Tag Archives: sharing

Yesterday, a new feature appeared in my Kindle account. Any notes or highlights I make in a book are now available online at http://kindle.amazon.com.

This is good, because it gives me a nice overview of what I’m doing in any particular book.

However, I can’t [yet?] share this information with friends. I’d love to be able to share my notes or highlighted portions. I wonder if it crosses into copyright issues. Amazon does have a habit of playing it safe.

As far as I can tell, these notes aren’t searchable from within my Kindle account either. If I’m looking for something in particular and I have a lot of notes to sift through, I need to search using the reliable old CTRL+F on my keyboard with Firefox.

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Contact Michelle with news, stories, events, and more.
Email: michelle[at]writetech[dot]net
Twitter: @writetechnology, Friendfeed: michellel
Sites: Write Technology, Wine-Girl.net

by Michelle Lentz

Here in Cincinnati we’ve still got at least one start-up that’s going full-steam ahead, with multiple offices and new features. It’s rather encouraging, to tell you the truth. Today, ShareThis announced the beta launch of a new widget. (When did widget come to mean more than a vague example in business class?  I digress.)

You can find a live version of the new widget on sites such as FoxNews.com, AccessHollywood.com, SparkPeople.com (also Cincinnati, by the way), and Boston.com, and it will be rolled out to everyone else who uses it – over 80,000 sites – in the next few weeks.

So, what’s new? Well, the new widget features the following:

• The abillity to share to their Sharebox (located on the ShareThis site) directly through the widget.
• Access to a contact manager, with (of course) the ability to import from all the big webmail sites. The widget also remembers the last three email addresses to which you shared, making sharing faster.
• The widget is prettier now, and easier to use. Tabs are completely gone and a more ribbon-y effect is used. I saw this demo’d back in the fall, and it really is a great improvement.

According to Tim Schigel, CEO, “More than ever before, people are relying on their personal networks to exchange information that is of interest to them and this new widget will help shape the next generation of sharing.”

The launch of the new widget follows the recent unveiling of ShareThis’s revamped web site that includes extensive instructional content on how to optimize ShareThis, whether you’re a publisher or a user.

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Contact Michelle with news, stories, events, and more.
Email: michelle[at]writetech[dot]net, Twitter: @writetechnology, Friendfeed: michellel, Blogs: Write Technology, Wine-Girl.net

Nominee for City Beat’s Best of the City: Vote for My Wine Education under Public Eye > Blog:
http://www.bestofcincinnati.com/

by Michelle Lentz

My personal blog pretty much lies dormant. With so many other blogs to write for, I’m often at my wit’s end. What on earth is left to write about on this last little blog? Plinky has arrived to put an end to that.

Plinky is a microblogging service that intends to put an end to blogger writer’s block. Plinky offers a series of prompts – questions – that you can answer. So far I’ve answered the equivalent of  “What was your first job?” and “What do you wear when you get home from work?”

When you answer the question, you have the option to expand upon your thoughts and even add an introduction. After you publish to Plinky, you can still come back and edit your answer.

Like any good social network, you can follow others and people can follow you. On Plinky, interacting with others is sort of like a virtual brainstorming session, helping you to piggyback and learn from the ideas of your friends.

When you’ve written your short Plink, you can publish it to Twitter, Facebook, or your blog.

Founder Jason Shellen told VentureBeat that he started Plinky to help fight blogger’s block. “After years of blogging, it turns out I’m that person.”

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Contact Michelle with news, stories, events, and more.
Email: michelle[at]writetech[dot]net
Twitter: @writetechnology
Friendfeed: michellel
Blogs: Write Technology, Wine-Girl.net

by Brian Solis

TwitThis is a potentially powerful and game-changing service, assuming it gets significant traction.

If you’ve ever visited a site or blog and have seen or used any number of integrated services that allow you to “share this” or “email this,” TwitThis is similar in concept. Essentially, it grabs the url of the page you’re on, compacts it into a TinyURL, and then allows you to add some thoughts to directly post to Twitter from the page you’re visiting.

For content hosts and publishers, you simply need to embed (copy and paste) a small bit of code into your template to offer the “TwitThis” icon and functionality into each post or page.

The service is also available as a browser bookmarklet allowing you to drag the “TwitThis”

Try it…click – TwitThis – and drag it up to your toolbar and start sharing your favorite things on the web with your friends on Twitter without having to leave the page.

For more Twitter tools and services, please visit the Twitter Manifesto on PR 2.0.

UPDATE: Also check out Shareaholic, a browser plug-in that allows you to share, bookmark and e-mail web pages quickly without leaving your browser, using a variety of popular social services.

UPDATE 2: Make sure to evaluate TwitThat, a similar service to TwitThis, but it also provides an aggregated stream to see what other people are sharing on Twitter.

UPDATE 3: If you already use ShareThis as a publisher, which I do, you can also submit any of these services as an option, if it’s not there already.

Connect with me on:
Twitter, FriendFeed, LinkedIn, Tumblr, Pownce, Plaxo, Plurk, Identi.ca, BackType, Jaiku or Facebook

by Michelle Lentz

I teach a class on blogging where I make it clear that in the beginning, you’re often “talking to yourself.” As time goes by, that feeling doesn’t always go away. It takes time, and nurturing, to build a community. Tokoni is offering a quicker way to do that without the “alone-ness” of blogging, or the commitment.

Tokoni is a social media community that provides a platform for people to share personal stories. Tokoni, founded by a husband and wife tech team of eBay and Skype executives, actually went live in November 2007. Since then, it has been quietly building a community. Today, the site relaunched with several new site and community features. The new tools emphasize the power of shared storytelling to entertain, inform, influence and inspire others. There are currently 19 categories and users can enhance their stories with multimedia such as photos and videos.

According to Alex Kazim, co-founder and CEO of Tokoni, “We created Tokoni to fill the distinct need for an online community where individual stories of life’s experiences have a voice and are valued, and where the collective wisdom of the community is celebrated. The growth of social media has enabled people to control how they create, consume and share content and personal experiences online; however, participation in the social Web is still daunting to the mainstream. Tokoni makes sharing your own story easy.”

So, if you just want to be a bit community driven, or you have something to share but don’t want to commit to a blog, then Tokoni might be for you.

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Contact Michelle with your news, apps, and events via email, Twitter, Pownce, or FriendFeed. Visit Michelle at Wine-Girl.net and Write Technology. You can also catch Michelle presenting on Twitter at the upcoming DevLearn ’08 in San Jose.