Today’s Guest Blogger is Ian grist from TechandTonic. Ian shares his views about the current state of Technology, Business, and Life in general. When he’s not blogging, Ian is playing the bass guitar in the band Dying to Wake.

Now that I have a partner in my love of Snuggies (HeyStephanie!), I’ve done a lot of thinking about the current popularity and unsure future of Snuggies. Are these just going to be a temporary fad? Or are they actually going to stick around and secure a foothold in our society much like blankets did in the 1930′s. Or maybe that was hundreds of years ago. Anyway, your standard blanket has been around for a long time. If some newer blanket technology exists, why are we still using the old kind? Just like no one is still using the 1st generation iPod because newer ones are cheaper, with more storage and color screens – why in the world are people still staying warm with standard blankets?!

Let me take it back a little farther with a better example. In the mid 60′s, the 8-track first came to market. It grew in popularity, and became the established standard for mobile audio throughout the 70′s. However, with the invention of the CD player, and its price dropping over the next ten years, it quickly became the obvious replacement to the 8-track with far superior sound quality. This was the obvious and typical progression as better technology became available, people gave up the older stuff. Such should be the progression of blankets to Snuggies.

It’s my hope that within the next 10 years we will, as a society, begin to phase out the use of regular blankets as people begin to realize that Snuggie’s are far superior. Any standard blanket can be significantly improved with the addition of sleeves. Or skeletor.

This not only provides protection against He-Man, but also provides sleeves for easy access, warmth, and allows you to do all sorts of activities without being inhibited by all the extra material that comes with a standard blanket. They can even be improved with the addition of some Ninja Turtles screen printing. Who can argue with the protection of a half shell and the warmth of Snuggie material?

I hope I’ve provided a convincing case for the longevity of the Snuggie in our culture. I, for one, will not be using blankets for the rest of my life as I transition over to the warm convenience of snuggies.

Today’s Guest Blogger is Alana from Good Girl Gone Blog. Alana is a college student and a member of Twenty Something Bloggers. She’s currently interning at a company called Springpad which looks pretty cool but I won’t spill the beans on what they’re all about. I’ll let Alana do that instead.

My name is Alana, but you can call me Good Girl Gone Blog. I’m just a regular college student, stressing about classes, going to parties and doing some major blogging on the side. To tell you the truth, I never even read blogs until this summer, when a mentor of mine told me I couldn’t become a journalist until I started following blogs, and writing one of my own. From then on, I was hooked.

I wouldn’t call myself a social media expert, because I’m definitely still learning. In that way, I’m kind of like Luke Skywalker, a paduan hoping to learn from the Jedi masters. Fortunately for me, I landed a fabulous internship working with a bunch of tech-savvy mac users. I like to think of my boss as my own personal Yoda, minus the confusing speech patterns. She’s taught me so much already about sites like Twitter, Delicious, and Bit.ly. Plus, she and her team have developed a really cool new product that I thought I’d share with you, my fellow paduans and social media Jedis. (Perhaps I’ve taken this metaphor a little too far…)

It’s called Springpad and it’s perfect for a busy girl like myself. Imagine a way to organize your entire life in a set of online notebooks! No more lost sticky notes, grocery lists written on the back of receipts or forgotten recipes, with Springpad, you can create the everyday lists with a little extra pizzazz from the Internet.

Check out this demo and see for yourself:

What’s even cooler about Springpad, is that it’s a great tool for bloggers. Suppose I enjoy the most amazing bagel of my life at a restaurant in Boston, and want to share that experience with my readers. With Springpad, I can write my blog post and then pull up a restaurant listing from “Yelp” that my readers can add to their Springpads. What’s even more awesome is that my brand name will appear alongside the restaurant listing. And yes, I did write a blog entry (complete with a SpringIt link, of course) about my favorite bagel.

Here’s a video showing how you can engage your readers by incorporating Springpad into your blog:

There’s a lot more I could tell you about Springpad, but why not check out the Website for yourself? With all the craziness of the holiday season, you could use a little organization in your life! So hey, why not simplify it a bit?

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Today’s Guest Blogger is Amanda from This Crazy Miracle Called Life where she blogs about all aspects of life and whatever “random fabulosity” that comes to mind. Amanda is currently in college earning her nursing degree, and in her spare time, she enjoys traveling, creating, spending time with family and friends, and planning her upcoming wedding.

Since it’s Back to School time and a lot of us are getting back into college, I figured what better topic for Stephanie’s monthly Social Media Guest Blog than helpful scholarly resources. Now sure, some of you are done with college or chose other plans, but these things can work for many different things as well.

Part 1: Social Media, College, and You

(Today at Hey Stephanie!)

• Search Smart
• Notes & Documents
• Project Planning
• Questions & Answers
• Ultimate Interactions
• Cheap Textbooks
  

Let’s go!!

Search Smart

Mahalo

• Chunk It is brand new, in beta, and it’s totally rocking my world!
• If you’re just writing a simple essay where a few Google sources are fine, here’s what it can do:

• Are you up against a deadline with an 8-page research paper due in the morning? Working with huge databases and journal articles? Check this out…

• Their site has many more examples, but what this can do in PubMed, EBSCOhost, [insert your major's preferred database here] will just amaze you.

Note Sharing Sites

• Two pretty similar sites, Scribd and DocStoc both serve the same purpose – hosting documents (many filetypes supported) that you can share (or make private) with friends or the entire world (via the sites or neat tools like embedding). The sites even look similar, so you can browse both. You can find all kinds of things like course notes, articles and papers on huge ranges of topics, scanned copyrighted documents (SparkCharts, scanned textbooks and study guides), and so much more. I’ll kind of leave this one at that, but I do want to warn you to use your own personal moral/legal judgment with the scans, and use extreme care as far as plagiarism goes. Just because someone posts a paper on Scribd doesn’t mean you can download it, turn it in, and your professor will be sure you wrote it.
• FYI, SearchDocs.net has the ability to search both sites as well as others, but that’s all it does.
• I’m keeping an eye on sites like ShareNotes and Incredicampus. They have a lot of growing to do, but you might be able to find something, and ShareNotes especially seems to have a lot of potential.

Project Planning

Notefish

• Notefish is a lot of fun. In Internet Explorer or Firefox, you just a need a little browser addon, and while you research your project or paper or whatever it is you’re working on, you can clip bits and pieces to add to the page. You can move things around, organize them, and basically, make your own little scrapbook of plans. You can share it, too! Check out this public page for a good example: Trip to NYC Notefish
  

Questions & Answers

Yahoo Answers

• Clueless on that last trig problem? Confused on a topic and you’d like to talk to a few professionals (or self-proclaimed “professionals”…. hey, we’re talking free here, people!)? Or feeling wise with your new scholarly knowledge and want to help others out? Yahoo Answers is the place. You can’t show up and post your entire chemistry worksheet and hope for someone to do it for you. You can, however, jump right in and search past questions, ask questions of your own, and use this site to explore, get help with specific things, ask for clarification perhaps on a math concept you don’t understand (maybe with an example problem), etc. Make sure you help back though – you lose “points” for asking questions and gain points for answering questions. Note that this is not a homework-help site – it’s a site for asking any question about anything, and a lot of the people there are really great about helping with educational/career/project questions.
• Fluther - another fun, similar site!
  

Ultimate Interaction

Ning

• Ning is the site where anyone can start their own social network for any topic! This has several applications for us:
• Start a course Ning for all the members in your class to share notes, discuss, etc. Many professors are starting to do this as well.
• Search for non-private course Nings already open. There are several professor-headed networks for people who need help in certain subjects or for students passionate about specialized majors. Also, there are several major-specific networks to join where you can make friends, share tips, blog, have discussions, post pictures, videos, etc. (Nursing major? We have almost 1200 nurses on Ning at NursesConnect) The bigger the groups, the more fun they are! (And Ning is definitely not just for school – run a few searches and you’ll find a group for just about anything!)

Cheap Textbooks

Textbook Revolt

• Sick of paying too much for books? Well we all know there’s power in numbers and our generation kind of rocks. So, why not boycott the textbook companies and start using sites like Textbook Revolt? I have yet to complete a successful “transaction” on this site, but I’ve heard many success stories, they just got a new owner, and the more students that join, the more the site will help us all!

Price Comparison Sites

• Two of my favorites are Campusi and BigWords. I never buy from campus bookstores anymore and I lost track of how many hundreds of dollars I’ve saved. Seriously.
  

That’s all for Part 1!

I hope you enjoyed it. Don’t forget to check my blog next week (Monday and Wednesday) for the rest. I have more links and surprises that you will not want to miss!

Thanks to Stephanie for letting me share my expertise, and thanks, readers, for listening! Feel free to comment with your favorite sites, and if you are struggling with anything college-related that you think the internet may be able to solve, go ahead and post and I’ll see what I can do to address it next week.

(Images from free stock photo site, http://www.sxc.hu)

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I have officially dumped YouTube. He was old, played out, and everyone got a piece of him. I moved on to a player that’s shiny and new. His name is Viddler.

I discovered Viddler from Demo Girl’s screencast on ididwork and didn’t think much of the player until I saw Viddler’s president, Rob Sandie, showcasing how you can customize your player.

We’re talking about customizing the shade and color of your player, a custom logo, and yes—you can even decide where your videos link to!

I’m all for customization and Viddler just took it to the next level. Here’s my custom logo in a recent video did for my company called “Sharing is Easy“. It’s not as cool as Rob’s. You won’t see a guy dancing in the background but it’s a start.

For an awesome step by step tutorial on how to customize your Viddler player, check out Alex Carpenter’s blog. He even has screenshots of other custom logos by Viddler creators.

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Special thanks to Jun Loayza, Chief Marketing Officer at Future Delivery, for this post on 12seconds. Don’t forget to check out his blog on Living the Startup Life.

12 seconds is not a lot of time for a lot. You can’t really watch a Youtube video, read a blog post, or even microwave a hot pocket (the entrepreneur’s food of choice). However, in today’s society where attention spans are short and the barriers to meet new people have significantly decreased, short busts of information and messaging are exactly what fill the gaps between the work we do at the office or when we’re stuck with writer’s block.

Enter 12seconds.tv. Think of it as the Twitter for YouTube. If you use Twitter, you know that this is a breeding ground for bloggers and startups to keep in touch, share ideas and information, and promote their products or brand. So it follows that 12seconds could potentially be used in the same way.

While browsing through my friend’s short impromptu videos I think to myself, “This is going to be the next Twitter!”… and I’ll tell you why:

1. 12 seconds is perfect for bloggers who want to convey a simple burst of information
2. It easily syncs with your Twitter so that you automatically post your video link on your Twitter as soon as you record your vid
3. It doesn’t suffer from decision paralysis. On Youtube, you can create a video about ANYTHING. On 12Seconds, it greatly limits your decision making and makes you focus on one core theme for the vid.

For a while I wanted to be a “Youtube star.” We’ve all seen them, those people who have the weekly wrap-up show or some funny little sitcom that they post up every other day. However, I just don’t have the time, let alone the creativity and resources to become a star. Plus, it’s so saturated that even if I had good content, I just wouldn’t be discovered. This is why I’m so excited about 12Seconds! I have the opportunity to apply all that I’ve learned about what sticks with YouTube, Twitter, and blogging and apply it to 12Seconds. It’s brand new so there is no competition, I can stand out immediately, and I can be a pioneer in the types of 12Second vids that I have.

So how can you stand out at 12Seconds? Still a little early to tell, but here are my predictions:

1. Pick a topic and stick to it. Your friends read your blog or twitter because they’re your friends and are interested in you. People outside your network could care less about what you do on your own time. If you want a steady stream of subscribers, you need to become a thought leader on a topic. I predict something similar on 12Seconds. What kind of entertainment value you’re able to present to your viewer is up to your creativity and personality.
2. Start conversations. You’re not able to video reply someone on 12Seconds yet, but I’m sure you’ll be able to do that eventually. But, you are able to do it if you have the person’s Twitter. Just add the “@username” to your video’s title and you’ll reply to them via your Twitter account.
3. Use the blog widget. There are twitter, meebo, and flickr widgets, so why not use the 12Second widget? This is such a great way for you to personally interact with your readership.

I feel that anything right now that is targeting bloggers and providing them with a vehicle to get their message and personal brand out there is hitting at gold. Look at Twitter and Plurk. You can even take Tradevibes as a great example: if you provide a group of people with a tool to distribute their brand or product, the group of people will use it and run with it.

I predict that 12Seconds will be successful, so hurry up and get your username before someone takes it! See you on the channels…

* If you would like an invite to 12Seconds, feel free to reach out to me at jun (dot) Loayza (at) gmail.com

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Today’s guest blogger is Maxie, author of I Hate So Much and member of Twenty Something Bloggers. We’re both taking part in the 20somethingbloggers’ Big Blog Swap. Special thanks to Ben Boudreau for organizing this event and thanks to Maxie for her guest post.

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Hi everyone! My name is Maxie and I normally write at I Hate So Much… but for today, the day of the 20 something bloggers swap, I’ll be writing here. I don’t really write about any certain topic on my blog, but for this switch I will be writing about what Stephanie usually writes about– Social Networks and other Internet related matters. This is perfect for me because I’m basically a slave to the social networks of the Internet. The thing I’m a slave to the most? My blog.

Some people may not think of blogging as a social networking tool, but I think it’s the most powerful of them all. When I started blogging it was just as an outlet for my every day thoughts. I never imagined that anyone would want to read it, let alone subscribe to it. The more people read my blog, the more I wrote. I would go and read my commenters’ blogs and give them my feedback and thoughts on what they had written. Even though blogging started as a solitary activity, it turned into much more.

I’ve been blogging for a little over 6 months and I’ve built many friendships with people I’ve met through my blog. My summer is filled with trips with bloggers, blogger meetups, and the prospect of writing about all of it on the place where it all began. My own place on the internet that has turned into much, much more.

For me blogging isn’t just a way to let out your feelings and talk to others– it changes everything. It changes the way I look at things, how I observe situations, and even my plans for the future. It has changed my life in huge ways and I wouldn’t trade the experience for anything (other than maybe a billion dollars.)

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