Web Secret #61: iRestAssured

Have you ever been on bed rest during pregnancy? Or know someone who is? It's a hell of boredom, anxiety, boredom, and more anxiety.

So when my colleague, psychologist Dr. Mike Klaybor, told me he was harnessing new media to help pregnant women on bed rest, I had to check it out.

Mike and his wife and associate Dr. Gayle Klaybor use Skype, blogging and Twitter to provide a supportive environment and psychological counseling.

Skype and iRestAssured: Mike explains it best:

"Nine months can seem like an impossibly long time when you're dealing with the stress of a high-risk pregnancy. We are here to help to help you cope.

We can work with you remotely if you have a computer, broadband (high speed connection) and webcam. Just download Skype (Skype.com) and we can meet online in your home. With experience working with stress, anxiety, depression, and relationships, we can help build your coping skills as you deal with the difficulties of high risk pregnancy and bed-rest."

iRestAssured blog: The blog features weekly posts containing tips, information, and helpful recommendations for weathering a high risk pregnancy.

iRestAssured Twitter: The newest component to iRestAssured allows high risk pregnant mothers to share whatever they're doing with their new support network!

iRestAssured - brilliant!

Web Secret #60: Back It Up!

I am 99% sure you don't back up all of your files (ie all those documents, photos, videos, files and folders that are on your computer as we speak.)

Those who can't do, teach. I fess up to not being fully backed up myself. BORING. But seriously you need to do it, because if your machine crashes, you will be very, very upset. And stats show that 43% of people lose irreplaceable files every year.

So do one of the following:

1. Buy a Corsair Survivor Flash Drive and use it!

2. Use DropBox!

or

3. Check out my latest find Carbonite. What's cool about Carbonite? It installs a small application on your computer that works quietly in the background looking for new and changed files that need backing up. It looks and feels like it's part of your computer, and is integrated with your operating system (mac or pc)- there's no new interface for you to learn.

Of course, you can try it FOR FREE for 15 days. If you become a convert, it costs $54.95 a year - but here's another cool thing - there are no limits on backup storage capacity. Carbonite will back up all the supported files on your internal hard drive whether you have 1GB of documents (like me), or 10GB of music files (like my daughter who is personally floating iTunes.) And you can access your backed up stuff online, from any computer.

Wasn't Han Solo frozen in carbonite in Star Wars?

Web Secret #59: Meetup

Sure online communities are great. But sometimes, it's nice to have real human to human contact. When you want to meet with like minded people in the flesh, you need Meetup.com.

What's great about Meetup.com, is that it serves two different purposes. First, you can use it to find a group in your area. To try this out, I entered "new technology" and my zip code in the Meetup search window. In a matter of seconds, I had a list of over 200 new technology related groups that meet in the New York City area.

For example, I found The New York Dot Com Hatchery. Meetup informed me that this is a 1,000+ member group that is located 19.1 miles from my home. The group defines itself as a "unique funnel for innovators to interact with a wide range of investors, present their plans, receive expert feedback, bring in strong leadership, and pave the way for them to receive angel and institutional funding". I can join the group for free, and attend their next monthly meeting.

Meetup's second purpose is to enable you to easily create a group and get the word out about it. My friend Juliette is a Washington DC area macrobiotic chef and cooking instructor who decided to start DC Area Macrobiotics. She just started it, so it's still very small, but she considers it an interesting adjunct to Healthy Living, her "day job." In time she hopes to drive members from Healthy Living to DC Area Macrobiotics and vice versa.

Meetup's motto is Do something • Learn something • Share something • Change something. I like it.

Web Secret #58: User Name Check

When I present my workshops on social media marketing, I always urge attendees to secure their Twitter username ASAP, even if they are not sure whether they will ultimately tweet.

Twitter usernames must be 15 characters or less, and many desirable names are still available. You can sit on your acquired name for 6 months, without posting a single tweet. (After that your unused name gets sucked back into the Twitter username pool and released to the general public after an additional 6 month's time in no man's land.)

But what if you are launching a comprehensive social media marketing campaign? You might want to check if the same name is available on Blogger, Twitter and Linkedin before you even get started. Now there is a quick and easy way to check username availability simultaneously, in a matter of seconds, on a super useful website with the catchy name UserNameCheck.com.

The User Name Check website is very spare. There is a search window, followed by a massive list - 4 columns of dozens upon dozens of social media and other websites, from flickr, to livejournal, to posterous, and much, much, more. All you do is enter your desired name in the search window, and click "check". Then sit back and watch as one after the other, in a matter of seconds, you find out if your username is available or unavailable on that specific site.

Even better, if, for example, your Twitter name is listed as "available", you can click on "available", and you are taken directly to the Twitter website where you can sign up on the spot.

One stop user name shopping.

Web Secret #57: TinyChat

Today I was stuck for blogging inspiration so I start clicking the Stumble button on my toolbar. Three clicks later, I stumbled upon a not untypical blogpost: 26 New And Awesome Web Apps You Probably Don’t Know About. Usually my response to this type of blogpost is "if I don't know about them, I don't need them."

Well there's a first time for everything, and the first app listed was TinyChat - and I fell in love - immediately.

TinyChat allows you to create your own chatroom and invite people through one simple link. You can upload documents into your personal chatroom and share them with your TinyChat guests. You can also embed your chatroom on your blog, your Facebook, or other sites. You can even invite people to join you through email and Twitter. Chat can be via text or video.

It's completely private and only those who know the link can enter your video chat room. The app won't save the video conversation unless you decide to save it for future access. The app can handle up to 12 people per video chat room.

The possibilities are endless...

• Have a therapy session
  
• Host a webinar
  
• Hold a meeting

So simple, so quick, your 5 year old could use it.

And then when your finished, you close it up - POOF!

Love it.

Web Secret #56: Hushmail

Recently, DeeAnna Nagel mentioned Hushmail.com during Ethical Implications Online: Working and Socializing in Cyberspace, a free webinar previewing an all day presentation on the same subject, to be held October 20th at the 2009 World EAP Conference.

I perked up because DeeAnna is one of the world's experts on issues related to delivering online counseling. Anyway, she was talking about the importance of encrypted e-mail to maintain confidentiality, and until that moment, I thought you only needed encrypted mail if you worked for the CIA, or your name was Obama, or you lived inside "The Matrix".

But I soon learned that according to the people at Hush, a typical clear text e-mail message is no more secure than a holiday postcard sent through the public postal system. Actually less - it seems any number of people can hijack your e-mail account.

Hushmail, the virtual Alcatraz of e-mail, is a Web-based service that lets you send and receive email in security. Hushmail messages, and their attachments, are encrypted using Open PGP standard algorithms. (Whatever that means.) These algorithms, combined with Hushmail's unique key management system, offer users powerful email security.

Hushmail's encryption works automatically, requiring no specialized computer skills or knowledge (whew!). Encrypting a message is as simple as clicking a mouse. And it's FREE!

Need to keep secrets? Need Hushmail.

Web Secret #55: Alltop

There are a number of milestones every social media fanatic aspires to:

* Having a 1,000 followers on Twitter
* Getting sent free stuff to blog about
* Making enough money on AdSense to actually get a check
* Getting paid to present your social media expertise

and...drum roll please...

* Getting your blog on Alltop®

Alltop collects and displays all the top stories on the web, aggregated on subject-category pages, and it’s fast growing into a digital magazine rack that includes all topics. Aggregation without the aggravation, for people who don’t read blogs in an RSS feed reader, but want to browse popular topics of interest on easy-to-read pages where the best of the best are available all the time.

Alltop aggregates RSS feeds from key blogs around the web. It categorizes them by topic and each topic gets its own page. There are around 30 topics varying from Design to Celebrities and Gaming to Mac. My blog is listed under "Blogging." Guy Kawasaki chooses which blogs to publish as well as the ordering of the blogs. There's basically no user input involved in the hierarchy and choices of the blogs.

What's great about Alltop? (Thank you Shiv Singh.)

1. It points me to some useful blogs. While I know which are the important blogs in my primary areas of interest like Social Media, I don't know which blogs to scan in other areas. In that sense, Alltop serves as a starting point especially if I am doing some research.

2. It's clean, uncluttered and kind on the eyes.

3. Less is more. I know exactly what to expect from Alltop and every page meets those expectations. There aren't any surprises - nor do I need to watch a video to understand what's going on. There isn't anything complex about this.

4. When you place your cursor over a headline, you get to see the first paragraph or so of the story. This allows you to decide whether it's worth actually clicking on that specific link.

No time for modesty. Alltop - I kick ass.