Xobni Brings Twitter To Your Inbox

Earlier tonight, Xobni quietly released, at least to some users, a new version of its Outlook plug-in that brings Twitter streams into your email in an intelligent way. Instead of acting like any other Twitter client and showing you the full stream of everyone you follow, it shows you only the recent Tweets of the person whose email you are reading, whether or not you follow them on Twitter. (A Xobni blog post went up briefly about it and then was taken down, but not before I was able to grab the screenshot at right).

Instead of replicating Twitter outright, it shows you the Tweets in the context of an email to help you learn more about the person with whom you are communicating. This is consistent with the way Xobni brings up similar information about a contact from Facebook or LinkedIn or Skype. If you don’t know the person, it gives you some more context. If you do, it gives you something personal to talk about. (Threadsy, which launched at this year’s TC50, also shows Tweets in context alongside emails).
With both the full Facebook stream and now Twitter built into the product, chances are you’ll see what each contact has been doing recently. Xobni also lets you reply via Twitter, and follow a contact from within its application.
One of Xobni’s investors is Vinod Khosla, who told me a few weeks ago that Xobni is getting “great traction.” I’ve since heard that the product is approaching 3 million downloads.

Source: TechCrunch

Promote & Publicize Your Latest Blog Post With An Email Signature

If you are a blogger like me or even if you happen to like a blog post by another hand, using your email signature could be the easiest way to spread the word. There’s no promotion like self promotion. Quite logically, wouldn’t we like our first readers to be the ones we touch base with through emails? It should be the easiest job in the world to enlist their help to promote your blog. In the ‘Digg’ and boost world of the WWW, grabbing a few eyeballs is what counts. Think of the humble email signature as a no cost viral way to publicize your blog.
Adding a link to your latest blog post not only spreads the good word but also spices up your signature.  If you write about something specific, then a blog post signature link adds to your ‘brand’. In today’s ever changing world, an active signature could be like those 30 second filler adverts which play in staccato sequence. They grab our attention because they keep changing.
All it takes for a little bit of PR are these two ways and of course the habit of writing regular and relevant blog posts.

BlogSigs

BlogSigs attaches the link to your latest blog post in your email signature. This utility with a simple function works with a number of email clients like Outlook, Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail and Entourage.
Additionally, there’s also a Firefox add-on available which makes it the right fit when we send mails using the browser. The Firefox add-on, though free, comes with a BlogSigs promotion link in all emails. Purchasing a BlogSigs Registration Key removes the BlogSigs promotion link (note: the add-on is still not compatible with Firefox 3.5.2).
To get back to the Windows version, here’s how it runs from the system tray.

1. BlogSigs can be setup using the single configurable window.

   

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2. On the first run, BlogSigs detects the signatures saved for your Outlook accounts. If not, create a signature from the Outlook Menu path – Tools – Options – Mail Format – Signatures.
3. In the BlogSigs options window, choose the accounts you want to use BlogSigs for.
4. Specify the RSS feed of the blog you want to use. BlogSigs pulls the latest post from the RSS link and sends the headline as a part of the signature.
5. Append an optional stylized text before the blog post. Set the update in days, hours or minutes for BlogSigs to update the link.

The little app worked well notwithstanding a few errors. BlogSigs is a 646KB download and compatible with Windows 2000/XP/Vista and Mac OS X.

WiseStamp Email Signature

This Firefox add-on nearly came head of the class in the brief review I did last year in my post on 5 Ways To Create Custom Multiple Signatures In Gmail. Just to refresh, WiseStamp lets you setup rich personalized signatures using a simple WYSIWYG Editor. The app supports Gmail, Yahoo Mail, AOL and Hotmail.
If you have come over from my earlier post, WiseStamp has added a few new features since then. Automatically sharing of blog posts is what caught my eye.
WiseStamp’s Feed tab allows us to easily include our favorite personalized feed and it automatically updates in our email signatures. Now we can share not only our latest blog posts but also bookmarks, videos, pictures, events and much more. This is a excellent way to promote your blog.

• Download and install the WiseStamp add-on.
  

  

• Access it from the browser’s Tools menu or right click on the little WiseStamp icon near the bottom right of the browser (Right Click – Edit signature).

• Design your signature in the WYSIWYG editor.

• Click on the RSS tab, enter a Feed title and the Feed URL. WiseStamp automatically validates the URL and OK’s it.

• You can preview the signature before clicking on Apply and OK.

• Open your email account to compose a new email. Right click on the little icon located on the formatting toolbar or the one at the bottom of the browser window to choose a signature (i.e. if you have more than one). The signature gets automatically inserted with the latest blog post.

Download the WiseStamp Firefox add-on for rich email signatures.
Familiarity may not breed contempt but it certainly lays the grounds for boredom. In a medium where it takes seconds to go from reading a mail to consigning it to the trash, an interesting link attached to the signature might just make someone pause. Who knows, following that link may make someone’s day a lot better.
There are of course many, many innovative ways to promote your blog post. Using your email signature to showcase your latest blog post is comparatively a modest one.

Free Ebooks-That don't suck!

If you’re a fervent reader and nerd like I am, you’ve probably encountered quite a lot of writing online. However, most of them are either absolute garbage or entirely illegal.
It’s hard to find good, legal reads online – unless you know where to look. There are several sites that offer classic out-of-copyright writing, or publishes new e-books online as promotions.
If you know where to look, you can feast on these completely free Ebooks for all the time you’ve got, and today is the day we’ll show you where to look.

Planet eBook

Planet eBook is a classy site that offers classic literature for free. These books, because they’re out-of-copyright, can be offered to you in an entirely legal fashion.

However, Planet eBook doesn’t just give you any piece of ‘free literature’. Right now, they offer about 60 books to their readers, all of which have been carefully selected. True, you won’t have the buffet of thousands that you’ll find on other sites, but you can be assured that each and every piece of writing on Planet eBook is of outstanding quality.
Furthermore, if you feel like a book is ‘missing’ from it’s collection, you put it up as a suggestion.

All books on Planet eBook can be read on the site, but can also be downloaded as a PDF, both in a 1-page and 2-page version.

ManyBooks

ManyBooks works in the same way as Planet eBook, they offer pieces of classic literature for free that are out-of-copyright. However, where Planet eBook presents a carefully selected array of literature, ManyBooks handles in bulk (as the name truthfully implies).

At the time of writing, there are 24,741 completely free eBooks available and although it might be true that not all of them will read your socks off, I’m sure you can find some good reads in the better part of them. To select a book, you can browse by author, title, category or language, or you can browse through the site’s recommendations.
Not only does the site offer an amazing number of books, it does so in an incredible number of formats. Although you might not be able to read it directly on the site, you can check out one of the mirrors or choose between a dazzling 25 different filetypes to read it on your desktop, mobile, or eBook device.

Classic Reader

Classic Reader takes a conceptual place in between Planet eBook and ManyBooks. It offers noticably more books than Planet eBook (3,629 titles at the time of writing), its material is still more selected (by a 1-man Canadian company) and controlled.

Perhaps the major distinction with the two previously mentioned sites is that there are no eBooks available for download. Alas no PDFs, ZIPs, or anythings — the eBooks are all meant to read online, on the site.
You can browse the author or title list, or filter content out by looking into a specific genre: fiction, non-fiction, young readers, poetry, short stories, drama or classical.

PublicBookshelf

Contrary to the three previously mentioned sites, PublicBookshelf is NOT filled with works of classic literature. Instead, PublicBookshelf relies completely on new, promising authors who publish online as a means of promoting their printed books. As such, you won’t be able to download the books, but will often find an Amazon link to support the author (who – with the books on this site – is often still alive).

PublicBookshelf – focusing entirely on romance novels – is a great site to sample the writing if you’re looking for something fresh, but it’s also a great site if you’re looking for a good read. Check out their top novels for reading directions, or venture off into the depths of the site and discover treasures of writing yourself.
I hope you’ve got 4 fresh bookmarks for completely free ebooks that will be able to satisfy the literacy-vampire that’s inside of you.  If they are not enough, check out where to get more romance e-books, 6 more e-book sites, where and how to read comic e-books, and how to make your own e-books from Wikipedia.
If you know of any other sites or have something to say about the ones discussed above, head for the comments section below.