Biggest Tech No-Nos

From Switched yesterday- the 16 biggest tech no-nos.

It's a pretty interesting list and I'm sure we can all relate to quite a few of them. Some of the ones that made me sit up and point my finger at my screen yelling, "Yeah, exactly!" include:

• Accidentally hitting All Reply - ...then again, how else would we learn how to retrieve/resend emails?
• Writing in ALL CAPS
• Leaving a phone ringer on - Okay, I've done this and I realize not everyone likes Vanilla Ice- oops.
• Being a bad customer with gadgets
• Never removing Bluetooth headsets
• Sharing large files

However, there were a couple on the list that made me think, "Who cares?":

• Constant, lame status updates - My opinion? Who cares. Just skim it and forget it. Unless you're suffering from Twitterhea, or something
• Pocket calling - Eh, I usually think this is funny when it happens to me and any fodder for mocking someone is not so bad in my book.
• Forgetting attachments - Not really a big deal. It happens.

What are some of your tech no-nos?

NOTE: By the way: tech"no nos?" O rLy? How about saying biggest tech irritations? Or biggest tech annoyances? But "no no"- what am I, five?

Print Your Own Magazine with HP's Help

MagCloud.com is a new site/service from HP that allows anyone to create and publish a magazine. Miss PC Magazine? Sad about Blender folding (wait, is it possible to be sad about that?)? Then step in and fill the void with your own magazine.

The process is pretty straightforward:

• Create a magazine on MagCloud or upload a PDF you have create.
• Order a printed proof - verify your magazine before publishing!
• Set your markup and publish your issue.

The New York Times reports about 300 different magazines have been produced so far on a wide variety of niche subjects. Lulu for books, CafePress for swag, now MagCloud for magazines. Is HP on to something, or is this a waste of their focus?

Kindle vs Print? Kindle Wins.

In a recent post using some publicly available numbers (mostly - they do use some estimated figures for employee compensation and benefits), the Silicon Alley Insider outlined how it would be cheaper to give every New York Times subscriber a new Amazon Kindle instead of actually printing the newspaper.

"What we're trying to say is that as a technology for delivering the news, newsprint isn't just expensive and inefficient; it's laughably so."

Tech Media's Most Influential Web Sites

Rob forwarded this on to me last week and I'd thought I'd post it here for those that hadn't seen it yet. This list comes from Techmeme's Leaderboard. The biggest shocker for me was to see Engadget drop from 2nd place to 19th. Are there any sites that you often reference that you don't see on here?

"Since the Techmeme Leaderboard reflects the reality that both blog-driven sites and traditional sites define today's news, use it to discover new sources, recommend sites to others, or illustrate where tech news breaks."

1. TechCrunch (still at the top)
2. CNET News (up from 5th)
3. Silicon Alley Insider (up from 13th)
4. VentureBeat (up from 25th)
5. New York Times (down from 3rd)
6. Ars Technica (down from 4th)
7. AppleInsider (up from 49th)
8. Gizmodo (up from 15th)
9. Wall Street Journal (up from 10th)
10. ReadWriteWeb (down from 6th)
11. Reuters (up from 12th)
12. ZDNet Between the Lines (up from 14th)
13. Techdirt (up from 30th)
14. GigaOm (down from 7th)
15. Webware (up from 23rd)
16. The Register (down from 9th)
17. NYT Bits (up from 34th)
18. Boy Genius Report (up from 38th)
19. Engadget (down from 2nd)
20. The Official Google Blog (up from 67th)
21. PC World (up from 42nd)
22. paidContent.org (down from 17th)
23. Boom Town (up from 51st)
24. BBC (down from 8th)
25. Valleywag (up from 99th)
26. TorrentFreak (down from 24th)
27. CNET's Beyond Binary (NEW TO LIST)
28. All about Microsoft (up from 39th)
29. MediaMemo (NEW TO LIST)
30. IntoMobile (NEW TO LIST)
31. Washington Post (up from 56th)
32. Tech Trader Daily (up from 50th)
33. Infinite Loop (NEW TO LIST)
34. Computerworld (down from 20th)
35. Electronista (up from 64th)
36. InfoWorld (down from 11th)
37. Microsoft (down from 32nd)
38. MacRumors (NEW TO LIST)
39. Bloomberg (up from 53rd)
40. BusinessWeek (down from 28th)
41. Search Engine Land (down from 19th)
42. NewTeeVee (up from 69th)
43. Business Wire (down from 29th)
44. eWeek.com (down from 16th)
45. WSJ's Business Technology (NEW TO LIST)
46. CNET's The Social (NEW TO LIST)
47. Laptop Magazine (NEW TO LIST)
48. TechFlash (up from 80th)
49. Epicenter (down from 48th)
50. Gadget Lab (NEW TO LIST)

You can't stop email. You can only hope to contain it.

Dealing with email is a problem that will never go away, but some folks out there are trying to ease the pain. Enter Xobni.

Xobni is an Outlook plug-in that’s been generating some buzz lately due to its powerful, time-saving feature set. This little sidebar has some great functionality that makes dealing with a large volume of email much easier.

• Search – Xobni fully indexes all of your emails, allowing you to see search results as you type in criteria. Much faster than Outlook’s search.
  
• Conversations – Instantly see all of the back-and-forth emails with a particular contact on the same subject. No more hunting for “that one email”.


• Attachments – Instantly see any file ever sent to you from a particular contact. Again, no hunting.


• Easy meeting scheduling – One click creates an email with your meeting availability to send to a contact.


• Linked In Support – Linked In information is automatically collected for your contacts.
• Analytics – See detailed information about your email volume.

Xobni is still in beta, but it’s a stable release now and the developers are keen to keep improving it, so expect more features to show up in the future.

The company recently declined a $20 million offer for purchase from Microsoft, so for now, it’s staying an add-on. Word on the street is Xobni-like functionality is already creeping into the next release of Outlook.

To install Xobni, click here and follow the simple instructions.