Some of my favorite stories/found resources from the week.

- This week CNN money had an informative article “Why all Smart Phones are $199” that set out to demystify what appears to be a consensus price for smart phones. In short? It is the lowest price they believe they can get most consumers to pay while still making a profit on the sale of the phone. Simple yes, but how it all comes together is still somewhat interesting.

- If you have a Facebook Fan Page, A Beginners Guide to Facebook Insights is a must read!

- Twitter now has 145 Million registered users! Still much smaller than Facebook but a growing force to be reckoned with

- One of the best sources of information on different countries is the CIA World Factbook which now comes with a very cool dashboard to display all of that data. Fun to play around with but also heavy on good data and best of all, free.

- The 6th version of Google’s web browser Chrome has been released

Add-ons are small programs that allow you to add functionality and features to the popular open-source Web browser Firefox. There are hundreds more available on Firefox’s add-on page that cover everything from managing social media accounts to changing the look of the browser itself. The following are my five favorite that have become a useful part of my work-flow so I thought I would share.

ColorZilla

Have you ever been to a Web site and seen a color you loved and wanted to know what it was? Colorzilla adds a tiny eyedropper to the browser. Click on it, then hover over the color you like and click. Colorzilla gives you all the information you need to add that color any creation.

Screengrab

Easily one of the most useful plugins. If you ever need to take a screengrab of an entire Web page this add-on lets you do it.

FireFTP

Need a well featured FTP client but don’t want to leave your Web browser? FireFTP allows you to connect to servers and transfer files without ever leaving firefox.

Downthemall

This add-on is a different kind of download manager, giving you the ability to easily grab and store the content off a page. This is a very handy tool if you are looking to grab a lot of images off of a page or download multiple pages of content from a Web site.

Webdeveloper

If you do any Website development this is a must have. The add-on gives you the ability to inspect the many different parts of a page including its structure, CSS, cookies, images and forms. You can easily turn off features of a site to see what happens, validate its code, resize the window to see how the site scales and do much, much more.

In our office it was new addition, intern Katie Shill, who first noted talk of an Earthquake being felt around Rochester, New York. No one in our office felt it, perhaps a testament to the solid foundation of our old city building, but she found plenty of chatter on Twitter, where local reporter and social media maven Rachel Barnhart was ahead of the curve in reporting what was going on.

“I think we just had an Earthquake,” Katie said “people are talking about it all over Twitter.” I immediately loaded up Tweetdeck, skimmed my collection of #ROC Tweeters and then added a new column, “Earthquake”. Within seconds I had a flood of Twitter users reporting what they were experiencing. Without knowing where the epicenter was in those moments, I could approximate. First I saw Toronto, then Rochester, Buffalo, then Central New York, then large chunks of Ontario Canada. Somewhere near Toronto seemed likely but as more tweets came in they suggested all of Ontario was feeling tremors. I figured  a little more to the East was the likely candidate for the epicenter. Then it was confirmed by the USGS, 5.5 magnitude north of Quebec.

I have blogged previously about mapping “trends” on Twitter and how location information attached to data might enhance our lives and understanding of the world. Putting the two together is an online application, Trendsmap and if you looked around the same time I did on Wednesday, this is what you saw.

Trendsmap watches what people are talking about and matches the  data to the location of Tweeters who are using devices with location data turned on. While this is a small number of overall Twitter users at present, the site still gives an amazing live insight into what is happening in a given area. Major sporting, news and weather events turn up as they happen. Elections, political scandal, government revolutions, coups and Wars appear too.

As the number of people posting data with location information increases, so will the accuracy of Trendsmap and services like it, giving us all a live picture of what is important to people at any given moment or over time around the world.

In these blog posts I usually mention tools for productivity, sites and organizations that do good work and sometimes I offer a glimpse into the latest social media developments. Today, I want to talk about one of my favorite things, zombie killing!

Not much of a gamer, I decided to download the game Plants Vs. Zombies on my iPhone as a way to keep occupied while riding on my exercise bike. Four days later and I still cannot stop playing!

The idea is simple. Zombies have taken over your town and they want to get in your home, a likely and all too common predicament. Your defense? A slew of plants and a green thumb! You strategically plant and watch as hordes of the undead do everything they can to fight back.

Plants vs. Zombies is fast paced and loaded with humor. Best of all, proper zombie killing takes strategic thinking and a lot of attention, so the time on the exercise bike vanishes. The downfall? So does all the time I play when I am not on the exercise bike

You can play a FREE but limited version of  Plants vs Zombies on the Web. The full version is available on the PC, Mac and on the iPad and iPhone from game developer PopCap. If for some reason Zombie Killing is not your thing I recommend a similar game also availabe for the iPhone Sallys Salon where you manage a salon, hiring staff, attending to customer needs and doing all the thing.

Quick Hits

• Google adds similar page suggestion to Search Results
• Facebook gets suggested Pages list
• Toy Story 3 builds online buzz with 1980′s style toy commercials
• iTunes accounts for 1/4 of all US music sales
• 4 ways one non-profit uses location to raise awareness

When I first started using Twitter it was unimaginable to me that anyone could follow a thousand or more people. Today I follow some 6,000 users and have over 7,000 following me. Best of all, I have formed great friendships with a very large chunk of them.

So how do I keep it all straight? I use several applications and Web sites to help organize.

TweetDeck

A robust and widely used app TweetDeck is also one of the most annoying things a person can use out of the box. It runs on Adobe Air making it available on the PC, Mac & Linux. The annoying part is that TweetDeck goes out of its way to get your attention, making noises, popping up messages and jumping out at you as much as possible. Do yourself a favor, after install go to Preferences and turn those things off.

The great thing i

s that TweetDeck allows you to organize your tweetstream into columns, where only the messages you want show up. You can have a column just for @replies, Direct Messages, one for the entire stream and columns that just show the tweets from users you group into lists.

Other things you can do? TweetDeck integrates with Facebook, MySpace and LinkedIn so you can send one message to multiple places and keep an eye on all of your contacts and connections. TweetDeck also connects into bit.ly the popular url shortener. So if you have a bit.ly account every url you shorten within TweetDeck will automatically be recorded, giving you access to statistics on everything you share.

Too complex for your tastes? Try Echofon

Tweetie 2

Tweetie 2 is my favorite iPhone app, period. Tweetie gives you the ability to access and organize your lists in a way that begins to make perfect sense and is intuitive to navigate. The application looks great and I have rarily experienced a fail (Though it did fail on me while writing this, of course!)

With that said, there are two things I wish Tweetie 2 would change immediately:

1) I wish it would integrate with bit.ly instead of the other url shortening services.

2) Tweetie does not handle RT’s the way users do. Instead of hitting a RT button and having it appear as RT @tippingptmedia the program reposts the tweet with a / via @tippingptmedia instead. Every time I retweet I copy and paste off the last part and have to delete the /via. It is a major pain.

Other than that I cannot recommend the program enough!

Hootsuite

Last but not least is a program that combines all of the great features of TweetDeck with a Web interface so you don’t have to download a program, you can just login from the Web. There is not much to say that hasn’t already been covered, Hootsuite has columns and can connect with different services. The one key addition is the ability to schedule status updates. So if you run multiple accounts or want to say something specific but won’t be around to say it live, you can just schedule it.

We have been using Hootsuite more around the office and recommending it to people because of its portability and ease of use.

Have you ever had something on your computer screen that you wanted to share? Maybe in a PowerPoint presentation, on a Web page or by E-mail? Regardless of how you use them, screen captures can be VERY useful.

Out of the Box

Anyone can capture an image of their screen with little effort.

Windows

If you are using a Windows machine hit the “Prt Scr” key on your keyboard… exciting isn’t it?

OK it probably doesn’t seem like anything happened.

Click on START > Programs > Accessories & open Paint

Now right click and select “Paste”

You now have a screen capture!

For more fun hold down the “Alt” key then hit the print screen. This will limit the screen grab to only the area of the active program you are using.

Mac

Mac’s have an even cooler way to screen capture. If you are using OSX, hold down the Command/Apple key, the Shift key and then hit the 3 key. Just like on a PC the entire desktop will be captured. Unlike Windows the image appears on your desktop in a .png file you can then share or edit elsewhere.

The Mac has another option. Hit the Command/Apple key, the Shift key and then hit the 4 key. A “crosshair” icon will replace your mouse cursor. You can now click and drag to create a box. Whatever part of the screen you put into that box will be captured when you release the mouse button. Just like before a new file will appear on the desktop.

Note: You can change the place the images are stored and their default file format too. So if you want a jpeg and not a png, no problem. You do need to use the Terminal, so if you don’t know what that is you might not want to do it. Check out this link for more.

Doing More

Skitch

Hands down the best free screen capture application I have used is Skitch. Not only is Skitch a program it is also a free service that allows you to store and share your screen captures on the Web. The downside is that Skitch is Mac only, sorry Windows users.

Once you’ve downloaded Skitch you can easily access it by holding down the Command/Apple Key, holding down the Shift key and hitting the 5 key. You now can select the area of the screen you want to grab just like you normally would on the Mac. You can even hit the Shift key and receive a countdown timer to the moment when the program actually grabs the screen.

The real power comes once you have finished the screen grab. The Skitch application appears and from there you can add arrows, text and draw shapes, then send your image to a wide variety of places. Skitch lets you even connect to bluetooth devices and attach to email. The ability to share is built right in! Want to go one step further? Skitch lets you take screen grabs of Skitch!

Cropper

On the PC side is a free program called Cropper. The program installs an icon in the system tray. Whenever you want to capture the screen you double click the icon and a box appears. You can resize this box however you like. Right clicking in the box will give you options including the ability to automatically create a thumbnail you specify to go with the image you save. Once the box is hovering over the part of the screen you want to capture you simply right click and tell it what format you want. You can save as BMP, JPEG, PNG or send to the Clipboard for use in other programs or directly to your Printer.

Cropper is not as intuitive or slick as Skitch but it gets the job done.

As mentioned both applications are free and easy to use!

Today marks what would have been the 201st birthday of President Abraham Lincoln. A lover of everything presidential history, I thought I would share some of the things you can find online related to the 16th President.

The Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library located in Springfield Illinois can be found on the Web, on Facebook, on Twitter, and YouTube. The library features many high-tech attractions including a holographic Lincoln!

The Lincoln Institute runs a number of informative sites including, Mr. Lincoln’s White House and Mr. Lincoln and New York.

You can read selected Lincoln speeches and writings or for those more daring the collected works of Lincoln.

There is a long list of Lincoln-related news and events throughout the year and of course, who doesn’t love Lincoln’s role in Disney’s Hall of Presidents?

In honor of the day my personal recommended reading is Lincoln’s second inaugural address. The second shortest inaugural in presidential history and given one month before his assassination,  the speech is almost as complex in context as the man who gave it. Somber in tone, Lincoln opens by noting the stark difference in occasion between his this address, given at the end of the bitter Civil War, and his first, given on the eve of that War.

The speech is a justification of the war which Lincoln had campaigned against before becoming President. It is also a written recognition that a great deal still laid ahead for the post-War nation, especially the bitterness that was brewing over Reconstruction.

In the audience were six men conspiring to murder the President, his Vice President Andrew Johnson and his Secretary of State William Seward. One of those conspirators was Lincoln’s very assassin John Wilkes Booth.

Lincoln ended the address by saying:

With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.

Quick Non-Lincoln Hits

• Official Twitter App for the Blackberry is Coming!
• iPhone 101: How to Force Quit an Unresponsible App
• PCs Around the World Unite to Map the Milky Way
• Amid snowstorms social networks thrive
• Facebook Data Reveals Secrets of American Culture

Pandora

Pandora is easily one of the greatest services ever made for the Internet. You tell Pandora what songs or artists you like, it finds other artists and music like it. In short, you build your own radio stations where you, eventually, only hear the things you like. Each time a new song is played you can either “thumbs up” or “thumbs down” the song. The more information you give, the better the program becomes at getting songs you will probably like.

Best of all the service is free and available on the Blackberry, iPhone, the Web, Boxee, basically anywhere you have an Internet connection. There are limitations, you can only skip 6 songs an hour per “station” you create because of licensing issues and the ability for Pandora to find the things you like isn’t perfect. With that said, it is a great way to listen to music! (If you want similar functionality but would rather have things organized by type of music for you, see Slacker Radio).

iHeartRadio

If traditional radio is more your style, iHeartRadio is a service from Clear Channel Communications that streams content from their radio stations. It is available as an application on the iPhone & Blackberry and a Web application. You can listen to your local Clear Channel stations or those around the country, meaning that if you are looking for a specific talk radio host or style of music, you should be able to find them on iHeartRadio.

Satellite Radio

Finally, if you have a satellite radio subscription, you should check out the SiriusXM application on the iPhone and now the Blackberry. You can get most of the content, minus Howard Stern. If you have a Mac I HIGHLY recommend the program Pulsar from the company Rogue Amoeba. Pulsar is a simple but well done program that gives you full access to every XM or Sirius station (depending on which service you subscribe to). 

Quick Hits

• How Social Media is Changing the Super Bowl
• What if Flash Were an Open Standard?
• Android Phone Nexus One gets mult-touch. Response to the iPad??
• 5 Challenges For Non-Profit Texting Campaigns
• Google teaming up with the NSA… If you have privacy concerns about this, you are not alone!