The ProVirtual Blog

Late to the party: learning to use Facebook

Late to the party, indeed. I just now am beginning to scratch the surface of Facebook. I spend quite a bit of time on LinkedIn (which I love); but have so far spent no time exploring the capabilities of FB... always assuming it was more of a personal thing. In my ignorance, I never bothered to really see what it can do. And it can do a lot. I am surprised by the number of people that use it excusively (and very effectively) for business and that it's actually very useful - not merely a social distraction.

Along with my "discovery" of Twitter last week (which is surprisingly addictive), I feel I'm making some social networking progress these days. Next week: Squidoo.

Many thanks to Erin Blaskie - who patiently helped me see the Facebook light.

So - since I'm new, I'm still light on friends... please visit me. ;-)  Anyone else feel behind the curve with Facebook?

Brush with Greatness: Andrea Kalli Reads This Blog!!

I'm so jazzed... Andrea Kalli - Virtual Trainer extraodinaire and Podcasting, SharePoint and Exchange guru was kind enough to post to IVAANet about this blog. I'm honored.

Check out Andrea's virtual training services on Podcasting, hosted Exchange and SharePoint. She's unique in the VA world. Her teleclasses are great too - she was kind enough to do a teleclass for our DVVAA membership about blogging. It was a big hit!

Thanks again, Andrea.

Web Worker Daily » Archive Continuous Innovation in the Online Office «

A terrific article at WWD about innovation with online apps exceeding that of their desktop counterparts (posted via bookmarklet).

Link: Web Worker Daily » Archive Continuous Innovation in the Online Office «.

Back from the IVAA Summit... a BLAST!

I'm finally getting unpacked from the IVAA Summit in Charlotte... and I had a great time! There were terrific programs and a record turnout - about 80 VAs from all over the USA and Canada, and I had the pleasure of meeting most of them. Best of all, I got to meet many contacts I had over the years - this time in person!

The DVVAA girls again made a splash... 15% of the attendees!!  Special thanks to Laura Pumo for being such a gracious roommate. ;-)

Kudos to IVAA and the Summit Committee... you really know how to put on a show!

CNN.com Sells T-Shirts with Web Headlines

Frequent visitors to CNN.com have likely noticed that their headlines are sometimes unintelligible, tawdry and/or creepy and have no relationship whatsoever to important news.

Now we know the method to the madness: CNN Shirt

Not familiar? View Gawker's Extensive History Of Terrible CNN.com Headlines

What if everyone who could telecommute actually did?

I'm always ranting about how the price of gas would drop like a stone tomorrow if all those who could do their work at home actually did. Here in the Philly 'burbs, the main arteries leading to the city and to the office parks of King of Prussia are CLOGGED daily with information workers of one stripe or another, who, truth be told, really don't need to be in the office all the time. Now, there is a study that tries to quantify the possible result:

They asked the simple question: what would be the impact if everyone who could work from home actually did? The answer they came up with for the USA: a savings of 625 million barrels of oil a year, as well as $43 billion less spent on gasoline and elimination of a couple of weeks of wasted commuting time per person.

The study (done by telework advocacy website Undress4Success) focuses on the immense environmental benefits of such a scenario, but there are compelling economic woes that can be alleviated as well. With skyrocketing oil prices linked to everything from worldwide food inflation to bankrupt airlines to shuttered pizza shops, anything that can drive down the cost of energy would help reverse the damage. For every infoworker who can skip the daily commute, life is made a bit easier (less traffic) and more affordable (cheaper gas) for those who can't telecommute: nurses, farmers, police officers, chefs, hairstylists and truckers (and our truckers really need a break)!

The less obvious benefits: happier and more productive workers, fewer car accidents, cheaper auto insurance, independence from foreign oil - and perhaps most gratifying of all - handing Big Oil a well-deserved cash "haircut".

Thanks to the wonderful Web Worker Daily for the validation I was looking for!

Be sure to read the original article about the study, at Undress4Success.

RescueTime measures your productivity (do I really want to know this?)

I just installed RescueTime - a free product which aims to provide users with a cold, impartial analysis of how you spend time on your computer - without data entry. RescueTime runs in the background and (basically speaking) tracks the focus of windows on your computer to compile a report which you can have emailed or published in an RSS feed.

You can even define productivity goals and measure your progress! So, if you have decided to spend 50% less time processing email, RescueTime will let you know if you are on track to achieve that goal.

There are obvious privacy concerns with any product that "tracks" activity on your computer. However, RescueTime does a good job of addressing these concerns by providing useful features to whitelist and suspend tracking for activity that you don't want to include in reports:

What about my privacy?
We take privacy pretty seriously, and it was one of our biggest concerns when we built RescueTime. Our first line of privacy defense is to provide a prominent pause feature that allows you to suspend tracking. Second of all, you can delete any particular data. Finally, we ensure that the only thing we track is the names of the apps and sites you use and the times that you use them. We also offer a "Whitelist" feature that allows you to only track the web sites that you want to. For more details, check out our privacy policy.

RescueTime also offers a paid version that will track the productivity of a workgroup.. so it looks like the product is also aimed at small businesses who are serious about measuring the results of adopting alternative processes and workstyles. It may provide weary commuters everywhere with a great tool to convince management that it's time to start adopting work-at-home options!

This may be a perfect way to measure once and for all how much time I really spend with email, eBay and celebrity gossip blogs. If my results aren't too terribly embarrassing, I will post again in a month's time to share the verdict. :-)

Twitter can be useful? Part 2...

Twitter saves an American arrested in Egypt?

http://gawker.com/380288/twitter-saves-american-arrested-in-egypt

Ok, I get Twitter now.

I spend a lot of time playing with new Web 2.x services and putting them to use. I love finding something that saves me a few minutes or fills a need - a need that sometimes, I didn't even know I had (Jott.com, comes to mind!).

I never really "got" the phenomenon that is Twitter. I never spent much time with it, as I assumed it was a MySpace-y type app that was for tweens texting one another about prom shoes - but I confess, I never gave it a fair shake. If you aren't familiar, Twitter allows you to quickly update "what are you doing" and update your website and your "followers" (or all Twitter-ers at large) with brief text messages. These messages are sent to your website, blog, rss (my favorite), phone, etc. - instant broadcast udpates as to your - status/thoughts/etc.. Twitter, however, allows users to restrict updates to approved "followers", so that you can use Twitter to update family members, workgroups, etc with updates without burning phone minutes or spending time on phonetag calls and voice mail. Useful!

So, as proof that Twitter is more than another teenage tech distraction... here's a blog post that describes the clever and lifesaving use of Twitter during a recent tornado outbreak in OK.

In case you are wondering - here's my Twitter page.. there is absolutely nothing of interest there.. but follow me if you like... ;-)

Also - please comment if there is something I am missing - or another great way to use Twitter.

Evernote Will Change Your Life

If you ever looked at your browser's "Favorites" file - its more than likely that it is completely disorganized and out of control. I (like most) had a bad habit of viewing a webpage that I want to revisit - then "adding to favorites" or "bookmarking" - only to discover that I could never find it again in the giant list of pages I tried to save to it over the years. Looking at my "favorites" now in my browser - I dont even know what a lot of it is or why I wanted to save it in the first place. It's a useless mess.

Enter Evernote. Evernote is an immensely flexible "clipping" tool that works on your desktop, on your phone and on the web. It allows you to save almost any kind of information (webpages, text, sound, pictures and video) and index it any way you like - tags, categories, separate notebooks. Evernote is similar to (also excellent) Google Notebook - only pumped up with an elegant interface and far more flexible features.

... but that's not all. Evernote also indexes by the content of your notes - including images. So, if you are in the grocery store and you want to save a picture of a cereal box (can't imagine why you would need to do this, but please humor me here.. :-D ) - text in the picture (Cap'n Crunch, in this example) would be captured and indexed.

So - if you were doing research on the vast health benefits of Cap'n Crunch, and you had saved your assortment of documents, webpages and pictures of Cap'n Crunch resources in Evernote - and you did a search on "Cap'n Crunch" - not only would you get the text and webpages - you would get the images that contained the phrase "Cap'n Crunch". Incredible!!

Like any great Web 2.0 app, it works with everything else you use. You can easily email notes to and from your Evernote account, and even dictate notes to it using that other spectacular service Jott! (I posted about Jott! on my former blog, but do yourself a favor and visit Jott! right now!)

Evernote is in "private beta" so you do either need an invitation (I have a few left - just email me [mary * at * provirtualsolutions.com] if you would like one) - or you can register for an invitation from Evernote - which may take a few days to a week. It works very smoothly  - so I doubt that it would be in a private beta very much longer.