Win a new 120GB REV Drive with Computers in Business

Computers in Business Magazine is running a competition to win a 120GB REV USB Backup Drive. Go have a look at the Computers In Business Blog and email in your answer.

Closing Date is Tomorrow!

Caveat: There is no data protection notification on the post in question, I didn’t read the article in the magazine so I don’t know if there is one there. I do not know what they intend to do with the email addresses harvested this way but I assume they are going to be responsible about it? (Positive thoughts, positive thoughts!)

Disclaimer: I am not affiliated in any way. I have entered. I will be winning (still with the positive thoughts positivity) but go ahead and enter anyway – you never know 🙂

Google “Shared Stuff” fills a hole!

I have been using Google Reader for a while now and even posted a more readable list of keyboard shortcuts on my personal blog (before they had a nice easy to find list of commands). In that time Google Reader has come on a long way and I have been (in general) very happy with the new functionality that has been added.

I have been thinking for some time of posting a list of “improvements” I would like to see in Reader. I think there are some pretty glaring holes in the functionality that are begging to be filled in. For example – if I’m going to be sharing stuff from my feeds, I’d like to be able to comment on them in some way so that people who look at my shared links (people who may not really know me) have some idea why I have shared something… Do I think it is an absolutely brilliantly written post or a shocking story or do I just love the graphics? If I find something through a friend’s “Shared Links” feed I like the fact that when I re-share it the link still goes directly to the original article but I’d love to be able to annotate and say “thanks to X for pointing this out to in his shared links”! Reader is a bit weak on this front – it’s really just a “noise filter” so that I end up sharing approximately 10-20% of what comes in on my feeds so my friends won’t have to read all the stuff I don’t judge worth sharing…

Enter Google Shared Stuff! http://www.google.com/s2/shared/stuff (The URI is a bit unwieldy at the moment but I’m sure at some point they will tidy that up.) This will hopefully allow me to share things I find interesting from a bookmark on my toolbar (works FINE in FireFox, unfortunately Internet Explorer seems to have some issues with it – I may just need to update IE so I’ll come back about that later) and a neat little dialogue pops up asking if I want to share a link only or an excerpt; there’s also a box for a comment which allows me to annotate with whatever I have to say about the article.