Mrs. Mecomber's Scrapbook

Talking technology, computers, and the Internet… for the average computer user

Archive for February, 2008

Kontactr Contact Form for Bloggers

Feb 28

Posted by Mrs. Mecomber in blogs, free stuff | 1 Comment

I saw this in action at another blogger’s page, and looked into it. It is SO COOL! It’s Kontactr, a free personal contact form for your blog or website. I love it! It looks so professional, is a breeze to install, and hides my email from spammers. In the early bloggy days, I left me email as a means for people to comment, and it’s probably no surprise to anyone that I get tons of spam now. Ugh.

Check out the contact form in action! I have it at my New York Traveler.net. Isn’t that cool?! Now, click the button in my sidebar that says “contact me.” A contact form will pop up. Isn’t that cool?! I love this thing!

Got a blog and want one? Go here: Kontactr.

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Free Flashcards Site

Feb 27

Posted by Mrs. Mecomber in educational programs | Comments off

I found a great website offering free flash cards. The website is http://www.flashcardfriends.com. It is free to join!

It’s a “safe for kids” website, but there’s much more to the website than your typical ABC flashcards. Want to learn Arabic, Chinese, German, or brush up on your political science or neurology skills? Wow, everything is here. Check out the “Browse by Category” link on the home page. Holy cow! Also, there are flashcards for the standardized tests like the SATs, ACTs, and GREs! This site is amazing.

There’s a good video here if you’d like to know more about it. Here’s the full scoop from the company:

Flashcard Friends Combines Social Networking and Online Learning

Second generation Web 2.0 entrepreneurs create a FREE “social learning” website for students, homeschoolers and teachers

Belmont, CA. – February 21, 2008 – Flashcard Friends combines social networking—a la Facebook and MySpace—with online learning. The inspiration for Flashcard Friends came when the founders of the company, Kendall and Ryan Hogan (now ages 15 and 12) were being forced to create flashcards by their whip-cracking father. They complained that “flashcards are lame…why can’t we do them on the Internet…and why can’t they be fun like MySpace.” Their father, Mike, a web 2.0 entrepreneur, started asking questions about how it might work. Kendall and Ryan described a social network where students could create flashcards and share them with their classmates; or teachers could create flashcards and share them with their students.

With the help of their father, Ryan and Kendall defined what they wanted their website to do. Then their father recruited a top-notch team of developers and got it built. You can now see their website at www.Flashcardfriends.com. Following in their father’s footsteps, Kendall and Ryan are second generation web 2.0 entrepreneurs.

Old school (printed) flashcards are a powerful and proven memorization tool. By using them, Kendall and Ryan were able to substantially improve their test scores. But online flashcards enable a lot of very powerful capabilities. For example, spelling, pronunciation of foreign words, automated testing and correction, images, all of this and more is a snap with Flashcard Friends.

Once the flashcards are in the system, you can share them with friends. The Hogan kids are now looking forward to the day when they return from summer break, only to inherit online flashcards from the class ahead of them. In addition to finding flashcards through friends, you can navigate through flashcard decks by category (e.g. math > algebra), or search by tags, keywords, and more.

Some of the website’s functionality:
• Create flashcards with text, pictures and sounds (ideal for foreign languages)
• Four different learning modes: find one that fits you, or use them all
• Auto-magically creates tests from the flashcards and then corrects them
• Uses social networking to manage sharing card decks
• Find existing flashcards by subject, school, teacher, book and more
• Speak into your computer and add the recording to the cards instantly
• Turns a spelling list into spelling flashcards with a spoken version of each word
• Includes web 2.0 technologies like user ratings, bookmarking and tagging
• …and much more

Flashcard Friends enables students to create flashcards, share them, memorize them and then test themselves. Flashcards can be used at every level, from Kindergarten to post-graduate, and for every topic, from learning colors to preparing for the legal bar exam, learning a language, or studying for the SAT.

Nancy Ferraro 5th Grade Teacher, Granite Bay, CA: “I was very excited to discover Flashcard Friends. I introduced it to my 5th grade students, and we have been using it ever since. The students like how easy the site is to navigate, but they are so jazzed to see their friends’ flashcards. My students have already exchanged flashcards on multiplication, fractions, the 13 colonies, and space. All this in one week! I will definitely use this site for all of my classroom flashcard needs.”

About Flashcard Friends
Flashcard Friends, the social learning website, is pioneering the powerful combination of social networking and online learning. The company was founded by students, for students. The entire website is free to all; students, teachers, homeschoolers, everyone. You can register for free at www.Flashcardfriends.com. For more information call (650) 595-2400, or email mike (at) Flashcardfriends.com.

See web demos of Flashcardfriends.com here: http://Flashcardfriends.com/videos.php

Got kids who need help? Are you even an adult who needs help? This is a very impressive flashcard website. I was impressed with the massive amount of “decks” of flashcards available. Can’t be beat, mom– it’s free!

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YouTube Outage Caused by Pakistan

Feb 26

Posted by Mrs. Mecomber in security news, technology | Comments off

I noticed that YouTube was not online Sunday. Anyone else notice? I, for one, was shocked. Since YouTube is so enormous and probably the most website on the Net, I thought it must have been something really big to disrupt service. I read this morning that it was caused by Pakistan’s attempt to censor YouTube.

Most of the world’s Internet users lost access to YouTube for several hours Sunday after an attempt by Pakistan’s government to block access domestically affected other countries.

The outage highlighted yet another of the Internet’s vulnerabilities, coming less than a month after broken fiber-optic cables in the Mediterranean took Egypt off line and caused communications problems from the Middle East to India.

… An Internet expert likened the cause of the outage to ‘identity theft’ by a Pakistani telecommunications company, which accidentally started advertising itself as the fastest route to YouTube. But instead of serving up videos of skateboarding dogs, it sent the traffic into oblivion.

On Friday, the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority ordered 70 Internet service providers to block access to YouTube.com, because of anti-Islamic movies on the video-sharing site, which is owned by Google Inc.

The authority did not specify what the offensive material was, but a PTA official said the ban concerned a trailer for an upcoming film by Dutch lawmaker Geert Wilders, who has said he plans to release a movie portraying Islam as fascist and prone to inciting violence against women and homosexuals.

The block was intended to cover only Pakistan, but extended to about two-thirds of the global Internet population, starting at 1:47 p.m. EST Sunday, according to Renesys Corp., a Manchester, N.H., firm that keeps track of the pathways of the Internet for telecommunications companies and other clients.

… John Palfrey, executive director for the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School, said that while all the facts in the case are not yet known, it appeared that the repercussions were due to Pakistan taking a relatively heavy-handed approach in trying to censor YouTube.

‘It points in many respects to the difficulty, if not the folly, in Internet filtering at the state level,’ he said.

Misrouting occurs every year or so among the world’s Internet carriers, usually as a result of typos or other errors, Underwood said. In a more severe example, a Turkish telecom provider in 2004 started advertising that it was the best route to all of the Internet, causing widespread outages for many Web sites over several hours.

‘Nobody ran any viruses or worms or malicious code. This is just the way the Internet works. And it’s not very secure or reliable,’ Underwood said, adding that there is no real solution to the problem on the table.

You can read more of the story here. This is a good example of how insecure the Internet really is.

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IZEARanks Rocks

Feb 26

Posted by Mrs. Mecomber in blogs, news | 2 Comments

The newest blog ranking system in the blogosphere is the illustrious IZEARanks, the brainchild of Ted Murphy (Murphy is a “serial entrepreneur” and CEO of PayPerPost, IZEA, MindComet, Social Spark, Rock Startup, and those really cool Blogger’s Choice Awards). IZEARanks has a system called “RealRank” that determines a blog’s value by its actual traffic and content. Gone are the days of arbitrary valuation (like Page Rank), the inaccurate stats of the toolbar (Alexa), and the begging for alms from other bloggers (Technorati’s “authority” numbers). RealRank is a formula that monitors your unique visitors, page views, and inbound links. The clincher is that the valuation determination is completely candid. This is from the IZEARanks FAQ page:

Unlike other ranking systems, the RealRank scoring algorithm is public. The system weights blogs 70% on daily unique visitors, 20% by daily active inbound links and 10% by daily page views as reported by ITK. Participants can choose to expose just their RealRank score or expand reporting to include other data such as pageviews and visits. This provides advertisers with the most comprehensive and relevant view of a blog’s ability to meet specific campaign goals. RealRank is the first site ranking service that focuses exclusively on measuring the traffic and influence of individual blogs throughout the blogosphere.

I don’t know about you, but I’ve been jumping for joy ever since RealRank was debuted a few weeks ago. I use it for all my blogs. My travel blog is Number One in travel at IZEARanks.com!

There’s a lot you can do with your RealRank stats. You can check your own blogs stats, compare all your blogs’ stats with each other, compare your blog with other blogs, and more. Here’s how Mrs. Mecomber’s Scrapbook rates:

Hmmm…. looks like I could use some more visitors to boost my ranks, wouldn’t you say? With RealRank, the lower the number the better (as in a #1 RealRank means you are NUMBER ONE!) This blog has a way to go before reaching number one, but I can see where I need to improve, thanks to RealRank. The next photo shows a comparison of my three blogs:

The great thing with RealRank is: the more the merrier! The more blogs that join the IZEARanks community, the more it adds to the value of the entire blogosphere. RealRank is the free tool that measures your place in the community, and lets you (and others) see the value of your blog. It is far superior to any other blog ranking system, ever.

I highly recommend that if you have a blog, use RealRank. It’s very easy to use– it’s a piece of code that you insert in your html, just as you do with stat counters and such. Plus, IZEARanks.com offers a little badge that you can place in your sidebar, to display your RealRank status (you also have the option of keeping your stats private). The time has finally come for us bloggers to have a worthy, standardized blog ranking system. RealRank meets this need. The more bloggers who join, the better our blogs are valuated. Check out IZEARanks.com for more!

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Eye in the Sky, My Eye!

Feb 26

Posted by Mrs. Mecomber in surveillance, technology | Comments off

Forget all that “eye in the sky” stuff. The Big Brother and Inc. want to follow you everywhere, watching everything you watch! This is unbelievable.

What better way to track people’s video consumption than to have someone follow them around all day — literally from the time they wake up until they retire at night — making detailed notes about when and how they watch, listen, surf, read, play video games, download, text and talk on the phone?

That’s exactly how a new $3.5 million study–funded by the Nielsen Co.–will track the media usage habits of a panel of some 450 consumers in separate phases throughout this year beginning next month.

Some people will do anything for a buck. This is creepy. Do you think there’s anything wrong with being completely monitored for marketing purposes?

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