Categories
Delicious

links for 2010-12-06

  • In this tutorial, I will start and finish a logo while documenting the entire process. I encourage you to open up photoshop and follow every step, it will help you learn a lot more than just reading it.
  • This is the time of year that many of us are thinking about what we didn’t do in 2010 and what we should do for 2011. Even professional online marketers have a long ‘to do’ list of things to improve their online marketing performance – made up of tasks to specifically improve ROI or something to save time and improve efficiency. For those of you that are doing your own online marketing, this sort of tasks may be way down on your list, way below items more specifically related to your business. These are the types of tasks that may not be ‘sexy’ and fun, which is why they are easily ‘put on the long finger’ (as they say in Ireland), but are critical to bring the best results from your online marketing activities.
  • I hope you had a blast fine-tuning your blog with testimonials last week. It’s really encouraging to hear that some are trying out the methods, can’t wait to receive more feedbacks on that! In the mean time, I will be sharing few more practical ways to display testimonials (and portfolio) on your LinkedIn and Facebook Page! Now there are definitely limitations comparing to working on a self-hosted blog because application is the main key. Not the best of plans but hopefully you can be inspired by this post and work out creative ways to promote your brand:
  • Today is the first page in a new chapter of our mission to improve access to the cultural and educational treasures we know as books. Google eBooks will be available in the U.S. from a new Google eBookstore. You can browse and search through the largest ebooks collection in the world with more than three million titles including hundreds of thousands for sale. Find the latest bestsellers like James Patterson’s Cross Fire and Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom, dig into popular reads like Laura Hillenbrand’s Unbroken and catch up on the classics like Great Expectations, A Tale of Two Cities and Gulliver’s Travels.
  • Search operators in Google help you refine and improve search results. For instance, a query like “Taj Mahal AND Hotel” will search for pages related to the Hotel Taj and not the Mughal monument. Similarly, “kindle -site:amazon.com” will find all Kindle related resources outside the Amazon website. This Google cheat sheet [PDF] has a nice overview of all the popular search operators that are supported in Google. Other than this “official” list, Google also supports an undocumented search operator called AROUND(n) that will help you find documents where the distance between two search terms is around ‘n.’
  • Looking for an alternative to the Windows native Windows Media Player? If yes, then look no further; fortunately for you we have gathered a list of 7 great audio players for people running Windows computers. Find the players detailed below and check out which one will suit you best.
  • Google today unveiled its long-rumored entry into the e-book sales world, not called Google Editions, as was previously speculated, but a more anonymous-sounding Google eBooks. The basic idea is to provide an entirely web-based e-book platform accessible from any device with a browser. The business model they’ve opted for is slightly less centralized than the competition, but not quite the distributed seller network I envisioned last week. My wool-gathering regarding the decentralization of the e-book store model are all in that post, so we’ll just focus on the particulars of eBooks service for now. One quick note: I’m going to continue to use the term “e-book,” though the service has opted to drop the hyphen. Like so many new tech-related phrases, the word and its relatives have yet to settle into a single standardized form.
  • Google eBooks is all about choice, so you can use just about any device you own to read any book, anywhere.
  • Google's thrown open the doors to an online bookstore stocked with over 3 million titles, which you can store and read in the cloud as if they were Gmail messages. Google's also offering free reading apps for Android and iOS devices. Beyond Android and iOS, Google's eBookstore supports Nook, Sony readers, and other devices, as well as offering straight-up access through the web. Other retailers, like Powell's, will offer Google's eBookstore offerings for sale, and Google claims it will offer "unlimited storage" of your purchases, with your page progress synced across everything. Google's made an effort to offer up lots of modern, popular books at reasonable price, but there are also a lot of free books in the collection, culled from Google's scanning of more than 15 million items in library archives. A video demonstration of Google's new Books and eBookstore is available, but it's neither playing nor embeddable for us—we'll update soon.
  • ]]>

    Categories
    Delicious

    links for 2010-07-27

  • Color is a major part of any brand's identity. Here we're taking a look at some of the most recognizable color identities in the world, as well as some groups and forums on COLOURlovers that could be valuable for anyone who is working to give their brand a little more color.
  • A comprehensive WordPress installation, albeit simple to produce, often requires multiple steps — many of which can easily be omitted accidentally. How many times have you forgotten to customize your permalink structure? How about adding in a sitemap plugin? What about changing your timezone? If you’ve installed WordPress more than once, chances are you’ve missed something. Take the following steps and you’ll never miss anything again.
  • ]]>