Online Storage done right:
50GB Storage: ADrive – http://www.adrive.com
25GB Storage: Windows Skydrive – http://skydrive.live.com

One desktop tool to manage it all: Gladinet Cloud Desktop – http://www.gladinet.com

I have had a ADrive and a Windows Skydrive for over a year. I didn’t care for the web interface. It was cumbersome and counter-intuitive. Glidinet Cloud Desktop makes managing these online storage accounts as simple as drag-and-drop to a shared folder.

The free version has numerous features. I like setting up ThinkFree as default reading tools for managing documents, presentations and spreadsheets. You can set up gmail, google calendar, picasa, and others as applications for Gladinet Cloud Desktop to use. Great stuff.

Look it up. Try it out. Give it a week. I think you’ll find online storage useful or more useful that you ever used it for before.

Links and Things: ManyCam

ManyCam is a free webcam program that shares a webcam, desktop or other soruce to multiple applications. If you have ever wanted to show what is happening on your computers desktop while having a conversation on Skype, Ustream, Seesmic or other programs then ManyCam is what you are looking for.

From the ManyCam website:

“Use your webcam with multiple applications at the same time
and add cool graphics to your webcam video window.”

and

“What is ManyCam?

- Use your webcam with multiple programs simultaneously.
- Add text to your webcam video window with any application.
- Add cool animations to your video window.
- Show your local day and date in your video window.
- Add live CGI graphics like fire and water effects. You can even make it appear as if it is snowing inside your house!”

The biggest feature that I have been looking for is displaying my desktop while I lecture. The classes I teach are all lab based and I teach using a projector. Showing what is happening on the desktop while I stream to Ustream is more important than looking at me or a whiteboard.

ManyCam is free and it is also cheap on resources. I have used WebCamMax and SplitCamera before and they tend to max out my processor (100% CPU) causing other programs to crash or lock up the desktop entirely. ManyCam has yet to give me any issues and uses less than 10% of the CPU. I use VMWare workstation for all of my labs and with 3 or 4 vitual machines tugging at my RAM and CPU I just don’t have the resources to spare.

Check it out. Even if you don’t need to show your desktop it can do some other cool nifty neeto things.

Links and Things for 10/10/08

Today’s link and thing is a URL shortener called cli.gs. Why do we need another Short URL service? You might ask. cli.gs also provides analytics or detailed traffic statistics.

It has a number of additional advantages that it mentions on the cli.gs help page http://cli.gs/v6n2X6:

“It is different from the traditional URL shortening services in many respects. The key features are:

• All your short URLs are protected by your account which means only you can see the statistics.
• Within your account, you can create an unlimited number of cligs,
  with an unlimited number of cligs pointing to the same destination URL.
  This means you can drop different cligs into different sites and watch
  their traffic evolve over time; for example, two cligs pointing to the
  same destination can be used one in a forum and one on twitter and then
  the traffic from each one is tracked by Cligs.
• The service forwards all cligs to their destination using an HTTP
  301 Permanent Redirect. This has several advantages, the key one being
  that the link value is passed through to the destination. This means
  that Cligs does not interfere with your SEO efforts.
• Cligs gives you a ton of traffic analytics, and more are constantly being added. At the moment, the available analytics are:
  • Total number of hits
  • Referral statistics
  • Recent mentions of the clig itself on twitter
  • Recent links (mentions) of the clig on blogs
  • Recent web links to the clig
  • Recent mentions of the destination URL on twitter
  • Recent blog links to the destination
  • Recent blog links to the destination
  • Recent web links to the destination
  • Delicious bookmarks of the destination
  • Total number of links to the destination

On top of all this, the service is FREE!”

Originally I didn’t think it was a big deal at first. Once I started using the service I began to find it fascinating. It works with education and e-learning by monitoring how much and how often the link I published is used.

The drawbacks I have found is the services and tools it doesn’t work with. The biggest issue is that twitterfeed doesn’t use it. I would love to see analytics from the services I post to. It isn’t available within twhirl which is my favorite twitter/friendfeed client.

The drawbacks are not an issue with cli.gs itself. If you use hyperlinks then you should use cli.gs.