• Background Tracking
• Conversation Tracking

One of the best social media monitoring tools  is Google Alerts. With Google Alerts, you can receive weekly, daily, or even “as it happens” alerts whenever your search term is mentioned on the web.

Don’t be afraid to enter multiple phrases that mention your brand; this can only yield more and diverse results. In addition to delivering relevant links to articles, blogs, video, etc., Google Alerts is also a great spring board for learning more about where your brand is being spoken about.

Probably the best feature of this service is that you don’t have to keep checking for the most recent mentions on search engines. Having the alerts delivered directly into your inbox allows you to keep tabs on where you might want to comment on a blog post or follow the development of a news story.

The major drawback about Google Alerts is that it doesn’t cover social media sites, such as facebook. To become a part of the “conversation,” you must use monitoring tools that focus on discussions, media (such as video, audio, photos, etc.), and just about anything else. If you are conducting a social media campaign, you absolutely must know if people are already talking about your brand. Sites like Twitter, Digg, and YouTube are the some of the many featured sites on Addict-o-matic, which is the site to find “the latest buzz on any topic.”

Addictomatic screenshot via flickr from Maestro Alberto's photostream

Other sites such as Daylife and Silobreaker are also great for processing recent quotes, graphs, trends, and lists of recent articles or blogs that mentions your topic.

Long gone are the days of missing what someone said about you behind your back. Utilizing effective monitoring tools will help you to truly be part of the conversation in every corner of the web.

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So I made my own VAT calculator in Google Spreadsheet. It’s really simple, yet useful, so I decided to share it with you. All you have to do is change the value in the Gross row, and the VAT row if relevant, and it will recalculate the Net amount automatically.

Here’s how it looks:

You can download the spreadsheet here.

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I quickly contacted as many people as I could about this blatant discrimination, including reporting this on a mailing list for journalists and writers. This happened last Thursday, Sept. 21, and by Friday morning all of the related web pages had been taken down, and were changed to include Israeli Jews.

But instead of blowing over, Tzvi Ben Gedalyahu reported on this on IsraelNationalNews.com, complete with pictures of the State Dept.’s shoddy attempt at correcting their online Word documents with Track Changes on for all to see! (And then with a virus inside. It just wasn’t their day.)
His article was subsequently picked up by prominent blogger Yid with Lid, and since then it has spread like wildfire throughout the political blogosphere. Here is a partial list of blogs that reported this story, and I will be updating it as I discover more:

• Yid with Lid: Miriam’s Story-UPDATE/US State Department “No Jews Allowed” Program
• Michelle Malkin: State Department subsidized No Israeli Jews Allowed program
• Debbie Schlussel: State Dept.: No Jews Allowed for Tax-Funded Biz Program for Arabs
• Mere Rhetoric: State Department Tries To Cleanse Obviously Illegal “No Jews Allowed” Application But Is Too Fucking Stupid To Turn Off Track Changes
• Atlas Shrugs: State Dept: No Jews Allowed
• Aliyah! Step-by-Step: U. of Cal program–no Jews allowed
• Right Truth: No Jews in State Department program, no Jewish bullets in Iraq, Afghanistan
• Solomonia: US State Department backing program that discriminates against Jewish Israeli entrepreneurs — Till they got caught
• The God Blog: No Jews allowed: Judenrein U.S. program
• The Jewish Week, by Michele Chabin: Federal Program Barred Israeli Jews For Three Years
• Yid with Lid:State Department Anti-Semitic Program: The Rest of the Story
• Israpundit: “No Jews Allowed” Application

Will any “traditional” news outlets pick this up and report on it? Only time will tell…although time seems to be indicating that they are either unaware, or disinterested.

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To ensure that the information on my computers was synchronized, I was constantly transferring my files back and forth between them over our wireless network. This was a time-consuming and annoying process, so now I just leave the files on my laptop and access them via the network from my desktop. This worked fine but I remained with one very annoying problem – Outlook. My Outlook is critical to my work flow, but transferring the information back and forth between two computers is painful. To make matters worse, I use Outlook with Business Contact Manager, an excellent free tool which uses its own separate database file, making it even more difficult to synchronize Outlook data between computers. Aaargh.

LogMeIn to the rescue! LogMeIn has a free version that is simple to use, and allows you to access any computer via the web. All you need is any web browser and an Internet connection, and you can use your remote computer as if you were sitting in front of it.

To sign up:

1. Go to LogMeIn and click on Create an account at the top of the screen.
2. Create your account. Make sure to select LogMeIn Free as your service of choice. Of course, you can choose to use one of their paid services which include additional features if you find them useful. To see a comparison of the different LogMeIn products, click here.
3. Once that is completed, you will be directed to download the LogMeIn software on to your computer. You only need to do this for PCs that you will want to access remotely. For example, if you have a desktop and laptop and you know you will want to access your desktop remotely via your laptop, only download the software to your desktop. If you have more than one computer that you want to access remotely, you can download the software to them too and choose which ones to access in each session.

To access your remote computer:

1. Go to LogMeIn and log in to your account.
2. Click on the computer that you want to access, and enter your computer access code that you defined during setup. A browser with three options appears.
3. Click on Go in the Remote Control section.

Your remote desktop now appears in the browser window. You can work there as if you were sitting in front of that computer.

Good, Bad or Ugly
LogMeIn is good. It does what it’s supposed to do, and does it well. In general, I find that there is very little delay when I am accessing a remote PC, meaning that if I click on a file, it opens almost as quickly as if I was sitting in front of the computer. It is easy to install and easy to use.

No bad. The service works well, and doesn’t make any excuses due to its being free.

Ugly? Nope. The interface is simple and clean, and you can easily toggle your view of your remote PC from full screen to actual size.

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While we all want our businesses to grow, this growth brings with it many more tasks and increases the difficulty of managing them. I recently found myself spending too much time trying to figure out what to do next, rather than actually doing. I felt like things were slipping out of control, and I needed to find a simple, effective and free way of managing my responsibilities.

I tested out a number of task-management tools, including Rainlendar, HipCal, and even wikis such as stikipad. All of these systems were lacking a major functionality that I needed – the ability to filter my tasks according to urgency, category or client. These systems would present all of my tasks together, sometimes with some form of categorization, but never enough.

And then I found Zoho Planner. Zoho Planner is a free (yay!) hosted system that allows you to create multiple pages on which you can enter your to-do’s, appointments, notes, and attachments. You can tag pages with certain keywords (like the del.icio.us and Technorati tagging systems), and Zoho Planner encourages collaboration with the page sharing feature, which allows you to invite people to view your pages. This is useful if you are working on a project with other people, and you need to manage a project task list together.

I created pages for each of my clients that had projects in progress, and added to do’s to each page.

You can define due dates if you want, and request a reminder when that due date is approaching. Now here’s where Zoho Planner rocks: once you’ve added all your to do’s, you can view all of them together under “All my to do’s.”

There you can see all your to do’s, both open and completed, and you can choose to view them according to their urgency: Overdue, Today, Today + Overdue, Tomorrow, Next 7 Days, All Open.

My personal favorite is Today + Overdue, so that I can see what I really need to do now!

Good, Bad or Ugly

Zoho Planner is good. It’s helped me get my business in order, and I refer to it throughout the day. It makes me happy when I can check-off a task, and I feel like things are under control.

I recently discovered the one bad thing about not only Zoho Planner, but all online services. One day I really needed to see my tasks, and Zoho Planner was having server problems, as was another online service I use. I felt pretty helpless, and realized that online services have their pluses, such as access from any computer with a browser, but have a major minus since everything depends on the Internet.

Ugly – not at all. Zoho’s planners designed a user-friendly, attractive interface that adds to the pleasure of using it.

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Weebly is a free service that allows users to create a pretty decent looking site quickly and easily. The site can either be hosted with Weebly under a weebly subdomain (i.e. example.weebly.com), or you can download your completed site as a zip, giving you greater flexibility in terms of appearance and hosting.

Once you have registered with Weebly and chosen your subdomain, you can get to work. First, choose a theme for your site. This will determine the overall look and feel of your site. Weebly provides a range of attractive designs for your use. Some of the themes are customizable to a certain extent, and you may be able to upload your own header image to use in place of the image in the Weebly theme.

You can create as many pages for your site as you like, and Weebly provides ready-made components for you to add to your site. You can add titles, paragraphs, two columns of text, pictures, photos, videos, feeds and more.

See my example Weebly site to see a Weebly site in action.

To sum up – Good, Bad, or Ugly?

Weebly is Good. It is a great tool for quickly and easily creating an online presence. Weebly provides a large amount of flexibility, and the downloadable zip file means that with some basic web design skills, you can customize even further and host your site on your own domain name.

But there is also some Bad. Weebly doesn’t seem to do so well with Hebrew. While their blog claims that Weebly supports international characters including Hebrew, my quick attempt at adding Hebrew resulted in a lot of gibberish characters appearing on the site. Maybe someone else will have better luck on that front.

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