Advocate's Studio

Joining the ranks of Flavors.me, Dooid, Zerply and About.me is Sidengo – a free website builder that requires no coding skills and about ten minutes of your time. I love these great “do it yourself” tools for those of use who don’t necessarily have the full-on skills of a web developer but want to get the word out about their business or self-promotional efforts.

If you have used any of these before, the dashboard and sitebuilder will look quite familiar. Simply follow the instructions in the builder by adding in the relevant information when asked, linking up your media, uploading your images and logos, and filling in your contact information and Voila! you have a site.

I like the fact that you can have multiple pages with this particular tool. It also integrates nicely with your existing hangouts on the web, like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Flickr. The contact page is pretty feature rich as well, with integrated Google maps information. You can use a custom domain, upload a favicon, download a QR code pointing to your site and generate embeddable widgets which you can share anywhere on the web. Check how your site is doing on the dashboard tab. And, for the mobile-inclined, the sites are iPhone compatible, and you can create a custom icon to appear on the iPhone home screen, giving the site the look of a mobile web app with a professional appearance.

As I have often said, it is worth taking advantage of as many of these tools as possible when building a web presence, as it offers you another outpost for your information and message. It is particularly attractive when the price is free (for now). Check it out and check back here with your URL – would love to see what you built.

More on the visual front. I am a big fan of the new wave of visually-inspired resume builders. ResumUP is a new player in this field with a very easy, detailed resume creation tool built on Facebook and LinkedIn. The tool is in beta, but from my view point, works just fine. The resume piece offers great depth in editing professional and educational experience, achievements and career focus, as well as boxes for pycho-social elements to fill out your character profile. The result is quite gorgeous, full of charts, detail and color.

But ResumUP doesn’t stop at your background. You can also make your job searching intentions known on the site, and employers can search and post “visual vacancies.”  The job postings mirror the visual style of the resumes, with corresponding charts and graphics for job description, experience levels, necessary skills, benefits and compensation. Check out some of the sample postings here.

Of course, there is a social piece. You can take advantage of a dashboard when you connect with friends on the site. Plus there are plenty of sharing tools for spreading your resume, with buttons for Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+. There is a message center within the app. And, you can download your resume in PDF form via the export feature.

I think the idea is quite brilliant – the Web is an experiential place. Offering a visually-appealing means to promote yourself and peruse jobs seems a natural fit for how we interact with information. If you would like a peek at how ResumUP works and looks, check out the video below. And take a few minutes to create your own graphic resume at their site.

I love a good infographic. Now I, and you, can make your own with Visual.ly’s infographic tool. I wrote about Visual.ly a while back when the site was new and the tool was in development – simple, infographic creation without a graphic design background.

If you want to check out the tool and create your own masterpiece, head over to Visual.ly, click on the “create” button, connect to Twitter and pick a hashtag of interest. Visual.ly will then fill in the blanks about your choice, adding data and design elements to bring the hashtag to life in graphic form, in about a minute or so.

Visual.ly has already served as a collecting point for homegrown infographics, with a social forum for browsing and liking contributors’ material. Now Visual.ly offers built-in tools for creating your own. Share it on Facebook or Twitter or on Visual.ly, download it, email it or embed it. Nice tool for the visually-inclined.

In honor of the new iPad fervor on launch day, check out my iPad 3 infographic below:

 

infographic created with visual.ly

Use Google Scholar for your legal research? Then you may be happy to hear that the Scholar team has further refined the service to highlight significant cases that cite to a particular legal opinion. “Significant” means it discusses the cited case to a greater degree, maybe distinguishing or even rejecting or overturning it.

Scholar always provided citing documents, showing them in order of prominence. Now, in Scholar, those citing cases will be shown in order of significance. So, not unlike services like say Westlaw, citations are shown with the greatest discussion and treatment at the top, and the least at the bottom of the list. Scholar also marks the amount of discussion visually in three tiers. Citing cases that only cite the original case show no marking at all. The tiers are shown with horizontal hashes to the left of the case name.

To say this makes Scholar more useful would be an understatement – as Scholar adds more and more features, the dream of useful free legal research edges closer to reality.

Along with the shiny new iPad hardware, Apple has released the newest version of its mobile operating system, iOS 5.1, which is compatible with the iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4, iPod touch 3rd Generation, iPod touch 4th gen, iPad, iPad 2, and “new iPad.” I got prompted to update the software last night. If you haven’t seen this yet, go into Settings > General > Software Update and get it for yourself (back up your device first). While the only major benefit to 5.1 discussed in the keynote was Siri in Japan, there are a few additional touches in the system that improve the iDevice experience.

So what do you get? First, you can now delete photos from the Photo Stream on any iOS 5.1. device. The deletions will only appear effective on devices running iOS 5.1. Additionally, you will only be able to delete photos uploaded to the photo stream on a 5.1 equipped device, so those older photos will remain for 30 more days. You can clear out the entire Photo Stream on icloud.com.

Next, Apple’s has improved the quick camera access via the home screen – no longer will you have to double tap the home button to bring up the camera button. Now the camera button will appear on the bottom right corner of the home screen: simply slide the camera button up to access the camera and slide it back down when done.

Next, iTunes Match has been improved. You can get Genius Playlists and Mixes now. Settings now includes a “use cellular data” option so that you can shut off streaming when away from wifi. Along with the  iTunes 10.6 update that came this week, users are reporting smoother, less bumpy playback so it appears the new OS fixes some bugs.

The new OS also adds greater granularity to the location notifications – check Settings > Location Services, where the new notifications are described. The notifications will show which apps are using what types of services.

iOS 5.1 comes with improvements to the iPad camera and facial recognition as well. Playback speed and skip back controls are now available in iPad podcast player. And, a curious “4G” indicator is now showing up on iPhone 4S – no, this doesn’t mean that your iPhone is now 4G capable. It appears to now detect when you are in a HSPA+ network. The new iPad will show an LTE indicator when it is actually in an LTE network.

That’s about the size of it. While not earth shattering, certainly better than the old version so its worth updating.