Dress Up Google Talk – Google Talk is becoming increasingly useful as a way to contact people, but it’s rather plain to look at. If you prefer an instant messaging service with more bells and whistles (and you’re running Windows XP), you can enhance your Google Talk experience a bit with the free GplusMessenger add-on. It installs as a client application, but seamlessly integrates with the main Google Talk menus.
Features include graphical and animated icons, “emotisounds”, the ability to set the font and color for your chats, and local chat logging. You can also define aliases to give you text-expansion while you’re typing.
Blog for a Year – If you’re still looking for a New Year’s resolution, you might consider Blog 365. Inspired by National Novel Writing Month, the folks who sign up commit to simply post something to a blog every day for 365 days. Whether you’re doing it as part of the Blog 365 challenge or not, frequent blogging is one of the best ways to build your personal brand online, an essential for many web workers.
Tap the Passive Web – The idea behind @eventtrack is to pull together tagged information from a lot of the other Web 2.0 services out there to give you an idea of what’s going on at major events. For example, if you were at the SAP Tech Ed ’07 event, you could have tracked the sapteched07 tag, and seen everything that flowed throught Twitter, flickr, del.icio.us, technorati, upcoming, youtube, and more with that tag. Comes complete with a Twitter interface to push updates to your account there, as well as online summary pages.
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