This video has a few useful hints and tips about writing online reviews. It’s more about the writing than the technology, but even so it contains information about how long website-published reviews should be, and in my experience it’s pretty accurate: 500 or even 200 words tops.
But in case you don’t believe me, or you’re more of a visual learner, watch the video – it’s just over a minute long.
How To Write an Online Review
Uploaded by Howcast. - Technology reviews and science news videos.
Collecta is well-named. A search engine, Collecta collects results from all over the social web: blogs, comments on blogs, tweets, social bookmarks – even videos and photos.
As with the other search engines I’ve been looking into in this series, I used the term “self-publishing” as the basis of my investigation. Here are two screenshots of the first page of results:
I think it’s a similar situation here. Some of the results, especially the tweets, look suspiciously like advertisements, but the only way you can really tell is to open the link on the right-hand side.
I did so, and wasn’t disappointed: I came across two more blogs which I didn’t know about before, but which I will be revisiting. They are Zoe Winters’ blog, and Out of My Mind, by Linda Cassidy Lewis.
As I didn’t spot these in either my Addictomatic or Bing searches, my opinion that one should always use more than one or two search engines for any particular line of enquiry has been reinforced.
On the whole, I liked using this, but because of the hit and miss nature of the results, this is very much a case of, as it were, caveat emptor: buyer beware.
Look and feel: 5
Consistency of results: 3
Quirkiness Factor: 5
Overall: 4
Sometimes I come across a website and think it would be quite useful to bookmark for future reference. However, I sometimes find that on returning to it, I can’t remember exactly why! Or I am looking around a website with the intention of reviewing it, get interrupted, come back to it a week later – and find that I cannot remember what I thought about it, and so have to start all over again.
So when I found out about Net Notes, I was quite interested. This Firefox addin makes it possible for you to append notes to a website. The clever thing is that when you navigate to a different website, the note disappears, only to reappear once you return to the original website. In other words, you can keep independent notes about each site you visit.
Here’s a screenshot of a net note I made earlier:
I’ve no idea what happens if you decide to clear your cache and cookies completely – I don’t want to lose some useful settings – but it seems pretty good so far. It’s not fancy, or fully-featured like Evernote (which I’ll review separately), but it is handy in that the notes you make for a website are right there when you go to the site. The only thing you have to remember is to open the Notes sidebar, otherwise nothing shows at all.
The video tells you a little more about it too.
Write comments on your favorite websites - Tekzilla ...
Uploaded by tekzilla. - Discover more college videos.
Is Bing a sort of poor man’s Google? There is always a temptation to compare any search engine with Google, but each has its own strengths and shortcomings.
Something I really like about Bing is that when you enter a search term, and click on Search, as well as the search results it suggests other searches. In this screenshot, you can see that I did a search on the term self-publishing. As well as the results, I’ve also been presented with other, related, search expressions I might like to try.
You’d think this would be a bit distracting, but it’s actually quite useful. For example, on this occasion I discovered the existence of the Self-Publishing Magazine, which I hadn’t heard of until now.
Something else I like is the history of my recent searches. When using Google, I find myself hitting the Back key countless times to retrieve a previous search, so this facility is a real time-saver.
Look and feel: 4 -- although I like the photo backdrop.
Consistency of results: 4 -- it seems to be very sensitive to the order in which you place the words in the search term
Quirkiness Factor: 4
Overall: 4
This gives you a quick look at J-Darkroom, which is a clutter-free text editor. I've used it myself, and it's not bad. You can't really do fancy formatting or even, if my memory serves me well, hyperlinks. But that's the point really: just get it done, and worry about what it looks like later.
Eliminate Distractions While Typing - Tekzilla Daily Tip
Uploaded by tekzilla. - Discover more college videos.
An interesting question these days is: “Do I need a publisher?” There are lots of options available for anyone wishing to go it alone, especially when it comes to ebooks.
As someone who has been published by traditional publishers, self-published using print-on-demand and self-published ebooks, I would say that it’s too soon to hold a wake for the publishing industry. Publishers certainly have a lot to bring to the party, in terms of general expertise of the book industry, contacts, editing services and marketing (although almost every author, myself included, remain typically unimpressed by publishers’ efforts in that last category).
However, I think the fundamental issue for any writer looking to a third party to do what she could, in principle, do herself is to look at what they are offering, and to ask some pertinent questions.
This tongue-in-cheek fictitious conversation between an author and the acquisitions editor of a publisher is well worth a read, and reflecting on. Fictional and humorous it may be – but it’s the conversation’s inherent grain of truth which makes it effective.
I’ve recently started using Addictomatic as my first or second port of call as far as search engines are concerned. What it does is pull together, on one page, results from blogs, Bing, Twitter, Yahoo!, Ask, various video sites and even Flickr. In short, it’s a good one-stop shop if you wish to include social networks in your trawl for information. To give you an idea of what it looks like, here’s a screenshot of a search I undertook on the term “self-publishing”.
As you can see, there’s a fair bit to follow up on, although at first glance not all of it seems relevant. In fact, some of the links are completely irrelevant or apparently advertisements, so I don’t think you can rely on Addictomatic alone for finding information. Nevertheless, it did mention the Strictly Writing blog, which I haven’t come across before, and which I didn’t see on the first page of either Google or Yippy but which I will certainly be reading from now on. See, for example, this highly-informed article called You Earn How Much? by Gillian McDade.
I’ve used Addictomatic for other search queries too, and it always gives me something different (what I’ve called the “quirkiness factor”) from the other search engines I use, so I definitely recommend it from that point of view. I also like the way it has everything laid out so neatly on the page, and the fact that the social search results sit alongside the more traditional sources.
Look and feel: 5
Consistency of results: 3
Quirkiness Factor: 4
Overall: 4
This is a very quick tip, but one that is remarkably useful. As you may know, Word has a ton of keyboard shortcuts which can make life a bit easier. But sometimes, if they’re really convoluted, they can make life difficult.
Fortunately, though, there’s another keyboard shortcut that can make life easy again. (Do keep up at the back.) And it’s this: if you want to repeat the last action you did, just press the F4 key.
For example, to create an e with an acute accent, like this: é, you have to hold down the Alt Gr key and press the letter e. For me that’s a two-handed job because the keys I need to press and too far away from each other to be able to do it with one hand. Thanks to the F4 key, I just need to do it once, and then press F4 for the next one. Note that this will only work if you have done nothing else in between. Thus, if you have already typed the text but need to convert a couple of letters, you can do the second one by highlighting the e you’ve already typed, and then pressing F4. In short, pressing F4 will repeat the very last thing you’ve done except, for some reason, highlighting.
It sounds completely pointless, but it comes in handy when you need to repeat something that’s slightly involved. As well as awkward keyboard shortcuts, another example might be inserting a table. If you need half a dozen tables of, say, 5 rows and 3 columns, it will save you a bit of time to insert the first one in the usual way (Insert—>Table—>select number of rows and columns), and then go through the document pressing F4 wherever you need the rest of them.
Well, that concludes the 13 Things You Didn’t Know About Word series. Hope you found it useful.
