Advocate's Studio

It’s the little things in life. Five steps to get from words, pics or vids on the screen to search or post on the web, for example. Multiply that over the course of the day and you have spent a considerable amount of time simply getting from point a to point b, over and over and over again. If you could drop that process down to two steps, well then, you are talking some serious time and repetitive stress injury savings.

If you are rocking Windows 7, XP, or Vista, then you are in luck. Click.to, a Windows add-on, will let you do just that. After you load it up, simply select what you want to search or share, hit Control+C and hit the desired destination in the pop-up box. Search by hitting the Google icon, or share on Facebook with the Facebook icon. There are way more options than that, including insertion into Outlook, Word or Excel, or click to convert to PDF.

If you Mac users are feeling left out, never fear. Click.to’s developer says that a Mac version is in the works and hopefully will be coming soon.

I just love little time savers like this. After using Click.to, you may never go back to the old select, copy, open, insert, and go/post  process ever again.

Sometimes browsing the Web feels a little like a game of “catch and release.” You happen upon interesting content, you consume it, and then you release it back into the wild. Invariably, at some point in the future, you may find yourself vaguely remembering having seen something once that might pertain to something you need to know right now, but you can’t quite put your finger on it ….

If you aren’t too fond of the circular file-like cycle of information consumption on the Web, then Zukmo might be your new best friend. At it’s heart, its a bookmarking system. But it’s clever-simple interface and deep functionality make it worth a look. The key functions of Zukmo are the ability to store, access, and share content. Content is culled from various sources around the Web to be stored in Zukmo’s one, centralized location. Create your account for free, drag the bookmarklet up into your browser bar, click it when you are on a page you want to keep and you can then retrieve it at your “My Zukmo” page, either via the bookmarklet link or at their website.  A very nice feature is the ability to import bookmarks from your browser and Google and sync with Delicious and other sources so that you can keep everything centralized. A very, very nice feature is the ability to add the bookmarklet to your mobile browser on your iPhone and iPad – where I do most of my reading anyway.

But it isn’t just about your Web bookmarks. You can also bookmark and upload local documents to My Zukmo, which then become part of the search universe within Zukmo. You can pull content from your Twitter stream, from Google Docs, from YouTube and Vimeo and from Slideshare and view them within Zukmo. The search function offers full text and attribute search across all of the stored content and streams and get back highlighted results, like a Google search. You can distribute out of Zukmo to Facebook and Twitter, by email, or all three at the same time.

When you save in Zukmo, the app uses a simplification process to improve readability, showing only the key content, without the usual Web page gobbledy gook. There is also an Easy Reader button on each entry, which essentially shows the substance in a printer-friendly format. Finally, you can use Zukmo as an automatic sharing hub to Facebook and Twitter, and access your content from any device, anywhere. Check out the sample screenshot of your My Zukmo page. Nice and clean:

Zukmo really offers an incredibly amount of storage service for free. Besides considering it for your bookmarking needs, the document add feature brings Zukmo closer to a cloud backup solution for a large segment of your own personal data. Not a bad deal for the price.

Have you heard about this new Chrome extension, Google Related? I think it is pretty cool indeed. Related works on your Google search page, adding related content in real time via a bottom bar. Search your topic, glance at the bar and see other information that pertains to your search. Peruse that related content without losing your original search result. For example, check out the image below – if you search for a restaurant, Related may show you maps and directions, reviews, other similar places or other nearby places.

There is also a built-in +1 button so that you can approve of your results. As you may know, those +1′s will show up on a tab on your Google Profile for later review. Check out this version of the page on a research topic.

You can hit this link here and get the extension yourself. You can also check out the video below for even more information. Nice add, Google!

In case you were wondering just what exactly adult Americans spend their time doing online, you can rest easy now. Just as in 2002, we almost universally spend some of our time online sending emails and searching for stuff. Pew Internet Research conducted its annual survey on Internet usage and has just issued its report based on its findings. The results were culled from data from telephone interviews conducted by Princeton Survey Research Associates International from April 26 to May 22, 2011, across a sample of 2,277 adults, age 18 and older. The numbers have remained fairly consistent with respect to these activities over the years: this most recent survey shows that 92% of online adults use search engines to find information on the Web, with 59% doing so on a typical day, and 92% use email, with 61% using it on a typical day. The overall number of users of both email and search engines has also grown: in January 2002, 52% of all Americans used search engines and in May, 2011 72% of all Americans used search engines. In January 2002, 55% of all Americans used email and in May, 2011, 70% of all Americans used email. And these numbers are fairly uniform across the generations. The report further breaks down results by gender, race, education, and household income. Three other uses were measured, with getting news and buying products holding steady over the 2002 to 2011 time frame. Using social networking sites didn’t register in 2002, but from 2004 to 2011, usage jumped dramatically from 11% to 65%.

Interesting results, no doubt. It is interesting to me that social sites have not put a bigger dent in both email and search as means for communicating and finding relevant information. I anticipate that social net use will eventually have that effect as communication tools and relevance-based news tools within the sites improve. Guess we will have to wait and see.

Digital Inspiration Blog has a couple of tips on how to create RSS feeds for Google searches. These can be VERY helpful in a number of ways. One way is to keep tabs on mentions of you across the Web using Google Alerts. The key to this one is making sure that you include all names and versions of names associated with you – I also recommend using your blog names and business names too. As an added touch, you can feed those into your Google Reader (and then into your fav feed viewing app of choice on your mobile or pad) and keep track of them there. Alerts don’t have to be limited to your associated names – you can use it for any type of search. But as Amit points out, Alerts doesn’t include all results. If you want to get super tricky with it, follow Amit’s instructions using your unique Google API key to get everything on the front page. Once you have the right string, you can subscribe to the feed in your feed reader of choice.

Why go through the aggravation? If you want to stay on top of a topic, you can certainly manually search for the data whenever you want. But wouldn’t it be more efficient to simply command the information to come right to you, in a format that is easy to scan, save and share? I think so. Thanks, Amit!