Since I mount my iPhone on my windshield for easy access to my music, I thought it would be appropriate to drill a hole in the plastic to let me take pictures and video while driving. It wasn’t difficult to do. If you have a dremel or a drill you can crank this out in 3 minutes. The plastic is durable enough to handle the pressure of the drill and there isn’t any cracking.

I have the Griffin WindowSeat which comes with adapters for ipod touch and the 1st gen iPhone. It’s a great deal/gift for someone who has an aux input in their car.

I took this video of my drive to work set to Animal Collective. The shot is a little high, but my windshield is angled awkwardly. Yours will probably be just right.

Check out CrossLoop. It’s free screen sharing software that is super simple to set up and install. Plus, it makes it easy for me to help people with their web communication needs and teach them how to fend for themselves. If you’re a computer genius, you can sign up to be a “helper” on the site. Folks can pay you through crossloop (they take a cut) and they give you free advertising for your services. This is a great way to generate additional income, which is something my buddy Erik seems to think is a good idea.

The new facebook looks good. I admit that I wasn’t a fan of the down time, hunting down my page manager, and losing some apps on the profile front page. But the cleanliness and ergonomics make me more of a facebook fan. With the new look comes more security features and limitations.

Last week, I was on a mission to consolidate my online life. I mind mapped all my social networking accounts out, which looked like this:

Eventually, after much nerding out in seclusion, I developed a way to update these sites with fresh content and still make facebook the central hub for connectivity. Facebook is where all the users are, so any other Social Networking and content production should update on facebook as well.

Problem is, Facebook now limits the number of rss feed that I can import to ONE. Definitely a bummer considering I have a lot of content that I want to automatically post of facebook. Here’s a map of my communication stream:

Here’s what to do to work around the Facebook one RSS feed limitation: Make a pipe with Yahoo! Pipes. Yahoo Pipes lets you plug multiple rss feeds into one feed. My facebook profile now receives information from this site, Brightkite, Jott, and whatever else I think of to add later through the pipe that I created. You can use a pipe for other purposes as well. 

We’re inching closer to our blog launch in September, and I have 12 blog feeds that I can combine into one RSS using Yahoo! Pipes. Then, a student can subscribe to all blogs at once. If each blogger updates 2 times a week, the RSS feed will have 24 new items a week. Frequent updates means more consistent traffic and returning readers. Be sure to only provide excerpts in the RSS feed so that subscribers must read the whole article on site.

My author friend David Athey is doing this film festival thing for his first novel, Danny Gospel. I wanted to give his event a little boost so I put my facebook page making skills into action and created this page.

I wanted to add a little flair (no not that dumb FB application) to the page, and I remembered that when I was creating my NACCAP presentations, Keynote gave me tons of saving options. It turns out that you can turn your Keynote slideshows into flash banners or quicktime movies. Here are a couple of pointers when trying this out:

• 3D transitions in keynote won’t convert over. You’ll have to use the 2D generic ones or just let keynote convert them for you
• You can’t use an FBML or HTML box in facebook for flash or video, but facebook has created a special application for flash on pages. Add it to your page, and then upload your flash presentation along with a preview picture.
• FB flash is limited, meaning that the presentation will not autoplay or loop. To counter this, make your preview image something that encourages clicking and duplicate your presentation in the slide window so that it will seem like it’s looping.
• If you’re not a mac user or don’t have Keynote, you can use PowerPoint to create a video of your slideshow, but no flash. The only way to add video to your facebook page is to upload the video to the facebook video app (Boooo!).

Check out the Danny Gospel Facebook Page to see what I mean. Click on the main picture to see the flash presentation, and click on the video titled banner to see the quicktime version. While you’re at it, go pick up a copy of Danny Gospel!

If you’re into the whole GTD phenomenon, you know the importance of inboxes. I’ve developed my own system based on GTD and the Action Method by Behance (they all have similar elements) that incorporates multiple inboxes into my daily routine. I’ve found that logging my ideas, actions, reminders and events in a consistent place and routinely process through these notes, I’ve become more productive.

It’s a good idea to get your bloggers into the same mindset. If they get in the habit of writing down ideas in a notebook that they carry with them at all times, they may not have to use the excuse that they have nothing to write about. You’re never creative when you have to sit down an crank something out, but your mind will definitely wander while you’re waiting for your fresh cut fries in the In-N-Out drive-thru.

I’ve purchased a dozen packs of the 3-pack Moleskine Cahiers to hand out to my bloggers this Fall. I may even get them some cool pens (like the Fisher Space Pen) to encourage their writing. The whole point of this is to give my students an inbox for their thoughts. These notebooks are great for stream of consciousness stuff, but it’s also a good idea to equip them with online inboxes.

Micro-blogging is a great inbox for the crazy stuff you see on the internet that you want to share or remember. I’ll have to write about this later, but I connect accounts like del.icio.us, evernote, and tumblr together so that I have a synced up inbox with all of my clippings for easy reference. It may even be a good idea to take the feed from a micro-blog such as tumblr and work that into the respective blog. Again, more on this later.

So yeah, inboxes. I’m a big fan. They help harness the incredible power that is ADD and give hope to those who can’t remember who they were suppose to meet in 15 minutes.

If you’re too ashamed to admit that you don’t know what people are talking about when podcasting is mentioned, you should check out CommonCraft videos. They will inform your pants off and allow you to grasp concepts that you should own already. 

You may want to check out their most poplar videos first:

• Twitter in Plain English
• Social Bookmarking in Plain English
• RSS in Plain English
• Wikis in Plain English

These videos are pretty easy to make, though the set up would take some time. Most of it is simple video with voiceover; when something is moving by itself they’re using stop motion. This is a great way to convey a message in an informative and strangely educational way.

I like to keep things separated in my life. Work and personal items have their own places in my apartment as well as online. If I needed a facebook presence using something other than a page, I would create a professional account so as to not muddy up my personal account with privacy settings etc. So to create a professional facebook account, you’ll need to do a couple of things.

Note: if you don’t want to put the effort into switching from account to account, just adjust your privacy settings to keep all notifications related to your account away from your friends. I don’t like this option, because the whole point of a professional facebook account is to be in front of the prospective student/whoever as much as possible.

Facebook doesn’t allow for organization type names on your account. So you’ll need to be real when filling out the biographical information. In other words, don’t make your first name, “Admissions Counselor” and last name, “Tim Cox.” Just put fill out the information just as you would a personal account but register with an email that represents your professionalness. If you have a email connected to your business that you didn’t use to sign up for a personal facebook account, use that. If you, like many others, used your .edu email for your personal account back when only college students could sign up for the service, create a free email account that is obviously related to your work. For my office at PBA, I created an email account for each admission counselor with gmail. Thus, my login to facebook for my pba account used the email pbatim@gmail.com . Then, I make the login information known to those in my office in case I need them to login and do stuff for me when I’m away from the computer (though I could just use my phone).

The only con to this is that you may have students trying to befriend your personal account and personal friends trying to befriend your personal account. Just reject their friendship and go find them with the correctly corresponding account.

There’s your tip. Is this something that you would use in your office? If you’re not using facebook, why not?