Search your name in Google. Does all the information you want appear in the results? Probably not, and if it does, it is often scattered through pages of results. This is where a new service called ClaimID comes in. ClaimID is a service that helps you claim and improve your online identity by providing you with your own personal information page. But don’t think it is your average profile service that has you write about yourself, because ClaimID takes a new approach that I think is an excellent concept. You can think of your ClaimID profile as what the creators like to call, a link resume. The idea is simple. You make a page with links that relate to yourself, whether they are your own sites, sites of interest, social profiles, Flickr accounts, or whatever it may be. If it somehow relates to you, put it on. Then the goal is to hopefully search for your name on a search engine and have your ClaimID appear. If one is to view your ClaimID, they will then have a page of links relating to yourself. Much better then going on a scavenger hunt about a person through a search engine!

(Screenshot of profile administration for my profile)

ClaimID has made it very easy for you to create your link resume. You create groups and then you add links to each group much like you would a normal bookmarking service. ClaimID provides a bookmarklet as well to make it even easier for you to just add and go. You can add as many groups as needed to fully describe who you are. For example, you may want to make a group for your websites, family sites, friends, or even user profiles from other websites. Anything that you want someone to know about you, really. So I’ve created a quick profile, although not completed yet. I made a group for personal links, blogs that I visit daily, and music. After a while, you will start to notice that things may get a little out of order, or maybe just aren’t in the order that you would like. That is why ClaimID has made it simple for you to sort any group or link. You simply click on the link to reorder and the groups/links will turn into blocks that you can easily drag and drop to the position that you find best. Definitely came in handy. Another feature that you may want to use are the stars. On each link, you will see a star. If you click on it, the star will continuously change colors. Maybe you just want to associate a color with a link, or maybe use them to signify importance. For example, marking all your work related links with red stars.

Lets talk more about bookmarking with ClaimID. You have two options to bookmark. You can either create a bookmark from inside of your profile, or you can use the bookmarklet to easily add a site as your browsing the internet. Either way, you will get the same form. You fill in the basic information like the address, title, description, and even an option to add tags. But more importantly, you will see two fields that allows you to describe your association to the link by authorship and if the link is about you or not. These two options allow one to easily learn how the site you bookmarked is associated to you. For example, say there is an article about you online that someone wrote. You would say that you are not the author, state who is the author, and mark that the link is about you. That is all there is too it. Once you have added a bookmark, you will see each bookmark listed in their groups with tags, descriptions, and even buttons that allow one to easily search the link in Google, del.icio.us, Technorati, and more.

Now, you must be thinking: I can post links, but what about actual information about myself from within ClaimID? ClaimID allows you to do this as well, although it is limited. You can supply a photograph of yourself, but it must be a direct link because there isn’t a way to upload your photo. You are then able to fill in your profile which can be seen on the right column of your ClaimID profile. I’ve just put some basic information about myself, but you can go a lot further then just basic information as you can see in Fred Stutzman’s Profile, who is one of the guys behind ClaimID. You will see that in his profile, he has placed his del.icio.us feed and even a Sitemeter tracking button to monitor visitor statistics. I am not sure what your limitations are, but you can add HTML to your profile and by seeing Fred’s profile, I am assuming you can add JavaScript allowing for more functionality.

ClaimID is simple in concept, but when used properly, it may help strengthen your online identity. Next time someone is to search your name, hopefully they will land on your ClaimID page providing them all the sources of information they need to get to know you. For an excellent example, I am going to point you to the creators ClaimID again, Fred Stutzman. He has bookmarks for personal work, projects, academic links, blog coverage, occurrences of himself in the media, and even links to Fred’s that he is not! Packed with information about himself. I am sure you can now see the potential that ClaimID has in managing your online identity. If you were interested, here is my profile. It is not completed yet, but I will be adding to it when I get some time.

One last thing. If you own a website, you can easily add your ClaimID Profile to your website/blog (example) with a few lines of JavaScript that you can grab from your account information area of ClaimID. Also, if you are a programmer, an API is available that lets you grab links from a profile along with parameters to filter the links how you want.

ClaimID is currently in private beta and it is unknown when it will be release publicly. If you wanted to give it a try, you can try to signup using my registration key. There should be 4 invites available at the time of posting this. I will see if I can get more.

Update: I’ve been given the Golden Ticket! Use this key to register, 14d95c2dd5b8cf05a5ec8199d28a0b78fd957ed9. It should be good for around 100 invites. Enjoy!

View Manage Online Identity with ClaimID.

Update (03/13/06): Looks like ClaimID is starting to work! I’ve gotten some referrers to my sites already from it and seems to be working as ClaimID said. Here is a screenshot of Google results for, Brian Benzinger - no quotes.

Not bad for just being active for only a couple of weeks. Solution Watch comes up first, one of my old sites second, and then ClaimID. If someone in search visits the ClaimID, they can then find all sites related to myself and learn who I am. Some were skeptical and questioned how helpful ClaimID really is. Well, here is proof that its working - for me at least. Nice work, ClaimID.

I cannot help it, but I am surprised almost everyday with the movement of the web. The other day I have reviewed iRows, an online spreadsheet service that provides amazing functionality. Now today I come across Thumbstacks, a service that actually allows a user to create presentations, very similar to what you would see when using the popular office application, PowerPoint, but online. I have seen online presentations before (Eric Meyer’s S5), but this is a very impressive solution. You can create fully designed presentations in an easy drag and drop interface online and share your presentations with anyone. I created a test slideshow and besides the interface looking a little different from what I am used to with PowerPoint, it really covered many of the features that I would normally use in PowerPoint. It does lack a few features like slide transitions and sounds, but I personally find those as little annoyances anyway. Alright, lets take a look at what Thumbstacks has to offer.

You first have to sign up and create your own account to save your presentations to. Once you are all set, head on over to the Presentation Builder and you will see something similar to the above screenshot. You will see a toolbar along that top that will provide most of your formatting options, along the left will be your slides (starts you off with two), and on the right will be your workspace, or stage if you prefer, that you will edit your slides in. Everything is very nicely layed out and is an overall simple interface to work with, although you may notice that some functionality cannot be performed unless you right click. For example, right clicking on the left slides bar, you will be able to add/remove slides or even set a theme to your presentation. Also right clicking on the stage will allow you to add text or image objects to your slide. It would be nice to have an easy, “Add Slide” button or something on the slide column, but right click seems to get the job done rather well. Also, something that isn’t really pointed out is that you can click and drag the slides up or down to put them in the order you want.

Your slide workspace is where all your content, images, headings, and everything else gets layed out and Thumbstacks has made it very easy for you to work on slides. You will notice that a lot of the functionality is possible by drag and drop or by right clicking on the workspace and objects. Position any element where you want, any size that you want. You can even select multiple objects at once by click and dragging on the slide background and making a box fully around the objects or by holding shift and clicking on each object seperately. Double clicking on a text object will allow you to edit the text and add formatting to it using the top toolbar. Also, if you are looking for more options with your objects, right click on it and select “Object Properties”. You will also see that you can position elements to the top, below other objects, etc., by right clicking.

I was impressed how you can easily create multiple slides and add text blocks and images to them, but then I was even more impressed when I saw the theme and background options. Thumbstacks allows you to easily add a background image or style to any slide and also allows you to even select a theme to base the whole presentations appearance on, like you would see in PowerPoint. Adding a background is as simple as adding an image to a slide. On the bottom of a slide, you will see “Edit Slide Background.” Then you can simply add objects as you would on a slide. For example, you could upload an image, set it as a tiled graphic, and resize the object to fit your slide. Very simple. But if you don’t want to go through the hassle of creating your own backgrounds for slides, then you can assign an already made theme to them! Just go to the left slides column, right click, and select, “Change Theme.” A dialog box will then open with a list of themes that you can select. I chose the Underwater theme and it worked perfectly. I wonder if we can expect more themes or possibly be able create our own themes to use in the future.

As you work on your slides, Thumbstacks will automatically save your progress so you wont loose any of your work. There were times that I went to go view another site and accidently closed the Presentation Builder, but then I would come back to find all my work was still there, thankfully. Once I closed it accidentally for the first time, I decided to save the project. You simply click on the save icon and pick a name. Once saved, it will then be available in your “My Presentations” area to easily view and change later on. So now you’ve got a great presentation online. So how do you share it with others? You can either export it as an HTML document or you can publish your presentation. Go to the Presentation Builder, open your presentation, and click on the icon that looks like a world with a chain (link icon). A dialog will come up that will let you publish your presentation and give you a permanent address to give out for anyone to view your presentation.

(Directs you to Thumbstacks demo presentation)

Now all that is left to do is to view and share your presentation! Presentations are viewed in a browser and opens in a full screen window. If it doesn’t go full screen for you, I’d recommend setting your browsers view mode to full screen because then it will look just like a normal presentation from an offline application. You get your basic functionality with left and right buttons (mouse or keyboard) for navigation through slides and even adds one last black slide like PowerPoint does saying the presentation has ended. If I wasn’t aware the presentation was built online, I would have never known that it wasn’t from software like PowerPoint.

As I have said, it is amazing what is possible on the web these days and Thumbstacks definitely shows that. For its first release, it worked very well. The Presentation Builder works in Firefox and IE at this time and the presentations can be viewed in IE, Firefox, or any standard based browsers. I was quite pleased with what you can do to your slides, but it would be great to see more features like transitions, bullet highlighting (like you see in Eric Meyer’s S5), and an option to save your own themes to use again at a later time. Thumbstacks is an excellent solution for making presentations that not only looks great but works just like your average presentation software. Would you agree? If you’ve made a presentation, I would be happy to see what you’ve come up with!

View Thumbstacks.com - Live presentations on the web! (via del.icio.us)

Some of you may already know of services that offer spreadsheets online, like Num Sum, but you may want to consider giving iRows a try. iRows is a great solution for creating web-based spreadsheets that has similar functionality to the popular office application, Microsoft Excel. With iRows, you can save spreadsheets online, keep it privately, share them with groups, and let anyone view them. You can perform formulas, formatting, and amazingly even graphs. I’ve played around making a few spreadsheets and I am very impressed with its overall functionality. I have even used it for work already instead of Excel. Looks like Office 2.0 is well on it’s way!

When I first signed up, I took a look at some spreadsheets that others have already created to get an idea of what can be accomplished with iRows. Some spreadsheets were packed with data, others were basic formulas, and some were tutorial spreadsheets that iRows created to get you going. My first impression was that it was just some Num Sum clone, but after taking a closer look, there were actually quite a bit of features that impressed me. I was mostly impressed with the spreadsheets themselves, but just to give you a basic idea of the system, here are some of the features you get. First thing that I liked was that you can easily search for data sheets and then easily find it again by going to the recent section of iRows, which will show the spreadsheets that you’ve recently looked at. I also liked how you can easily create groups and share your spreadsheets with them. Sometimes I just want to make a private spreadsheet but maybe allow a few people to see it. You can also give others access to edit your spreadsheets making them into collaborative documents. One thing that I didn’t find though was tagging. You can apply keywords to spreadsheets, but I think tags would make for a whole lot more functionality.

I was very impressed when making spreadsheets on with iRows. The first thing that you will notice is the similar appearance to Microsoft Excel with the blue gradients making it a very comfortable environment to work. I am used to the style of Microsoft Excel and I was glad to see that iRows has maintained the style. Secondly, I noticed that the container the spreadsheet is in can be resized allowing you to fit the data in a view that works best for you. You can also resize columns and select multiple cells at a time (even Shift + Click works to select multiple cells). But most of the functionality can be found along the top menu of the spreadsheet. You will find that you can change colors, font formatting, number formats, modify rows and columns, export and import, add images, and amazingly even create graphs on the fly. iRows also allows you to add formulas to cells as you would in your basic spreadsheet application so you can easily make calculations on data.

To get an idea of how advanced you can get with iRows, take a look at the above spreadsheet. I did not make the above spreadsheet, but I believe it makes a great example to show. There is a lot of data present, many formulas, and headings in various places. I noticed that clicking on a cell that has a formula will not only let you easily modify it, but it will also border the cells involved in blue dashed lines making it very easy for you to see what’s going on. To see how flexible the graphs were, I decided to add a Pie Chart to this spreadsheet. I selected one row with headings and around four or five rows of data under the headings. I then clicked on the graph icon and selected the Pie Chart. It automatically filled in the range of data and had me select if the data was for the selected rows or columns. I then filled in a title for the graph and clicked “ok.” That was all to it and the graph you see above is exactly what it produced. Not only that, but you can resize the graph at any site and even modify it in real-time in that if you change any data on the spreadsheet, the graph will update automatically. Lastly, you will see in the screenshot that I’ve got the import/export menu open. iRows allows you to export your spreadsheets in XML, HTML, and even tab delimited or comma seperated text document. I use tab delimited format a lot for work, so I found that export option especially helpful. Then, you can import data to a spreadsheet by inserting your text delimited data or iRows XML export data into the import text fields provided. Although, I would love to upload files directly into the application through an upload form instead of just the provided textarea. For the most part, the export/import options worked very well and a lot of my offline spreadsheets transfered over just fine.

iRows works great and I personally prefer it over Num Sum at this point because of the graphing and import/export options. I would like to see tagging though as it makes searching and collaborating a whole lot easier for everyone. And lastly, for those of you interested in embedding spreadsheets into your sites/blogs, iRows provides you with code to easily do this as well and in an interactive or static format. I have tested it in an HTML document and it worked out great.

I find it amazing seeing all these online applications function just like many of our offline applications. I still use offline applications, but things may be changing soon as it appears I can easily switch at anytime to online services only. The only worries that I have when it comes to office applications online is the security of my data and knowing that if a server goes down or I am out of connection, I cannot access my data. Things should be getting very interesting in the coming generation of the web and the theory of Office 2.0. Anyone else feel the way I do when it comes to the security of data? Do you believe that Office 2.0 is going to be the way of the future?

View iRows - Web-based Online Spreadsheets.

Update:: So I wrote this review last night, and it figures that a new release of iRows is published this next morning! Hah. Yes, iRows has just released an update with the spreadsheets and they look very nice. But the new version does not appear to work in Firefox, but did in the old version. I notice there is now tagging and you can also export the document as an Excel file. Although the tagging seems to still function just like the old keywords did (just displaying the words). It would be great to be able to select spreadsheets by a tag or tag cloud of some sort. Maybe making a new “Tags” section in the “Data Sheets” area would work, if not, maybe in the Search area somehow. Also, you will see the interface has a new menu that is orginized just a little differently compared to the description I made last night. It functions great in Internet Explorer and Safari, but seems to fail in Firefox. I am glad to see the increase in functionality though, so hopefully they can fix the browser issue and everything will be great.

Update: Seems to be working again in Firefox. Nice work, iRows, for fixing that quickly.

Building a portfolio is an excellent way to establish an online presence for yourself. Whether your a designer, photographer, fashion designer, or whatever it may be, a portfolio allows you to show your work and make an impression. Unfortunately, not everyone knows how to build a portfolio online and not everyone wants to spend a fortune for someone to make a portfolio for them. This is where a new service called, Carbonmade, can help you. Carbonmade allows you to make a very nice looking and functional portfolio in no time. I have always kept an eye out for a portfolio service such as Carbonmade, but a lot of them are too complicated, not customizable enough, and just don’t seem to be what I have been looking for. So I gave Carbonmade a try and found it amazingly easy to make a portfolio that was presentable.

Above is an example portfolio. The portfolio has the default style for Carbonmade portfolios selected, which is a very simple style presenting all your work in a clean format. The other style is just the opposite color scheme, but same layout. It would be nice to have more templates, but I’m satisfied with what has been given. Each account gets their own sub-domain address (you.carbonmade.com) in which you can begin adding projects and content to. If you take a look at the above screenshot, you will see that it actually works much like a photo gallery service. You select a project and then you can view each image in the project using next and previous navigation. You also can view more information about a project by clicking on the bar above the image being shown. Lastly, when on the main page, you will see categories on the right that you can select to narrow the selection of projects to what you are looking for. Very basic, simple, and straight to the point (your work).

Carbonmade has made it very easy for you to get in and start working on a portfolio in a matter of seconds. When you first signup, you will need to click on the button, “Add a Project.” (Note: at the time of writing this, only six projects are allowed to be added because Carbonmade is still working out some things. But the service will eventually take away the limit once they are done working on it.) Once you start a project, you will be asked to upload a first image. After this, you will then be able to fill in information about the project and additional images for the slideshow. The project management area was very well done and uses Ajax to help speed up the saving process. You will also see that you can actually drag each image in the project to change the order of each image. Fill in the basic information and that is all to it for that project. Continue and start another!

You have added a few projects, descriptions, and images. Now you may want to change some of the portfolios appearance. The first thing that you may want to do is to navigate to the main page and change the order of your projects. You will notice that all the project boxes are draggable and you can actually place them where you want. Now that you’ve got that set, lets change the actual look of the portfolio. Unfortunately, you are not given that much freedom for the appearance, but you can select a color scheme and font face (with only two options each). To change the appearance, make your way to the settings page and change the options available. Now that you’ve got the appearance set, you may want to write some information about yourself for your visitors. Next to the Projects tab, you will see “About.” Select this and you will then see some fields that you can enter your basic contact information, a bio, and photo of yourself.

That’s all to it! I have created a project in a matter of minutes with one project, an about page, descriptions for my project, and selected the white color scheme with serif typeface. Quick, easy, and looks great. I think Carbonmade is a great solution for many seeking a quick and easy portfolio. Whether your a designer, programmer, fashion designer, architect, identity designer, or whatever your profession may be. I do wish it allowed for more customization of the overall look, but it works. I didn’t run into any problems as I tested the service and am quite satisfied with its output. If you make a portfolio, let me know. I am interested in seeing how it works for you and of course viewing your work.

View Carbonmade: Show off your work.

Sproutit has recently launched its new service, Mailroom. Mailroom is an email management solution built specifically for small businesses, but can work just as well with groups, bloggers, or any individual. It’s not your average email management solution though. This is because it has been built to help you save time that you spend each day with email by learning how you work and performing certain tasks just to speed up the process for you. I’ve read a great interview with Charles Jolley from Sproutit to get some more information on what the service is about to him. Basically it narrows down to the fact that Small Business spend a lot more time then they should on email each day. Charles was asked why Sproutit decided to make Mailroom and he replied, “Well, it sounds boring, but we did market research! We actually talked to about 30 small businesses from around the US. We found that most of them were spending up to half of their day just answering emails!” They found a problem and set out to solve it - and they did. I’ve been testing around with Mailroom for a few days now and I find it to be a very helpful and definitely does save time. Let’s walk through it so you can see why it can help you with your everyday mail.

When you signup to Mailroom, you can select a plan that has one user account (free) or multiple user accounts. Each user gets their own login and Mailroom that is built to work around them. To get started, I’m going to login and we’ll take a look at the “Needs Attention” section of Mailroom. This section is where you recieve only the emails that are waiting for you to reply to or mail that you need to follow up with. As you use the system, it will begin to pickup what email you need to monitor closer and even how to respond to emails (more on this in a bit). The first that that I noticed after using the system for a few days was that unlike most email clients that list email in an ascending order by date, Mailroom shows only email that needs attention and sorted by oldest to newest mail. As I look at my attention page, my mind says, “I need to reply to this email from a few days ago. I’ll do that now.” This is because Mailroom detected that it needed my attention. Not only that but if you come across an email that is very important, you can mark it as a hotlist conversation which will then have the email show on the top of the list with a flag next to it.

On the top of the attention page, you will see your list of email. Clicking on an email will then open it in the below area (using Ajax) displaying the email along with some options for you to select. Messages are shown in an easy to read style and also appears to be a text only client. But what about Mailroom makes it so special? As I have said, Mailroom learns how you work with your mail. It will take note of tags that you assign to mail, actions such as closing an email, marking mail as spam, replying to a message, or even assigning mail to another account. Just to let you know why the assigning functionality is important, take the scenario that you are a programmer but you recieved an email in your attention page for the support department. You can then simply select the email and assign it to the support account. This will then close the email, direct it to support, and tell Mailroom to remember to assign emails such as that to support rather then yourself. You can also tag any email you receive. You simply select the edit link next to “tags:” and fill in your tags or if you have previously created tags, you can select the ones you want from the list. Now lets move onto the most important functionality of Mailroom, sending replies to your mail.

As you make replies to your mail, Mailroom will save your reply to the “Saved Replies” page (above screenshot). It will remember that you sent a certain reply for a certain reason, place it in this page, and send it to the contact. You can then come to the “Saved Replies” section to add, edit, or remove saved replies. But why? Because these are the messages that Mailroom will use to learn the way you work and suggest replies for you to use when sending a reply to an email.

Making a reply works much like your normal client except except with the added functionality that Mailroom offers. When you click on the reply button, a message box will appear on top of the message labeled, “Suggested Reply.” Depending on how smart Mailroom has become from your use, it should show a saved reply that will match with the email allowing you to easily modify what is needed from it and send it on its way in a matter of seconds. If a suggested email is not what you were looking for, you will see two arrows at the top right of the message box that will let you browse through your other saved messages that may work for the reply. If not, then you just fill it out as you normally would. You would then send out the message and Mailroom will learn from this reply to help with future suggestions. The more you reply, the stronger the suggestions get. Also a note that when sending replies, the “From:” headers point to the sproutitmail.com email address you are given. But Sproutit has told me that this is soon going to be changed and Mailroom will allow you to set it to any address that you want. For now, I’m fine with it, but when they get that set, I will be a lot happier with the service.

The beauty of Mailroom is the organization (with user assigning) and the sending of email because it makes it so simple for you. You only get mail that requires your attentions and the fact that it learns what you need write when making a reply by the suggestions it provides so you can view and send in a matter of seconds. Sure, you will probably have to edit a few sentences, add some specifics, names, etc., but it certainly saves you from writing out a whole email. This is perfect for small businesses, or anyone really that is highly involved with email. I know I definitely could have used it the other day with 140 comments mailed to me the other day for my coComment review!

(Note: Blurred some contacts for privacy)

The last feature that I want to discuss is the contacts section, or the “People” section as Mailroom refers to it. You may wonder what is so special about a section that lists your contacts? Well, to start off, contacts are listed in an unusual box type manor. But because of this, it actually makes it easier to view all your contacts and provides some useful information. On the top you will see all the Mailroom users and on the bottom contacts that have sent you email. Each email provides basic information like the contacts name and email but also gives you the last time the contact has been active and how many emails you have from that contact. Clicking on the contact will then go to a page that will display all the emails you have received from that contact. The contacts section is very well done in my opinion and I like how it adds contact info for received email because you never know when you’ll need to contact that person back or look back in your archive of mail for a specific contact.

As you would probably guess, Mailroom does not limit your email viewing to attention only. You can view all mail that is assigned to you or any of your fellow Mailroom users. You can also search through mail, view mail by tags, and even filter out by date or by status. Status being needing attention, waiting for reply, closed, or junk mail. The searching is available anywhere on in Mailroom on the top left and the viewing and filtering of all mail is possible through the “All Messages” section. I love being able to add tags to the email I receive and then easily being able to find mail again by just selecting tags I have used. Very simple.

Overall I find Sproutit Mailroom to be an excellent solution for email management. It is great to see a service such that targets small businesses to help save time with email so they can get back to doing what they want. There are five different plans that you can select from, one being free. So make sure you test it out and see how it works for you and/or your company. Everything seemed to work very well and there are updates on their way. I’m excited to see how this takes off. You can keep up with Sproutit at The Big Act and also you will find another blog for Mailroom specifically when you signup. And lastly, make sure to checkout Sproutit’s DEMO presentation where they show you how to use Mailroom and even put it to the test with a 30 second timer. I will definitely be using this sometime in the near future, but may wait to use it full-scale until they get the “From:” headers to point to whatever address I set. But overall, loved it, definitely helpful, and definitely saves a lot of time. Great work to the Sproutit team.

View Sproutit Mailroom for Small Business Email Management.