Here’s this week’s Five Faves. Five favorite sites that offer an incredibly useful tool or two, a stunning design (eye candy) or some thought-provoking thinkery. Feel free to sprinkle some of your own faves that you’ve discovered recently, in the comments.

1. Springwise

Springwise is one of the world’s leading sources for new business ideas, powered by a network of 8,000 spotters.

Springwise scans the globe for the most promising business ventures, ideas and concepts that are ready for regional or international adaptation, expansion, partnering, investments or cooperation. We ferociously track more than 400 global offline and online business resources, as well as taking to the streets, cameras at hand.

Need ideas?  Want to see what’s new and upcoming around the world?  Springwise is brain food for entrepreneurial minds!  Subscribe to the newsletter, visit the site once a week or browse ideas by industry.  You’ll find something that’ll get ya’ thinkn’.

Check out their Top Ten Business Ideas for 2010.

2. AskCH

AskCH is a healthcare tool you can send a question about a healthcare cost or definition via a twitter direct message and receive an answer.

Imagine leaving the doctor’s office with your sick child and you need to pick up a prescription.  You send a direct message via twitter to askch in this format: Cost of [drug name] near [zipcode].

So for example: “d askch cost of lexapro near 37211″ would return your answer.  You have to follow askch on twitter.

Other questions you could ask via a direct twitter message include: What is [drug name] – Example: “d askch generic for plavix” and What is [health issue] – Example: “d askch what is diabetes”.  Check out AskCH for more exmples.

3. FoxFilter

Need to filter your own web browsing in Firefox?  Wasting too much time browsing the web?  Install the Firefox add-on FoxFilter to help you stay focused on your work.  Or use FoxFilter as a parental control to protect your family’s browsing on the web.

FoxFilter is a personal content filtering add-on for Firefox that automatically protects you from a number of websites as well as allowing you to include sites.  Can’t seem to pull away from Facebook?  Add it in the blocked list.  Need to add an exception?  You can do that too.

Check it out.  FoxFilter is free but there’s also a premium service with more features at $9.95 a year.

4. RescueTime

RescueTime is a tool that allows you to easily understand and optimize how you and your team spends their time and attention. One of the most important things about RescueTime is that there is NO DATA ENTRY. You install a small application on the computers at your company and we magically track what software and which web sites are actively being used.

Read more about RescueTime and watch the product tour.

5. How to use Facebook with a feed reader

I love stuff like this.  I use Google Reader for my RSS reading.  This article explains how to add your Facebook Posts, Notes, Notifications and Status message to your RSS reader.  Enjoy.

That’s it. Have fun!!

Here’s this week’s Five Faves. Five favorite sites that offer an incredibly useful tool or two, a stunning design (eye candy) or some thought-provoking thinkery. Feel free to sprinkle some of your own faves that you’ve discovered recently, in the comments.

1. GQueues

GQueues is a web app that allows you to keep lists of ordered items.  It looks and feels like Google made it but they didn’t.  It does however interact with your Google account because it’s built on top of the Google App Engine.

GQueues makes it easy to enter to do items as well as categorize items and reorder to do items. GQueues can also integrate with your Google Calendar.  You can set the date and time for a task as well as have an SMS or email message notify you.

A feature called Smart Queues lets you pull multiple types, or tagged items in a list. Make sure you check out some of the helpful GQueues videos to get started.

2. Web Design

Here’s an article with a huge amount of web design to take you to the edge of design – 50 Best Web Design Blog Posts In 2009.

Includes CSS, Photoshop, Freelancing, Best Practices, Promoting you design, Free Fonts, Forms, eCommerce, Portfolio Design, Minimalism, Web Design Books, Web Design for Blogs, much more.  You can never get enough incredible design ideas and inspiration.

3. Knowem

Knowem is a website that will create a profile for you at over 350 social media networks.  Why would you want to do this?  Whether you’re a company or an individual, Knowem helps you secure your brand name or personal name before someone else does.

You can check your name instantly to see how many of the sites you’re already registered at.  Knowem offers a free account in addition to paid plans that offer more features.   A nice feature they provide is listing all those social sites into categories which makes it easier to work with.

4. All Things Tech for 2010

Over on TechCrunch, Michael Arrington wrote 2010: My Fifth Annual List Of The Tech Products I Love And Use Every Day.  Check this list out and see if you’re using anything them.  I’m sure you’ll find something new to check out.  While you’re there, check out their Ten Technologies That Will Rock 2010.

5. SlideDeck

SlideDeck provides a way to display content on your website in a sliding panel metaphor.

There is a lite (free) version as well as a pro version.  Built on jQuery, SlideDeck is easy to install with a few lines of code.  I fired up my local WordPress and tried it out on a page.  Pretty slick.  The free version offers a simple interface that presents your content clearly.

That’s it.  Have fun!!

Here’s this week’s Five Faves.  Five favorite sites that offer an incredibly useful tool or two, a stunning design (eye candy) or some thought-provoking thinkery.  Feel free to sprinkle some of your own faves that you’ve discovered recently, in the comments.

1. DocVerse

DocVerse allows you to share your Microsoft Word, PowerPoint and Excel over the web in real-time by installing a plugin.

If you’re working on a document off the web it will synchronize using DocVerse when you’re back online.

There is a free account as well as paid accounts that offer number of documents and users who can share documents.

2. Niche Watch

Niche Watch is a free SEO tool that allows you to check the competition for keywords or keyword phrases that you might want to use for a new or an existing website.

By entering your keywords or keyword phrases, Niche Watch will go out to the web and retrieve some of the top sites that rank for those keywords.

It returns some standard SEO information including backlinks to a domain as well as web page, page rank of domain and web page and other attributes that are important to look at when trying to rank for keywords and keyword phrases.

3. Web Design Inspiration

Need some web design inspiration? Here’s a great article on 35 Fresh and Cool Web Design Interfaces for Inspiration over on aext.net.  Which one do you like?

4. Thesis WordPress Theme

My blog uses the Thesis WordPress Theme.  I have not changed the look too much from its original design when you first intall it.  But this article lists 110+ Thesis Design Customizations You have to See to Believe.

If you’re a blogger and use Thesis now or are thinking about purchasing it, this article will option your eyes to the possibilities that thesis can become.

5. PowerPoint Twitter Tools

This is cool.  You can provide instantaneous feedback on your PowerPoint presentations via twitter with these free PowerPoint Twitter Tools.

Some feature include:

• Twitter Voting – Bar Chart and Pie Chart
• Mood Meter
• Crowd Meter
• and more…

Worried about what might pop-up on your presentation, not to worry, these tools use TidyTweet, which provides a free service to eliminate inappropriate tweets, automatically or manually.

That’s it.  Have fun!!

Here’s this week’s Five Faves.  Five favorite sites that offer an incredibly useful tool or two, a stunning design (eye candy) or some thought-provoking thinkery.  Feel free to sprinkle some of your own faves that you’ve discovered recently, in the comments.

1. Evite

It’s that time of year – parties, parties, parties.  A great way to invites folks and make sure they get all the information they need is to use Evite.

Evite allows you to create free invitations and is the top online invitation and social planning website.  Select your invite design, add email addresses and send via email or text messages.

Evite will track who can come to your event as your invitees reply.  Other options include:

• Adding polls for your guests to answer – find out what movie, food or music everybody prefers
• Letting guests select items to bring – great for potlucks and other group-run events
• Allowing guests to invite more people to the event
• Sending your invitation to your friends’ phones and Facebook inboxes

2. A Couple of Five Articles

Drew McLellan wrote 5 reasons why other people will spread your personal brand.  Drew points out some of the attributes that you need to possess to carry your personal brand into 2010 and forward.

Talking about 2010, John Jantsch Founder of Duct Tape Marketing wrote about 5 Trends That Will Shape Small Business in 2010 over at American Express’ Small Business Open Forum.

John talks about what we’ve seen in 2009 and looks forward to what 2010 will show us along with some apps that will help you navigate the trends of 2010.

3. Let’s Get Political

While keeping tabs on H.R. 4173, the Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2009, I came upon a website I hadn’t seen or used and will be using more often – OpenCongress.

“OpenCongress brings together official government data with news and blog coverage, social networking, public participation tools, and more to give you the real story behind what’s happening in Congress.”

4. Another To Do List

Here’s a cool to do web app – TeuxDeux.  Why’s it cool?  It’s Simple.

A visually compelling to-do app, TeuxDeux features include:

• week overview
• check off done tasks
• delete tasks
• move tasks
• someday bucket

5. A PDF of Your Tweets

With tweetbook.in you can generate a pdf of your tweets, replies and favorites.

Yes, it can take a long time to generate a pdf of your tweets.

Here’s a list of 13 Web Apps you might not know about and could help you in your online endeavors.  Have fun.  

1. VLC Media Player

VLC Media Player is a highly portable multimedia player and multimedia framework capable of reading most audio and video formats (MPEG-2, MPEG-4, H.264, DivX, MPEG-1, mp3, ogg, aac …) as well as DVDs, Audio CDs VCDs, and various streaming protocols.

2. Boxee

Boxee is designed for your TV.  To get Boxee on your TV you’ll need to first connect your computer to the TV screen.  You’ll most likely need a DVI/VGA to HDMI cable.

3. The Cloud Player

The Cloud Player is a web-based music player that allows you to…

• Find and play all tracks from SoundCloud
• Save playlists to your Google account
• Make smart playlists based on genre
• Share your playlists with your friends
• Collaborate in making playlists

4. NetVibes

Netvibes is a free web site that lets you personalize your web experience. Take everything that matters to you while online — newspapers, blogs, weather, email, search, videos, photos, social networks, podcasts, widgets, games and funny applications — then bring them together in one single page, your personalized page. Make this page automatically update every time you open it. That’s what netvibes does. And it does so much more.

5. Cheese

Cheese uses your webcam to take photos and videos, applies fancy special effects and lets you share the fun with others.

6. Songbird

Songbird is an open-source customizable music player that’s under active development.

7. Wolfram|Alpha

Wolfram|Alpha is a systematic computational knowledge engine.  Wolfram|Alpha allows you to input free-form natural language which then produces very interesting dynamic results.  Iz cool.

8. Phoenix Image Editor

Aviary.com’s Phoenix is an online image editor…

From basic image retouching to complex effects, Phoenix delivers the key features of a desktop image editor with the simplicity and accessibility of a web-based application.

9. Sumo Paint

Sumo Paint is a thriving online art community.  The primary purpose of the community is to create, share, remix, explore, comment, rate and fave the artwork of its members.

10. Geany

Geany is a small and lightweight Integrated Development Environment. It was developed to provide a small and fast IDE.

Some basic features of Geany include:

• Syntax highlighting
• Code folding
• Symbol name auto-completion
• Construct completion/snippets
• Auto-closing of XML and HTML tags
• Call tipsMany supported filetypes including C, Java, PHP, HTML, Python, Perl, Pascal and more
• Symbol lists
• Code navigation
• Build system to compile and execute your code
• Simple project management
• Plugin interface (see Plugins)

11. Notely.net

Notely is a collection of online tools designed to help all you crazy busy students out there to organize your hectic lives. Whether you’re in University, College or High School, Notely has the tools to help you get organised and achieve better grades.

12. eyeos

eyeos is a web desktop.  All you need is a browser.  The desktop is in the browser with access to many web apps.  Very cool.

eyeos provides functionality for personal use, developers, education, and public administrations like public library networks and other public environments.

13. MindMeister

MindMeister is an online mind mapping tool.  MindMeister brings the concept of mind mapping to the web, using its facilities for real-time collaboration to allow truly global brainstorming sessions.

Here’s this weeks Five Faves.  Five favorite sites that offer an incredibly useful tool or two, a stunning design (eye candy) or some thought-provoking thinkery.  Feel free to sprinkle some of your own faves that you’ve discovered recently, in the comments.

1. JoliCloud

I saw a tweet on twitter about JoliCloud, an operating system built on Ubuntu Linux made for a netbook.  Well, I’ve got an HP Mini 1000 Netbook that I bought in Spring 2009 with Windows XP Home Edition installed on it.

There was a choice to buy the Ubuntu version but I decided not to at that time.  I should have though.  And I was planning on taking time to investigate if someone has retrofitted Windows XP to Ubuntu on the HP Mini.

Well, I decided to download JoliCloud and jump ship on my netbook.  I installed JoliCloud to my hard drive on my HP Mini.

Although it’s in Alpha, which can be a very unstable release version of any software, JoliCloud is very stable.

2. XMind

XMind is a mind-mapping tool that you download and run on your computer.  Mind maps are graphically linked ideas based around a central keyword or phrase to help brainstorm problems, decisions, research, and other tasks.

With XMind you can share your maps online, collaborating with other people to enrich your mind maps.  Features include sharing maps online, export to PDF, Word and PowerPoint, and other features.

3. Seasonal RSS Feed Icons

As much as I’d like to hire designers to take care of everything on my blog, I enjoy running into new web design, icons, fonts and everything that surrounds web design.

I found some Thanksgiving RSS icons you can use during the Thanksgiving season that look incredible on your blog.  Check them out at ArsGrafik.

4. Refollow

There are tons of twitter tools out there but this week I spent some time goofing around with Refollow.

From their website…

Refollow helps you discover, manage, and protect your Twitter social circle.

Here are some of the things you can do with Refollow:

• Manage your Friends and Followers
• Group by Relationships
• Sort by Importance
• Explore Twitter Social Graph
• Discover Relevant Users
• Filter Irrelevant Users
• Batch Follow/Unfollow/Block
• Crowd Tagging and Comments
• Lock Relationships

Refollow is a tool for drilling down into the details of your twitter social network.  Pretty cool.

5. My Writing Nook

A simple and uncluttered online place to write, My Writing Nook offers a place for you to write wherever you happen to be.

My Writing Nook includes features such as:

• Autosave
• Word Count
• Dictionary/Thesaurus Lookup
• Send to Email
• Download to Computer
• Authentication via yourGoogle profile.

If you’re a blogger, this is a great tool to clear your computer screen and get down to writing.

Here’s this weeks Five Faves.  Five favorite sites that offer an incredibly useful tool or two, a stunning design (eye candy) or some thought-provoking thinkery.  Feel free to sprinkle some of your own faves that you’ve discovered recently, in the comments.

1. PageLime

PageLime is a “remote Conent Management System”.  It reads an existing site’s CSS and enables you to edit your website using PageLime.

By placing a CSS class called “cms-editable” in various areas of your web pages, PageLime will allow you to edit those areas.

There’s also an image management feature that allows you to zoom and crop images for your site.  A photo editor allows you to apply various effects right from your browser.

There is nothing to store on your computer when you use PageLime.  It is a hosted service that uses FTP to interact with your website.

PageLime is free and offers paid plans with more features.

2. Passion

Leo Babauta of Zen Habits wrote The Short but Powerful Guide to Finding Your Passion.

This little guide takes you through 10 steps to help you determine what it is you’re passionate about.  What you love doing and making a living at it.

Here are the 10 steps:

1. What are you good at?
2. What excites you?
3. What do you read about?
4. What have you secretly dreamed of?
5. Learn, ask, take notes.
6. Experiment, try.
7. Narrow things down.
8. Banish your fears.
9. Find the time.
10. How to make a living doing it.

Now go read about ‘em.

3. GratitudeLog

The GratitudeLog is…

“…a website where people come together to celebrate happy moments, send simple gifts of appreciation and brighten up each other’s day. It’s based on the simple practice of expressing gratitude daily for wonderful moments in your life.”

What a great idea GratitudeLog is.  A twitter-like community where you follow people and have followers.  You can send emails to invite people to join you at GratitudeLog and there are virtual gifts you can send people.

You can link your Facebook and Twitter accounts to GratitudeLog which will automatically send your Gratitudes to Facebook and Twitter.

When I first visited the site I thought this would be great in a company setting where you’d run GratitudeLog internally.  It would be nice if you could set it up by email domain, like Yammer and have employees use GratitudeLog to enhance the culture of a company.

By the way, Yammer is a great twitter-like tool that is based on email domain that is used within a company but hosted at Yammer.

4. Passwords, Passwords, Passwords

We’re inundated with websites where we have to provide a unique password.  Sometimes we get lazy and use the same password over and over for every website we visit.

That isn’t a good idea because if one password gets stolen then all the websites you use that password for are accessible to anyone who has the password.

There are some simple steps you can take to come up with multiple unique passwords that are memorable for each website you visit that require passwords.

Visit Fix Your Terrible, Insecure Passwords in Five Minutes over on Slate to read about why you need to change your passwords and how to change them to be more secure.

5. Twitter Lists – Listorious

Recently Twitter introduced lists, where you can create your own lists and categorize the people you follow or you can follow other people’s lists.

One website, Listorious, has a directory of “Awesome Lists On Twitter.”

Using the Twitter Lists API, the folks who created Listorious have numerous lists you can checkout from around the twittersphere.

The Listorious 140 Lists lists the most popular lists on twitter.  Check out all the different twitter lists at Listorious.

I’m tweaking my newsletter but in the meantime if you want a couple of extra tips on using twitter lists, please subscribe to my newsletter.

Here are 7 cool web tools to help you with your web work.  From creating online diagrams to an online business card for the web to good old bookmarking apps, a blogging platform and more.  Enjoy!!

1. Creately

Creately is an online diagramming tool I used recently to replace the diagramming stalwart Microsoft Visio.  Although Visio has been around forever and contains many tools to get the job done and much more, you might not want to plunk down the dollars it costs.  Besides, it might be over kill for hat you’re trying to accomplish.

You can create typical flowchart diagrams with Creately’s built-in flowchart objects as well as network diagrams, organizational charts, sitemaps, and more.  All these diagrams have objects that you can drag around on your diagram, tweak and design.

A very cool feature of Creately is the online collaboration, sharing and export features.  You can allow your colleagues to collaborate on a diagram, send it to twitter, export it to an image, embed it, email it, link to it, as well as export it as a pdf.

2. Card.ly

Wouldn’t it be cool to create a web-based business card?  (Yes it would Bill, tell us how.)  Well, browse on over to Card.ly and start creating one.

Card.ly walks you through a 5-step process to create an attractive online business card:

1. Select from a bunch of different social media sites where you hang out at and want people to find you.  Just pick the site and enter your name for that site and Card.ly will build the link automatically for you and verify it.
2. Enter your personal details that you want to share with people like your website or blog, your birth date, gender, an avatar, your location, a short bio as well as a long description and other data you might want to share with folks.
3. Pick from a gallery of excellent designs.  If you’re a premium member you’ll have more pro design choices.
4. Step 4 allows you to tweet your new Card.ly online business card.
5. You’ll also be able to grab embed code or link code to place Card.ly on your website or blog.

There is a premium membership that allows many other features incluing removing the “nofollow” attribute to external links.  This is cool because by removing the “nofollow” attribute you’ll get some link juice from the search engines via the Card.ly website.

Here’s my Card.ly card.

3. Evernote

Evernote is a bookmarking web app on sterioids.  I continue to use Google Notebook and have for a long time but since they stopped allowing new users to join, well, I’m pretty sure one day Google Reader will be history, so time to find a replacement.  Evernote really fills the bill and more.

Once you create an account you’ll be able to drag the Evernote Bookmarklet to your browser’s bookmark toolbar.  Then, when you find a website or part of a web page for instance, you’ll be able to click on the Evernote Bookmarket “Clip to Evernote” and the page will be saved for you or the selection of a web page.  You’ll be prompted for additional information you can provide as well as select how the clip displays in Evernote.

There are so many features including excellent mobile support that it’s best to read about them on their What is Evernote? web page.

4. Instapaper

Instapaper is minimalism.  And that is good.  A bookmarking app, Instapaper works by first creating an account and dragging their bookmarklet to your browser’s bookmark toolbar.

Whenever you want to quickly bookmark a web page, you click on the “Read Later” bookmarklet and Instapaper flashes a small, unobtrusive window that opens up and simply says, “Saved!” or “Updated!”.  That’s it.  Later you can go and read your bookmarks in a simple list at the Instapaper website.  As you read them they will automatically move to archive.  You can also categorize your links into folders you create.

5. Google Mobile

Google has so many cool apps that it’s almost hard to experience them all.  But what I’ve found recently and used is the Top Search Trends which has been around for awhile and now you can also get it on your mobile phone that allows you to browse the web at http://www.google.com/m/trends

What can you do with Google’s Top Search Trends?  Well if you’re an internet marketer looking for what’s popular then Google’s Top Search Trends could be something to watch and use in your marketing efforts.  Need a topic to blog about and want to write about something popular?  Use Google Top Search Trends.

Also, on the Google Mobile radar is their Google Mobile page in your browser as well as their mobile apps page on your phone.

6. Posterous

Want to start blogging but don’t want to go through the hassle of registering a domain name and all the stuff you have to go through that involves setting up a self-hosted blog?  Check out Posterous.

Posterous is a very popular site that allows you to blog by sending email to your account at Posterous as well as creating a blog posts at the site.

There’s also a built-in image gallery if you send images attached to an email, and that includes images sent from your mobile phone.  If you can send email with attachments from your phone, then you can create an image gallery that includes thumbnail images of your larger images.  See an example below.

These are some of the background images I have on my Palm Pre.  So I sent them to Posterous via my Pre to see how they looked in the gallery.  There’s also a command you can include that will just list the images and not put them in a gallery.

7. Dropbox

Last but not least is Dropbox.  With Dropbox you get 2 GB of space for free that allows you to sychronize files between computers.

Once you install the necessary software on your computer, you’ll get an icon in your taskbar that resemble an open box and you can start dropping files in there.  It also creates a “My Dropbox” folder by default under your “My Documents” folder in Windows.

You can use Dropbox as an online backup tool or share photos, documents, large files as well as track and undo changes to files.  Very handy.  You can pay for more space as well.