Category Archives: web 2.0

Have you ever been stuck naming a new project?

Posted on by Sarah Cooley
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Enter Mixnomer! Mixnomer is this cool new web tool that helps you find a domain name for that new idea, blog, company, or side project that you’ve been wanting to get off the ground. It’s what I used to find the name for Simply Curated and it helped me find a great domain that I never would have thought to try.

The tool is super easy to use, enter keywords or possible words you’d like in the name. Let’s say you want to open a vegan bakery (not the most original startup idea, but just go with it). I enter the keywords vegan, bakery, baking, treats, cakes, simple, healthy, chocolate, tasty, delish. Then I enter the prefixes little, and the. Then pick some suffixes like, ous, ly, and shop. Mix it up and here’s what I got.

More options than I could show you! Mixnomer not only shows you the available domain, but if the twitter username is available as well. Right now the list is ordered by the number of characters in the URL. But I can rearrange to show my favorites on top.

Some of my favorites from this search were DELISHVEGAN.COM, LITTLETASTY.COM, THEDELISH.COM, lots of options I would have never thought would be available domains.

So play around with it, I’d love to see what cool domains you guys come up with! (full disclosure, mixnomer is a company I have been consulting for, but I honestly think it’s an awesome product!)

To RT or Not to RT?

Posted on by Sarah Cooley
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Many people have been talking about twitter’s new RT beta feature and it may seem like most people don’t like it. But I thought I would throw my 2 cents in the ring about what I think of the feature.

In case you are unaware, Twitter is rolling out an official retweet feature that is in beta right now. It allows users to RT with just one click (no more copying and pasting tweets), and it provides a way for people to easily see how much their tweets are being retweeted.

Now there are some obvious drawbacks to this. The new feature only lets you RT the tweet as it was originally written, you can’t modify it or add your comments. For some people this is a drawback, but for others it’s a plus.

It’s a drawback if you frequently like adding comments to the things you RT, and it could be positive because tweets no longer need to be short enough to add your username to be “re-tweet-able”. A tweet that is exactly 140 characters can easily be retweeted now, where in the past it would have needed to be shortened to allow space for RT @that persons username.

twitter RT_s

One reason that I like the new RT feature is that it helps to regulate fake RT’s and is a great way to discover new people to follow.

A few things I would change:

1. Avatar correction. I would want the avatar to be the person that I am following who is choosing to share this information with me. After all, the people I follow are people that I trust. So seeing what they retweeted to their followers should be reflected by showing their avatar in my timeline.

2. RT alerts. Similar to the way that Tumblr shows users alerts when someone else has liked or reblogged your post. If a simple one line alert showed up in my timeline letting me know that my tweet had been retweeted it would make the whole process easier and more encouraging for users.

Tumblr notes

3. 3rd party support! Currently desktop and iphone apps are not taking advantage of the RT feature because it is so new. There is no place in tweetdeck or tweetie for me to see my retweets the same way I would see @replies. In fact, if someone retweets a tweet that has my username in it using the official RT function, that tweet won’t show up in my @replies of a 3rd party client at all.

The fact is that it will be very hard for twitter to rope in a feature that was created by the users and standerdize it. That can’t force you to stop retweeting the old way, so they new way will be hard for people to adopt.

What are your thoughts on the new feature?

Let me know in the comments.

Supporting local businesses: where does the web fit in?

Posted on by Sarah Cooley
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Supporting your local economy can seem overwhelming.

Why should you go out of your way to support your local farmers when you can get cheaper produce elsewhere.

Why go to an independent bookstore when you can get the books cheaper on Amazon?

Well when you spend your money at local and independently owned businesses the money does more than you think.

A while ago I heard about the 3/50 Project, an effort to get people to spend $50 a month at 3 local businesses in an effort to boost local economies.

“If half the employed population spent $50 each month in locally owned independent businesses, it would generate more than $42.6 billion in revenue.”

“For every $100 spent in locally owned independent stores, $68 returns to the community through taxes, payroll, and other expenditures. If you spend that with a national chain, only $43 stays here. Spend it online and nothing comes home.”

That got me thinking, where does the web fit into all of this?

I consider myself a fairly digital person and I am the first person to gravitate to shopping online. So what do sites like Etsy do to the local economies of their sellers? Has anyone crunched the numbers on that?

Even though the web might not be able to help us with all of our local purchase decisions, it can help us find places to spend our money that are independently owned.

Delocator is a website designed to help users locate independently owned businesses.

Launched in 2005 Delocator was created so users could locate independently owned cafés. The Delocator is the opposite of an online retail store locator, common to corporate store websites. In 2006 book stores and movie theaters were added. Finally, in 2009, users can log in to the site, modify their entries and add more types of independently owned stores.

Do you know of other online resources that help users support their local economy? Leave it in the comments and I will add to the post.

Typography, cold?

Posted on by Sarah Cooley
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So I’ve been asking people what they think of my new theme, and most people like it. However I did get one comment on twitter that threw me for a bit.

@danlavelle said:

@sarahcooley love the format, very simple and easy to read. What don’t I like? The fonts. Too industrial and not enough personality conveyed

I mentioned in my last post that both themes (old and new) have had the same font. Helvetica.

It’s the type of font that does display anything, no personality, no emotion, and yet…it says everything. It’s clean, simple, timeless.

I never really noticed Helvetica has a font until I saw the documentary film, Helvetica.

From the website:

Helvetica is a feature-length independent film about typography, graphic design and global visual culture. It looks at the proliferation of one typeface (which celebrated its 50th birthday in 2007) as part of a larger conversation about the way type affects our lives. The film is an exploration of urban spaces in major cities and the type that inhabits them, and a fluid discussion with renowned designers about their work, the creative process, and the choices and aesthetics behind their use of type.

The film showed me how much this simple little font had already affected my life. It’s everywhere!

So I stand by my choice of font, and I think it says a lot about me!

:)

If you are on iTunes to check out Helvetica, you should also check out the other documentary by Gary Hustwit, Objectified. They are both really interesting.

Also from the website:

Objectified is a feature-length documentary about our complex relationship with manufactured objects and, by extension, the people who design them. It’s a look at the creativity at work behind everything from toothbrushes to tech gadgets. It’s about the designers who re-examine, re-evaluate and re-invent our manufactured environment on a daily basis. It’s about personal expression, identity, consumerism, and sustainability.

I wish Yelp had…

Posted on by Sarah Cooley
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Over the past year I have been an avid Yelp user. Originally I started using it so that I could remember places I ate out in the city. Yelp was good to be, I found some great places that I can now call some of my favorites because of Yelp.

And when I moved to Philadelphia there was no doubt in my mind that I was going to need Yelp more than ever now.

That being said I have noticed some things that I really wish Yelp did that would be especially helpful when visiting, or moving to a new city.

Recommendations!

There are a lot of places that I love in NYC but I have not been able to easily find their “Philly counterparts”. If Yelp had a way to show you places you might like in a new city based on places you have reviewed and liked before, I think it would be very helpful.

Also if there was a Yelp feature similar to Urban Spoon for the iPhone, but using the data that Yelp already knows about me and places I like to eat. For example if I could select a radius on a map, and just press a button that would give me some suggestions, that would be awesome.

But unlike Urban Spoon, these suggestions would not merely be random, but would be tailored to me.