Give your PrivatePhone to strangers!!!

You get asked for your phone number all the time, but do you really want to give out your home or cell phone number to just anyone?

Now you have an alternative — give them your FREE, LOCAL "PrivatePhone" number,

and keep your primary numbers for your closest friends & family.

You can:

• Give it out instead of your personal numbers


• Check your voicemail online


• Have voicemail forwarded to your email


• Protect your privacy


• Keep unwanted callers away

The new service could come in handy when:

• Meeting new friends and acquaintances


• Job hunting


• Running a home business


• Socializing online


• Buying or selling merchandise

Each call goes right to voicemail that you can access online, anytime. You can also setup your preferences to have an alert sent to an email address whenever you receive a new  voicemail message, and attach the voicemail, as audio file, to the alert.

The signup process was very easy. Within 5 minutes I had my new number assigned to me. All I had to do next was set up my new PIN and record my personal voicemail greeting.

If you liked this post, and think others could benefit from it, please digg it.

Tags: privatephone, voicemail

Blogging Platform & Tools, Part 4: Stats

Stats are metrics about your blog. By adding a small piece of "Script" to your blog you can answer  the 4 Ws:

• Who are my visitors?


• Where do they come from?


• When do they come?


• What do they like to do?

More advanced features includes data about comments made, Adsense clicks, outgoing links, and much more.

I've decided to try out Performancing Metrics. I liked their blogging tool extension for firefox, so I thought I'd give them a try.

My basic setup is now ready. The blog is up. I have the tools to write and I can "see" my visitors. There are many more things one could do to improve but at this point, the most important thing is ==> content.

So let's hope you like it..

Tags: performancing, metrics, firefox, blogging, blog, blogs

Tagging Your Posts With Tags

What is it?

Think of a tag as a simple category name. People can categorize their posts, photos, and links with any tag that makes sense. Technorati was the first to make "tagging" an indispensible part of effective blogging. 

Tags are often used in social software and Web 2.0 pages.

You can see that I try to make sure that I tag every post with all the rerlevant tags. To make sure that you've included all the relevant tags you can use Tagyu.

You can also include a Tag Cloud in you blog. Tag clouds are "...cool, informative, appealing representations about what's happening in your blog, or anywhere else...".

ZoomCloud is a tool that lets you put in a matter of minutes a tag cloud in your site.

Tags: zoomcloud, tagu, tag, tags, tagging

Blogging 101

I was just getting my notes ready so that I can post about the "blog editor", when I came across this interesting and handy primer on blogging.

Let me know if you find it useful.

Tags: blogs, software, blog editor, Qumana, primer, blog, blogging, guide, beginner, 101

Blogging Platform & Tools, Part 3: Blog Editor

Since I've chosen the quickest and cheapest route to blogging, aka blogger.com, it is no surprise that I need some extra tools to facilitate my work.

For example, I don't like working with their WYSIWYG editor. It is very limited, and you have to stay connected in order to write your posts.

That's where tools like Qumana (which I'm using to write this post) come in handy.

Some of the key features are:

• DropPad - gather links, text, and pictures by dragging them to a resizeable desktop pad


• Create media-rich posts of images and text together


• WYSIWYG editor


• Edit old posts from any of your blogs


• Offline editing to work at your own pace


• One-click posting to one or more blogs


• Technorati tagging - one click insertion of tags, with editing option


• Multi-window editing


• Seamless publishing and cross-publishing


• Integration with all major blog platforms


• Easy image uploading


• Built in image resizer for large images


• Simple image alignment


• Spell check and Thesaurus


• Save as HTML or RTF for offline editing

Next: Stats - Answering the 4 Ws: Who, When, Where & What

Tags: qumana, blog editor, blog, blogging

Blogging Platform & Tools, Part 2: Syndication

I just realized that I actually had to go through quite a lot of steps just to get to this point of having written a few posts.

OK, once I've chosen blogger, I had to setup an RSS feed.

What for?

For the Reader: Subscribing to feeds makes it possible to review a large amount of online content in a very short time.

For the Blogger (i.e. me): Feeds permit instant distribution of content and the ability to make it "subscribable."

For more information click here.

 I decided to go with Feedburner. They are extremely easy to use, very feature rich and FREE.

Michael Arrington over at Techcrunch even named them as one of the "...Companies I Couldn't Live Without...".

So I've quickly setup an account, added my blog's address and 5 minutes later my blog had a "Subscribe to Feed" and "Subscribe by Email" features.

Next: a Blog Editor

Tags: syndication, feedburner, techcrunch, arrington, rss

Blogging Platform & Tools, Part 1

Naturally, one of the first things I had to do was to decide on a blogging platform.

There are a lot of options out there, ranging from quick and cheap to professional grade.

The first thing you need to decide on is whether your going to have your blog on your own domain (i.e. www.bybizman.com) or as I did, host it on someone else's servers (i.e. bybizman.blogspot.com).

www.bybizman.com would have looked more professional, but would have meant a much bigger investment of time and money. Since I wanted to get going, and since this IS about "doing more with less" -- I decided to go with a hosted solution.

The ones I considered were Blogger and WordPress.

Now, I have always, liked WordPress blogs. I found the templates and the fonts to be very pleasing and easy on the eyes. Also, technically speaking, WordPress is a much more powerful and flexible solution. I highly recommend it.

However, more power and more flexibility also mean more time needed to customize. Once again, I chose the quicker, out-of-the-box solution --> Blogger.

I hope you'll think I did the right thing.

Next: Syndication

Tags: blogger, WordPress, hosting

To Catch a Predator

This blog is about celebrating the great opportunities that the Internet brings.

I was just reminded of the great dangers that come with it.

Dateline NBC was showing - "To Catch a Predator": Men arrive at Dateline's undercover houses to meet teens they have targeted online.

It gave me the chills. We, the parents, must be aware and on the lookout. There are a lot of tools that can help protect our kids (and maybe I'll cover them in the future), but it all starts with awareness and communication, which we can all do.

I do want to mention "Perverted-Justice"- a watchdog group that regularly catches online predators by posing as kids online. They worked with Dateline on this project. Their web site is full of useful information and guides. I encourage you to visit and if you're feeling generous - they take donations.

It also seemed to me that the people they caught on tape weren't too bright. It scares me to think about the smart bad guys...

Tags: security, kids, online, predators

How This Whole Thing Started

Last year I read this great post by Joe Kraus on his blog Bnoopy, titled "It's a great time to be an entrepreneur".

First of all it's a very interesting read. Joe is an interesting story teller with lots of hands on experience. He talks about how "...There's never been a better time to be an entrepreneur because it's never been cheaper to be one...".

I think it was then that I decided to seriously start "collecting" the tools and services that make this new reality.

Tags: power user, online tools, entrepreneur