send a mail with thank you note and a link to each subscriber as soon as they filled in the form.

Pssst, Chris Brogan hasn’t started a secret podcast #gtd #productivity

Chris Brogan isn’t reinventing himself, and his project for 2012 Shhh! The Secret Show is certainly not a podcast.

So what is he doing?

Write something: Insightful #blogging

This item continues the section “Write something:”, which I hope will inspire you to write something for yourself using the keyword. The topic for today is: Insightful.

How do I write something insightful?

This can either be an insight I had, something I learned or a thread or conversation I have been following which made me think. In the first item I wrote about my habit to jot down notes in a notepad which I carry with me. An idea is always a work in progress so I take the notes I make I put in a mind mapper and free associate, this allows me to make connections that I may not have made initially. Sometimes I leave it for a while, although often I pour the idea into a blog item and leave it to mature.

Read more articles in this series…

Image source: Jerry Wong

Write something: To translate news for people #blogging

This item continues the section “Write something:”, which I hope will inspire you to write something for yourself using the keyword. The topic for today is: Translation.

How do I write a translation?

When I speak and read the language writing a translation looks and sounds easy, and it is when I am translating from a foreign language to one of the languages I speak as a native. However context is always important when translating something, perhaps I’ve been following a news item in a number of languages and have formed the context in my mind. That doesn’t mean that the reader of my blog post has this same context.

What I do to ensure this is to check which large news organizations have covered this, however shallow the coverage may have been, and reference these as well as the original sources in my post. You will often see the ^[1] citation block in my posts, and sometimes my emails, these are to clarify the source and add background to the story. This is specially important when writing a translation for which my audience may not have been able to form a context.

Another way to do this is by starting with an interesting news story from a large news organization and creating a context and a background that the organization may not have highlighted due to poor research on the part of the author or even a political slant that the news organization may have.

Finally there may be item in which I have an interest and which appear in a language I know poorly or don’t know at all, I can use an online translation tool and fill in the blanks with my knowledge and research.

When you decide to do translations of news stories on a regular basis it can be handy to use more professional translation tools to aid – computer aided translation – and to create a corpus for yourself – perhaps per subject – to help in the translation of these items.

Read more articles in this series…

Image source: Jerry Wong