Part 1:

• Getting an Account
• Finding Friends
• Customizing Your Profile
• Adjusting Privacy Controls
• Communicating with Others

There was just no way for me to cover Facebook in one 10 minute video though, so I’m releasing it as Tech-Bite’s first ever FREE Mega-Bite!

Under normal circumstances, I probably would have put this hour-long episode together as a DVD and made it available for purchase, but this Mega-Bite is going to be available to everyone and at no cost! Just subscribe to the Tech-Bites newsletter using the form below and you will be given immediate access to my full Mega-Bite tutorial on Facebook! Subscribers will also know when new videos or Mega-Bites are available in the future.

Here’s what we will be covering in the 2 additional Facebook videos (altogether totaling about 1 hour in length!) :

Part 2 (subscribers only):

• Reading the Newsfeed
• Personalizing the Newsfeed
• Adding Applications
• Joining Groups
• Becoming a Fan

Part 3 (subscribers only):

• How to Get Your Email Inside Facebook
• Adding RSS
• Working on Office Documents (like Word docs, Excel, Powerpoint, and more) together with friends on Facebook
• Adding your Twitter
• An Overview of Desktop Applications for Facebook

Just type in your Name and Email below to watch the next two videos in my Facebook Mega-Bite series. (Already a member? No Problem! Either click the link that came to you in the most recent newsletter, OR type your previously registered name and email here. My system will recognize you and let you through!)

Twitter is one of the best Social Networks on the internet mostly because of how SIMPLE it is! Today’s video shows you how you and your friends can get started twittering each other ’til the cows come home.

Twitter asks you one question: What are you doing?

Will you answer?

Go Sign Up for Twitter

Know of a better way to update your friends than Twitter? Let us know in the comments below!

Yahoo! Answers is one of my favorite networks and a great place to find answers to questions that have been in the back of your mind for days! Learn the ropes in this new video! Click here to go to Yahoo! Answers.

Technorati Tags: tech-bites, yahoo answers, ask questions, social network, how to, how do I

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  Today we look at one of the best free music sites around. Last.fm let’s you listen to music that you like for as long as you want from any platform. You don’t need an account and you don’t need to download any files. Perfect for work or listening to some music on a whim from any computer.  

 DON’T Buy a Computer this year!

Unless you listen to my special message on this important issue. 

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Join the eBiz revolution at www.ThirtyDayChallenge.com and learn to make $10 this August with no spending involved (no credit card required). Work together with other towards the same goal using social platforms online, among other technologies, to start your own business online.

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Anyone who has lost their bookmarks from a computer crash or accidental deletion knows the pain of losing those “blazed trails” on the Internet. Bookmarks help us keep our bearings in the very big world that is the Internet. So, it makes sense that we should not only back them up, but use them to their fullest in today’s web world.Welcome to the world of social bookmarking.You’ve probably heard of “Del.icio.us” and wondered what it was and whether it could be useful for you.

“First, you can get to your bookmarks from anywhere, no matter whether you’re at home, at work, in a library, or on a friend’s computer.

Second, you can share your bookmarks publicly, so your friends, coworkers, and other people can view them for reference, amusement, collaboration, or anything else. (Note that you can also mark bookmarks on del.icio.us as private — only viewable by you — if you like.)

Third, you can find other people on del.icio.us who have interesting bookmarks and add their links to your own collection. Everyone on del.icio.us chooses to save their bookmarks for a reason. You have access to the links that everyone wants to remember. You can see whether two people have chosen to remember a link, or whether it was useful enough for a thousand people to remember — which may help you find things that are useful for you, too.” – Del.icio.us

This method of bookmark-management is quickly becoming the defacto/preferred method for millions of people. Del.icio.us has already provided extensive information in getting set up with your browser (however, I’ll show you a quick visual of the sign up process on the video) so we will move on to the different things you can do with it once you’re ready to go:

Del.icio.us Registration (this will get you set up with an account, browser buttons, and import your bookmarks -if you want-)
Del.icio.us’ Help Page (great information source)

Also, watch the video to see how I prefer to situate Del.icio.us in Firefox (I prefer to use Firefox’s Quickbar and hide Del.icio.us).

What Now?

So, let’s talk about some of the practical uses for Del.icio.us. I will be using the Firefox version for this article, but the IE version is similar.

Tagging a new site:

From now on, when you want to bookmark a site, you will use the tag button.

• URL: Shows the current address.
• Name: The clickable name that will show up in Del.icio.us and in your bookmarks.
• Notes: Good for communicating the nature of this page to others or simply to remind yourself why you liked it.
• Tags: Important! Separated with commas, you can use these keywords to help yourself and others locate this bookmark later.
• Do Not Share: If you check this box, you are the only Del.icio.us user that can access/search this bookmark. Good for private links.

To sort and browse through the bookmarks you have tagged, just click the . More on using this tool can be found here.

Using Del.icio.us to Find New Sites

This is, perhaps the most important function of Del.icio.us, in my opinion. It pulls everyone’s non-private tags, notes, and links together to create a user-based search engine. It won’t replace Google for most types of research but it is perfectly suited for discovering popular sites.

Method 1:

Go to Del.icio.us and type something into the search bar at the top (or just use the quick search in firefox).

I typed in “learn italian” and these were my results:

The “Best” Match is the bookmark that has the best combination of relevance, recency, and number of saves (others who have bookmarked this site).

Further down the list, however, I see a page that has 1,790 saves. While it may not be the “Best” match, it’s probably worth checking out because so many people considered it worth bookmarking.

In this case, it seems that the numbers were right. The BBC site is very cool. The LearnItalianPod “Best” Match was also cool, though.

It’s usually worth checking at least both the “Best” Match and the result with the most saves.

Method 2:

If you simply go to Del.icio.us, on the front page you can see the hottest pages. These pages are recent and have been rapidly accumulating saves, so it’s a good “buzz” board.

To the right of the “hotlist” you can see some of the tags that are experiencing unusual activity:

On both the “hotlist” and the “tags to watch” areas, simply click one of the tags to get instant results for just that topic. Here’s what I got after clicking “gtd” (“get things done”):

This is a great way to discover new and useful sites or pages on the net.

Sharing Your Links With Others:

Although all your non-private links are shared with everyone already, I’m assuming you might like to specifically share some links with friends or family. Here are the two most common ways to share your links.

Go to Del.icio.us and click “your bookmarks” to see all of your bookmarks. You can link someone there simply by copying the address at the top of your browser. For instance, mine is http://del.icio.us/justaleaf. Anyone can view this page and see my non-private bookmarks.

If you’d rather link someone to a specific set of links, just click the tag that contains those links (ie: “design”) and copy the new address instead. http://del.icio.us/JustaLeaf/design <— the tag is appended to the address.

Whether you are on a account page or looking at a specific tag in that account, you can also add it to your RSS reader (or your friends could) which will alert you whenever new links are added to this list.

Beyond This

Del.icio.us is a very powerful service and there are many, many, ways to utilize it. You can have your links dynamically display on your blog or website, streamline del.icio.us (adventurous only!), view cloud views of your bookmarks, and more. You can also make the interface easier on the eyes, as in the screenshots above, by using this greasemonkey script.

Stay tuned for my next article and video episode. For more tips and tricks, sign up for the Official Tech-Bites.com Newsletter! You will be the first to know whenever I release new articles and videos and receive special subscriber only articles and product reviews.

Sign-up today!

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So, you just got (or have been using) a digital camera for your family. Once you figured out how to put those pictures on your computer instead of having to develop all that film, you realized the possibilities were endless.

Now you have 1,000 pictures on your hard drive and you don’t know what to do with them .

Most all of the people I know struggle with this. It would cost a fortune to print those pictures; it would take ages to try and mail them, and you don’t know how to resize them for email (we’ve all received those emails where all you can see in the picture is someone’s right eyeball because the picture is so darn huge!).

And to top it all off, you don’t know how to “download them to the internet” (as I hear it so commonly said).

Enter Flickr.

Thanks to Flickr, it can be MUCH easier to share your photos than you think. With the ability to upload on a whim without worries about size, avoid flooding people’s inbox, the ability to run slideshows, and link directly to your photos, Flickr has truly made this seemingly daunting task of uploading your photos to the web a joy and not a chore.

Another reason to consider Flickr over it’s competitors is that it is owned by Yahoo!. This means there is very little chance of Flickr going down overnight as a result of bad business and losing all your photos. For those who want to use online photo sites as a kind of secondary back up, this is very important.

So let’s get this buggy movin’!

Getting Set up:

You are going to need a Flickr account before you can upload anything.

• Just go to flickr.com and click “Create Your Account”
• Sign up with your info (if you already have a Yahoo! account, this will be especially brief)
• Once you are confirmed, just sign in to get started

Getting Photos Online:

Ok, you’ve got your flickr account, a million photos to upload, and a healthy amount of determination. Here are some things you should know at the get go:

• With the free account, you can only update up to 100mb of photos each month (30-70 photos, depending on the size photos your camera takes)
• With the paid account (only $25 a year) you can upload as much as you want
• Use a photo uploader to add photos to your account to keep things as easy as possible
• You CAN make photos private so that only you, or designated others, can view them

For the Brave: Flock, a browser for all platforms and very similar to Firefox (even runs most Firefox add-ons), integrates extremely well with Flickr. If you are adventurous, try it out. It’s really great!

The most basic way to upload a photo is to click “Upload photos” on your flickr page after signing in.

You can add photos simply by clicking “browse” next to one of the 6 fields provided.

You can also see your monthly allowance, set the level of privacy you want on the photos you are uploading, and you can quickly add a tag to them (ex: “Disneyland Trip”) to help others (including yourself) find them later by using keywords.

Also on this screen is “Uploading Tools“. I highly recommend clicking this and downloading an uploader for your computer to ease uploading multiple photos. For this article I will be using the jUploadr since it supports Windows, Mac, and Linux (but feel free to try the “official” uploader for your Operating System).

After downloading the appropriate version (in my case, Windows), I unzip it to a folder on my computer and click jUploadr.exe to start it up. (if this sounds too complicated to you, just download the official Flickr Uploadr) Mac users just drop jUploadr into your applications folder, as usual. For the official how-to for all versions, click here.

Once jUploadr is up, just do the following to connect it to your Flickr account (make sure you are already signed in to Flickr):

• Click Edit > Preferences
• Click Authorize jUploadr

  

• Click “Authorize” on the pop-up you will see
• Flickr will display a page in your browser confirming that jUploadr is “Authorized” (or it may ask you to confirm).

  

• Finally, go back to jUploadr and click “Complete Authorization”

  

• If every thing went ok, you should see this message:

  

It’s all downhill from here .

Uploading Photos Using jUploadr

This is the pay-off. From now on, uploading your photos is as simple as dragging-and-dropping your files into jUploadr! Here’s an example:

Here are my photos from my recent trip to Italy that I didn’t go on.

I drag a box around them and drag them all into jUploader.

Just double-click any of these photos to modify their upload settings (if you want)

When I’m ready, I just click upload!

When all the pictures are checked off, that means that you are done with the upload. Just go to your flickr page to take a look at them! They’re online… Now what?

There is so much you can do with these photos from this point forward, but we are just going to focus on the most common task.

Sharing with friends and family online
To link people to a specific photo, just click the photo in your flickr account and click the “all sizes button“.
Then you can use the link provided to link others via email, chat, etc.

If you wanted to share the whole batch of photos that you just uploaded, probably the quickest way is using tags. Sets are great too, but they are limited to 3 for free accounts, so we will use the tags example for this article.

The quickest way to get this done (rather than tagging your photos one-by-one) would either be to tag them while in jUploader or to do the following:

Click the little arrow next to Organize and click “Most recently uploaded photos”

This automatically allows you to edit your last uploaded batch as a group

Next click “Add Tags” and enter in something relevant (use quotes if it is more than one word)

Now if you visit one of your pictures, you will see a tag on the right side of it

By clicking that, you will be taken to a view that shows only pictures with that tag… kind of like a folder.

Just copy the address in your address bar (at the top of your browser) and now you can link people just to these pictures! They can even come view it as a slideshow.

Beyond This

Most users of the paid account say that it is worth every penny. Unlimited uploads, sets, and more means that you can really use Flickr to it’s maximum. At $25 a year (at the time of this article), if you take a lot of pictures, this is a no-brainer.

For those of us who couldn’t max out the monthly upload limit if we wanted to, Flickr still stands as one of the net’s best free services. But there are other ways you can spend your money at Flickr.com; from having prints made, to making custom coffee mugs, to professional picture books.

I’ll leave you with a couple links to some extras:

Camera Finder : Which are the best cameras for digital photographers? Graphs and more found here.
Do More with your Photos! : Lots of cool ways to print and use your photos.
Flickr Programs : Some free, some paid. Many cool. This is where I found jUploadr.

All this and we didn’t even get into the social capabilities of Flickr for networking with friends, family, or photographers with similar interests. And Greasemonkies (see my Greasemonkey video/article if you are not familiar with what it is) and don’t forget to see what you can do with Flickr at Userscripts.org. It’s all there and more if you want to pursue it!

Have fun with your photos.

Stay tuned for my next article and video episode. For more tips and tricks, sign up for the Official Tech-Bites.com Newsletter! You will be the first to know whenever I release new articles and videos and receive special subscriber only articles and product reviews.

Sign-up today!

Though many people have come to trust Google’s ability to sort out the web, we still have one problem:

While we all appreciate Google’s enabling us to find an article on organic soy-free bird feed, there are times that we just want to peruse a more general topic, like “Self-improvement”. With over 2.5 million results and mostly businesses on the top results, how can we “discover” some quality information?

Well, you StumbleUpon it of course!

StumbleUpon is a service that lets you, in their own words, “Channel surf the internet with the StumbleUpon toolbar to find great websites, videos, photos and more based on your interests. StumbleUpon learns what you like and makes better recommendations.”

It is also community-driven and has over 2.5 million members! Well what do you know!? 2.5 million pages, 2.5 million members. Maybe we can figure this Internet-thing out!

There are 2 major benefits to using StumbleUpon:

1. Previewed Sites: StumbleUpon takes what it knows about you (you tell it what you’re interested in) and what other users liked gave a “thumbs up” to and delivers sites it thinks you will like. When you start rating sites yourself (thumbs up or down), Stumble takes notice and “learns” what kind of sites to serve you. Oh… and it works pretty good!
   
   
2. 5-star Results: Another cool feature is that, if you want it to, StumbleUpon inserts a 5-star rating system into your search engine results! So when your sifting through Google results, you can see which sites users liked.

   

Video: To see visual examples of the steps in this article, watch the video at the top of this page.

Getting Started:

The first thing you need to do is get an account and download the toolbar. Both IE and Firefox are supported. Click the link below to download it now:

• Join StumbleUpon Today >
  

(Firefox is used in these examples, but you should be able to configure IE similarly) Once you have the toolbar installed in Firefox (remember to restart the browser) you might want to add the Stumble button to your toolbar so that you can show/hide the toolbar at will to save space while you are not using it.

• Right-click in a blank area on your Firefox toolbar and select “customize”
• Drag the StumbleUpon button onto your toolbar, wherever you’d like it to be (see video)

Alright, now we’re ready to go!

Click the “Start Stumbling” button on your toolbar and type in your user name and password. After you’ve signed-in, you’re ready to start stumbling.

If you haven’t already, make sure to go to “preferences” on the StumbleUpon website to setup your “interests” in the “stumbling” tab.

Stumbling (excerpts from StumbleUpon Site):

Stumble!

Click the Stumble! icon on your toolbar. Stumbleupon will send you sites and pages based on the Topics that you choose. Stumble! as much as you want. Stumbleupon has millions of sites in its databases, all submitted and recommended by other Stumblers. There is a drop-down menu (beside the icon) that allows you to Stumble! in many different ways (more on this in the FAQ).

As you Stumble! you, click the thumbs to tell the system what you like (or dislike). = I like this! (send me more like this, please!) = I don’t like this! (don’t send me any more pages like this, thank you!) Made a mistake? No problem! Simply click the same thumb again to un-thumb the page, or click the opposite thumb to change your rating.

When you Stumble! a page or site, first thumb it, then click on to see reviews & comments made by other Stumblers, and to add one of your own. On the Reviews page, click on: Add your own review and tag the page for future reference (more about tagging in the Help resources). Type your comment into the Review box, then press: Try it! (You will learn how to delete comments in the next step).

Click the icon to see Your Pages – this is where your comments and reviews are displayed for you, and for other stumblers to read. From these pages, you can edit (or delete) your reviews, and Add Comments. When you have more than 10 reviews the oldest is moved off the front page – but you can still use the PREV and NEXT buttons to see ALL of your reviews! There’s another drop-down menu here: Stumble! a bit and get some reviews & comments on your pages before exploring this facility (or see how it works when you visit other Stumblers’ pages).

This guide has shown you the key functions of the toolbar, but there is more to discover. Lots more! Part of the fun of SU is in finding out some of the secrets for yourself, or to meet your fellow Stumblers and ask them How do you do that?! Take a look, too, at this icon on the toolbar: It reveals a drop-down menu that contains all sorts of useful stuff, including Toolbar Options which will let you customize your toolbar. You can update your topics here, change your password, and lots more.

• Tools > Toolbar Options > Configuration (tab) >
  • This option will add a 5-star rating system to you search results and whether a site has been “Stumbled”
• Tools > Toolbar Options > Configuration (tab) >
  • By checking “Not-for-me” StumbleUpon knows to automatically start Stumbling to the next page when you give a page a “thumbs down”
• Tools > Profile Preferences > Settings (link) >
  • Make sure to set this option if you’d like to stay out/limit the social aspects of StumbleUpon. (as mentioned below)

Beyond This:

Actually, this service is pretty simple. You can get in as deep as you want. There are Stumbler blogs, favorites, forums, charts, and more… if you want to get involved in the social aspects of StumbleUpon. Also, check the selection of StumbleUpon scripts for Greasemonkey, if you run Firefox, for some cool modifications, such as adding del.icio.us reviews.

Stay tuned for my next article and video episode. For more tips and tricks, sign up for the Official Tech-Bites.com Newsletter! You will be the first to know whenever I release new articles and videos and receive special subscriber only articles and product reviews.

Sign-up today!