Now that Pubcon is over I’m going to let you in on a tool that helps me keep track of, organize, find, and use the information I get from conferences, trade shows, and seminars:  Evernote.

The company describes Evernote as an external brain. Your external brain. It remembers things so you don’t have to. Evernote is a clipping service with a browser based client, web interface, desktop application, and smart phone interface (it works on the iphone, blackberry, and others). Evernote is also cloud based, so information that’s added from your smartphone is sync’d to your desktop automagically. But enough promotional chatter. Let’s get down to some real world usage.

Once you’ve got an evernote account set up, you’re going to create a notebook for the conference. Think of it as a big bucket for holding all the Pubcon stuff. By default your notebooks are private, but you can share them with select people or the entire internet, which is what I’ve done with my Pubcon 2009 Notebook. Go ahead–take a look.

To make your notebook useful, you’ve got to put stuff in it like the conference schedule. While you could just as easily bookmark the page,  Evernote’s advantage lies in its technique. It actually stores the data from the page so that, when the 2010 schedule goes up and erases what’s there now, you’ll have a permanent record of 2009. The next thing I added was live blogging session posts from Outspoken Media, 10e20, Top Rank Online Marketing, and Search Marketing Sage. Normally I would have added Search Engine Roundtable too, but they are using a new app that doesn’t render the text on the page. Evernote can’t read it.

Now that I’ve got all that content in my notebook, I can start doing searches. I heard the session about the Las Vegas Hotels using twitter was pretty interesting, so let’s do a search for [las vegas hotels twitter].   I get three live blogging recaps I can use for reference.

After the conference, you’ll get a CD with all the presentations; however, unless you remember where the information is or what its name is, sometimes it’s hard to find what you’re looking for. If you uploaded all the presentations to evernote, though, the content is fully searchable. Now there are some legal restrictions and some people don’t let their presentations go public, so for this notebook I only uploaded mine (since I’m pretty sure I can’t sue myself). However, if you keep your notebook private, you don’t have anything to worry about. Let’s say you remember something in a presentation about banned sites. Executing a quick search on [banned sites] brings up the presentation and the live blogging recaps.

You may be thinking, “Well this is all pretty neat, but can’t I do the same thing with a Google custom search engine?” You could if you only wanted to search text, but what about images? Evernote has some extra functionality. An example: maybe you’re really bad with names and faces. While evernote isn’t savvy enough to have facial recognition, if you are clever and take people’s pictures in front of their speaker cards, evernote can read the text. Can’t remember what Jennifer Laycock of Search Engine Guide looks like? A quick search for [Jennifer Laycock] will bring up the picture you took. If you click through you’ll see it actually reads the text from her name card and highlights it in yellow.

As long as you take the picture fairly straight on and not at an oblique angle, it works pretty well. Here’s another example. A search for [image indexing] returns a picture of  Bruce Clay in front of a slide with the words “image indexing” on it.

Maybe that’s still not awesome enough for you. Have you ever lost a business card? If you use Evernote to take a picture of the card, you’ll have a picture of it and be able to get back in touch with that really smart person. Are you bad about losing your receipts? If so, you can use evernote to take a picture of the receipt so you can find it when your bookkeeper needs it. If your smart phone has GPS, it will also record the location for you. You can also scan the receipt and import that way, but you lose the nifty mapping functionality.

There are lots of other ways that you can use Evernote but, as a conference reference guide, it’s a pretty powerful tool. Evernote comes at two levels: free and paid. The paid product is $45 per year, which gives you a huge increase in upload file size, more file types, and a few other things too. Full details are available on the premium membership page.

Disclosure: This wasn’t a paid or sponsored post. This post contains no affiliate links. I wish there was an affiliate program because I would absolutely join it. My membership wasn’t comped or discounted. I paid the full price for a premium membership. If the nice folks at Evernote like this post and want to send me some swag or a t-shirt (x-large) it would make me almost as happy as batch of warm chocolate chip cookies

Click here to view the embedded video.

Thanks to Michael Dorausch of Planet C1 Chiropractic for allowing me to include his photos.

photo credit: TheLizardQueen

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How to Use Evernote to Create the Ultimate Post Conference Reference Guide

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So after coming back from SES I had some interesting conversations, looked at some interesting things and came up with a few ideas. One of the things I’d like to try but have never seen is a recently updated function/plugin. How would a recently updated plugin differ from a recently published function … well I’m glad you asked …

Recently updated would be used when you are using pages or posts in a more traditional CMS environment instead of a blog one. For example say you have a library or article database of keystone or flagship content. After the site is 3-4 years old the content may be come outdated. Rather than put up a new page/post with a new URL you decide to use the existing one and update or refresh the content. It would be nice if you could have a list of the ten most recently updated articles or even a page of the 50 or 100 most recently updated pages/posts. Sure you could hack the functionality by changing the publish date but that introduces other complexities.

UPDATE
Thanks to Corey Salzano who cooked up some quick code, thanks.


< ?php
$today = current_time('mysql', 1);
if ( $recentposts = $wpdb->get_results("SELECT ID, post_title FROM $wpdb->posts WHERE post_status = 'publish' AND post_modified_gmt < '$today' ORDER BY post_modified_gmt DESC LIMIT 18")):
?>
<h2>< ?php _e("Recent Posts"); ?></h2>
<ul>
<?php
foreach ($recentposts as $post) {
if ($post->post_title == '') $post->post_title = sprintf(__('Post #%s'), $post->ID);
echo "<li><a href='".get_permalink($post->ID)."'>";
the_title();
echo '</a></li>';
}
?>
</ul>
< ?php endif; ?>


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Looking for a “Recently Updated” Wordpress Plugin

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So back in the beginning of August I mentioned two plugins that I felt needed to be developed. Joost DeValk stepped up to the plate and wrote one, the Amazon Auto Linker, so he gets the free link love. In caser you missed it the plugin goes thru and auto appends your amazon aff id to any amazon URL’s, nifty huh

If you are interested in writing some plugins and kicking them into the public domain in exchange for some link love and attention drop me a line I’ve got some ideas …

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Amazon Auto Linker Plugin

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Last week Giovanni Gallucci sent me a link to Viewzi which has some interesting search UI’s that I think advanced users might actually use. Unlike Cuil I don’t think they spent 30 million and ended up with a product that thinks the best picture for me is a picture of Elliot Spitzer.

One of the search UI’s is called celebrity photo and here’s what it turns up for Lindsay Lohan.

Here’s the video search for Lindsay Lohan.

Ok so maybe your looking for something a little more serious and professional like information on disqus.com, try the information window.

Another interesting view is the Techcrunch only view.

If your music collection is short some album covers and iTunes hates you because you didn’t buy if from them try album search.

it’s not perfect, timeline view gets a little busy for active subjects, and shopping is kinda spartan, and the recipe search is very hit or miss.

It’s probably a little to complicated for the non tech savvy people. But it’s an interesting tool if you are in the high level broad research part of a topic, or have a need for some of the special searches it is configured for, so try it out: www.viewzi.com

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Viewzi – Interesting Advanced New Search UI

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So my friend Cesar Serna launched his new site this week and is making his first tool Tweet Pro available. If you don’t know Cesar he used to work for Greg Boser aka Webgeurilla. I was in on the beta program and had a chance to put the tool thru it’s paces this weekend.

In a nutshell the tool is souped up twitter search engine in the form of a desktop application. You put in your search term and twitter returns a list of people who used the term recently

You can then add these people as friends. It has some configurable settings so you can throttle your friending so you don’t look like a spammer. So you don’t believe that friending people on twitter is a worthwhile marketing activity … can I suggest reading a Twitter Case Study from Rae Hoffman (aka Sugarrae) showing how she used twitter to build her follower list.

Want another example, fine lets say you had a blog and you wrote a nice post about how to sync your iphone contacts with google/gmail then lets say you fire up Tweet Pro and search for [iphone google contacts] you get a nice list of people most of whom are looking to find out how to sync their iphone with their google contacts list:

Do you think those people might find it helpful if you sent them a message like

Hi @johnsmith I noticed you were looking for help with you iphone and google contacts here’s a link you might find helpful http://is.gd/ngK

Do you think if you were using any social tools or had a blog, they might subscribe to you, bookmark you, follow you, tell their friends or even retweet you?

Do you think subscribing to a tool that makes that easier is worth $20 a month?

I’ll also make some suggestions for improvements since I know Cesar will see this:

• I’d love to be able to tweet replies right from the app itself
• I’d also love the ability to store some preprogrammed responses so I didn’t have type them over and over, and have them isolated on a profile basis (did I mention it has multiple profiles)
• Also I’d love the ability to search inside TINYURL’s for people who are tweeting links to my domain (or my competition). I know this can be done I’ve seen other programs do it.

Remember using tools to automate things isn’t evil (see legitimate uses of mechanical grunts), it’s about taking tedious work and making it faster and easier.

if you’re ready to step up and start using the good tools check out Tweet Pro

Disclaimer:
No cash, services, products or future considerations were exchanged for making this post. I did receive access to a preliminary beta copy for evaluation. It’s really sad that organizations like Google make you look like criminal committing a felony for writing about or linking to your friends. But matt cutts spamming twitter with books about google is “different” and “ok”

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How to Use Twitter as a Marketing Tool with Tweet Pro

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Here’s a list of Firefox extensions I have installed, if you know of anything cool I’m not using drop it in the comments below:

Aardvark

- Lets you debug HTML really quickly and easily
About This Site – a wealth of quick links to get more data
AI Roboform Toolbar for Firefox cause who has the time to remember passwords
All-in-One Sidebar – give me links and access to the sidebar
Better GCal – makes it pretty and more useable
Better Gmail 2 – makes it more useable
coComment – keeps track of comments you made elsewhere
ColorZilla – a color picker
Copy Plain Text – removes formatting when you copy text from a web page
CustomizeGoogle – gives you nice little links on other search engines
del.icio.us Complete – only the best bookmarking tool ever
Download Statusbar – helps you keep track of download stuff without the annoying pop up window
Email This! Bookmarklet Extension – lets me email pages to places like twitter quickly and easily
Favicon Picker 2 – gets rid of lame favicons
Gmail Manager – multiple gmail accounts
Google Notebook – makes working with the google notebook easier
GooglePreview – puts ASK style previews on SERP pages
Greasemonkey – makes it possible to do way cool stuff with firefox
Java Console – i hate this one and wish sites would never program with java applets
ListZilla – lets me export lists like this
Live HTTP Headers – lets you catch all the background redirects
MeasureIt – measures stuff on the page in pixels
PDF Download – because we all hate PDF’s so now you have a choice
Pearl Crescent Page Saver Basic – saves visible or full page screen shots
PrefBar – lets you turn off things on the page, play with your user agent and so on
Searchbar Autosizer – makes it possible to keep lots of stuff on your toolbar w/o taking up much real estate
SearchStatus – lots and lots of quick links to lots and lots of info about the website you are on
SEO For Firefox – give you lots of really quick and useful SEO info
ShowIP – because sometimes you need know
Skype extension for Firefox – makes phone numbers on web pages skypified for easy calling
StumbleUpon – hey give this post a thumbs up why don’t cha
Tab Mix Plus – makes tabs even better
Web Developer – lots of cool HTML and display functions

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Firefox Extensions

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A few weeks ago I saw a post on Sphinn about organizing your feeds with a three dimensional approach. I use something similar but with a trick I learned from GTD.

I like to sort my feeds by importance and categories. First I’ll put things into category based folders like SEO, Travel, Disney, Celeb News etc. Next I’ll set up special folders for high priority stuff like ego tracking, client tracking, client feeds ETC. If I’m pressed for time I only check these everything else can wait. Next I have aggregators type feeds where I just scan the headlines to see if there is something I want to read. These are the lowest priority I only scan them when I have finished all my work or are killing time. So ideally I want to go through the priority stuff first, then the regular feeds and lastly the scan feeds. Since 99% of feed readers force you use alpha sorting this is problematic. Here’s my solution …

Put the @ sign in front of the priority stuff first @me, @client, @company, etc so the important stuff is now first. Now to put the scan stuff last I use a “Z” like Z-seo, Z-social, Z-widgets, and so on.

This helps keeps thing in order and organized, now if only Google reader would work with folders on my mobile phone …

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Organizing and Prioritizing Your Feeds

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Michael Arrington has a great post listing what web 2.0 websites he couldn’t live without. I don’t know that there are any sites I couldn’t live without but there sure are a few I use that make my life and my day more productive. I’m also not going to limit myself to web 2.0 sites, but here are the sites that help me GTD:

Gmail: Say what you want about the Google borg and it’s all knowing all seeing tentacles, but web based email is a much better solution than PC based email. It will be great when someone figures out how to merge “cloud computing” with offline computing (Google gears is buggy as all get out) but I’m willing to deal with that one downside in an otherwise stellar program

Google Reader: Again the borg has another foothold in my life, but aside from a few suggestions it’s a stellar product, IMHO much better than bloglines and netvibes. I really wish everybody would give up the partial feed nonsense and the offline gears things worked but again I can deal. I think I’ll dump my client sanitized feed list later this week.

Google Documents: I’ve got 12 bloggers/writers who work for me all over the planet, hands down there is no easier way to share and collaborate on documents. Cloud computing isn’t the spot for confidential documents and things like proposals, but for something that will be in the wild within 2-4 weeks it’s an excellent choice.

Google Analytics: Again it’s not for everyone and you should still be running server logs so people like me have the data to dissect when things go wrong, but you get decent data without getting your hands dirty.

Firefox: This is the one program that I use every single day more than any other. It’s my workhorse. I’ll drop a post with my extensions later this week as well.

Delicious: There are lots and lots of bookmarking solutions delicious is one of the best. With the new toolbar FF integration it’s near perfect and the social sharing aspect also a huge plus.

Twitter: Sure most of the time it’s fun and games, but I’ve hired writers from twitter, solved tech issues, gotten news, and on other accounts even use it for marketing and sales.

Amazon: It’s my number one spot for buying almost everything online, highlight the term use and FF plugin to search amazon once click shopping enabled and I’ve made a purchase in three clicks. Now that they have MP3’s they are giving ITunes a run for the money. I could care less about the price difference the DRM free is the deal maker for me. I’ve bought more albums from Amazon since they went DRM free than I ever bought from ITunes. The Ipod integration is another super feature. If only you could get the unbox videos onto my ipod as well.

ITunes: This is the one piece of software I really wish I could get rid of, and I’d drop in a heart beat if I could. However they made it nearly impossible to get music/video/pictures impossible to get on and off of your iPod without it. There are workarounds and alternatives but they are clunky, cumbersome and buggy at best … damn you itunes you ruined it … damn you all to hell (planet of the apes reference for you youngins)

Trillian: My friends are all real particular about which IM/Chat they use. Trillian makes it possible for me to communicate with everyone no matter where they are. Upgrade to pro ($25) and you can even chat with GTalk.

Wordpress: I have a love/hate relationship with wordpress, they make it really easy to publish and I use it in tons of places. If they would just be a little SEO aware and stop making decisions that make it necessary to use plugins to make it more search engine friendly out of the box everybody’s life would be sooooo much easier.

Tripit: I don’t use it everyday but it does make it really easy to keep track of all your travel stuff. Combine it with filters/rules in Gmail and the magic of automation simplifies your life.

Grand Central: This seemingly simple software enables me to route calls wherever I want my cell, VOIP, my wife’s cell, the pizza parlor (just kidding). If you travel overseas and don’t want to get screwed on rate changes it’s perfect.

Digg: I wish you would die I hate you just slightly less than Itunes. I have to play your game for now, but when you die I will dance a jig on your grave … twice … with tap shoes. I say a prayer every night that Mixx will stomp you into the ground

Blog Desk: this is my #2 workhorse right after firefox it lets me write and upload to multiple blogs. The single best feature is the image editing. I can uplod from a file or the clip board (I could kiss you for this feature), I can also resize and crop without opening photoshop, I so think I have a serious man crush on you.

So there ya have it. Feel free to make your own list and drop a link to it in the comments below. While we’re at it I’ll tag some people like Jason Calacanis, Danny Sullivan, Barry Schwartz, Steve Rubel, Bill Hartzer, and Jeremiah Owyang to see if they are willing to share.

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What Websites and Programs Do You Use to Get Things Done

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So after coming back from a vacation after SES I was reminded bandwidth and download speeds are still very much an issue.

The Thursday after SES San Jose we drove to Anaheim to visit the second happiest place on earth, Disneyland (shocking I know). While in Anaheim we planned a day trip to Catalina Island, where I was going to do a little scuba diving. Faced with the choice of getting as much client work out the door before I left, or planning/booking all of my travel plans, I chose to do the client work and book things on the go.

Since I’m paying $60 a month for my verizon card I don’t use the $10 a day hotel internet anymore. While Verizon is faster than dialup, broadband speed it ain’t. In fact big splashy graphics, flash, or audio files are torture to download. So when evaluating scuba tour sites, if the potential companies websites didn’t load (which was about half of them) they were eliminated from consideration. The person who got my business wasn’t the person with the fancy graphics or design with the most “sizzle”, it was one who had a website I could use.

What you don’t run a travel website so you think this doesn’t pertain to you? I’ve been in a cab with my crackberry addict blackberry wielding friend, looking for a restaurant and experienced the exact same problem with download times and flash. Am I suggesting that the web jump back to 1999? Not by any stretch of the imagination, what I’m saying is don’t build your website and only look at it from a broadband connection. Load it on a mobile device and see what happens, try it from a mobile hot spot or wireless laptop card. Try it on a smart phone, more and more people use them in fact some of my friends have more than one smart phone.

Don’t think of this as limitation, think of it as an opportunity you currently aren’t utilizing. Think of this as a market your competition isn’t going after. Think of it something you can do to get more traffic and customers. I’ve already seen people shopping on an iPhone and more are coming … trust me.

This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant. Be sure not to miss the Thesis Wordpress Theme review.

Why You Still Need to Be concerned with Bandwidth and Download Speeds

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Ok I’m going to be testing out twitter at SES if you think you might want to connect with me twitter is an option. Here’s what you need to do.

1) go to twitter and sign up
2) go to my profile and add me as a friend
3) next week send me a direct message (the link is in the right hand box) the direct message will come straight to my phone
4) You won’t be able to send me a direct message unless I’ve reciprocated your “friend add” (you might want to do it before I’m actually at SES, hint hint)
5) If I know who you are, have seen your nick or you can get me into an exclusive invite only party (and you mention that) you stand better shot of me adding you back than someone I’ve never heard of or from
6) Yes that does indeed make me a socialite search party whore, so just deal with it

This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant. Be sure not to miss the Thesis Wordpress Theme review.

Twittering at SES

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