Whohub Gives You Probing Interview Questions To Give You Better Visibility On The Web

Having a strong presence on the Internet these days is almost essential for marketing your skills, experiences, and sometimes your views on various issues and topics. We have covered a few user profile sites like Dooid.com, and others for your social networks; each has its unique features. A fairly new site, however, takes another approach to letting people know who you are and what you do. It’s called Whohub.

Whohub’s goal is to develop a “social network for creative professionals based on their capacity for self-expression and collaboration”.  In other words, you use Whohub to not only paste links to your business and social network sites, you also answer a series of interview questions to convey more specifically who you are, what motivates you, and what your goals are. It’s sort of like posting a personal job interview or being interviewed on the Larry King Show – that is, depending on how you choose to answer the questions.

Why Use It?

Whohub provides another way to publicize your work and experience to potential clients, employers, associates, or colleagues. What you reveal about yourself is up to you. Whohub says it automatically optimizes all interviews for search engines. It also provides customized HTML code that you can embed into your blog or other websites to publicize your interview.

There are of course interview questions for linking to your other sites and sites you recommend to readers. You get a personal URL to share with others, and you can contact other professionals like yourself, in order to share experiences or collaborate on projects.

The site contains interviews from people all over the world, in more than 100 countries.

How It Works

Setting your interview profile on Whohub is very simple. You select a category (e.g., writing, cooking, politics, advertising, art, music, entrepreneur) that fits what you mainly do or are interested in.

Each category has a dozen or more unique questions from which you can choose from. For example, if you’re a writer, questions may include: “What did you first read?  How did you begin to write?  Who were the first to read what you wrote?  What discipline do you impose on yourself regarding schedules, goals, etc?” and “What is your creative process like? What happens before sitting down to write?”

Just because you’re given a long list of questions, however, doesn’t mean you should answer all of them. If you want people to actually read your interview, you might limit your responses to say 10 questions, focusing on ones that convey what you think readers most need to know about you.

After setting up an account, you can edit or delete your responses, as well answer additional questions. Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be a way to add your own questions to the list.

As you might expect, you can share your interview on various social networking sites.

Other Features

To further build your profile, you can maintain a log of your current activities and projects, as well follow other “authors“ and send them messages.

Whohub.com also features a pretty large free jobs board, where you can search by title, company, location, and job type. Job searches are free, but there’s a fee for posting jobs. There are also forum and bookmarking sections, but they are linear-based and only broken up by language.

There are some excellent questions in the forums where users asks people to help them with a project, respond to their published work, or answer tough discussion questions like, “What is the cause of the global economic depression?”.  There should be a way, however, to do a topic search of forum questions instead of clicking from page to page in order to read the long and growing list.

Let us know what you think of Whohub and feel free to post a link your interview page.

Organize Your Gmail Inbox Better With ActiveInbox

We send and receive lots of emails daily. Many of the messages we receive are important ones requiring some further action or reply – but most of these emails are automatic notifications and updates from our social networks and subscriptions. How to make sense of all this clutter? How do we not miss something really important in that mess?

There are a lot of ways to. For example, you can usescheduled reminders not to forget to get in touch with the person again. Or you can schedule emails and delay replies in Gmail or use Gmail Priority inbox to reduce the clutter. And of course don’t forget our Ultimate Guide To Gmail for plenty of tips on how to make the most of Gmail.

This post looks at one such tool that helps you better organize your Gmail inbox (by taking the full advantage of Gmail labels). ActiveInbox, formally known as GTDInbox and GTDGmail (mentioned in our Gmail productivity post earlier), is a handy Gmail companion that makes the proper use of Gmail labels to help you get your inbox better organized.

Step 1: Install & Set Up ActiveInbox

The first thing you will need to do is to install the tool. It is installed as a regular browser addon and can run on FireFox and Google Chrome.

After installing the tool, you will need to create your first Status labels that help you turn emails into tasks. Status labels are regular labels in Gmail – you can add or remove them later to suit your needs as you start using ActiveInbox.

After this is done, you will see the following taskbar on top of each of your emails:

Playing With New Label Types

Basically, what the tool does is rearrange your existing labels to make your inbox easier to manage. You can see it in action in this video :

Status Labels

With the tool you’ll be encouraged to mark every message using the main three status labels:

• Action: Track important emails until the tasks are completed;
• Some day: Track email you don’t know how to deal with but feel they are too important to be deleted or ignored completely;
• Waiting on: Track emails that you plan to reply in the nearest future.

Once you choose any of the statuses, the message becomes trackable via ActiveInbox’s sidebar.

This is the key to safely emptying your inbox: give your actionable emails Status, archive them and use your sidebar to track them until they’re complete.

You can now quickly load the list of messages which, for example, are waiting for a reply and even preview them in the pop-up screen:

From there you can also change the status label or archive the email as done or skipped.

Projects & References

While status labels categorize the emails as tasks based on which action they require, projects are meant to organize your messages thematically. You can turn your existing labels into projects or create new ones:

Reference labels are meant to make your messages easy to retrieve later, e.g. R/MeetingNotes, R/Invoices, R/Receipts.

Browse Emails More Efficiently

Apart from helping you to organize your inbox, the tool also adds a few nice features that let you quicker dig into each specific email conversation:

• See ‘previous emails‘ for compose/reply view
• Browse related emails in conversation view
• See ‘Contact History‘ popup on right-click on a contact
• Preview emails in the inbox and search results on right-click

Preferences

The best thing about the tool is that you can use it “as much as you want of it”. ActiveInbox’s preferences hiding behind the About & Help link in the sidebar let you set every bit of the tool feature range:

Tips and Tricks

All in all, the tool does a great job helping you make sense of your Gmail (or Google Apps) inbox. Here are a few helpful tips to make the most of it (note: you can do most of these with Gmail even without the tool but with ActiveInbox it seems just so much more fun):

• Don’t check your inbox multiple times a day and reply to each new one – it is so inefficient. Better set up status and project labels to let your inbox get sorted by itself.
• Never forget to follow-up: let your emails hang in the “Waiting on” folder until you hear back.
• Set up Gmail filters for all “service announcement” emails (Facebook notifications, Twitter updates, etc.) to put them into a special label and archive automatically. That way you can read them when you want to, but they don’t clog your inbox.

Do you think this tool might help you organize your inbox? Please share your thoughts!

4 Simple Steps To Achieving & Maintaining Inbox Zero In Gmail

With three email accounts, one for work, one personal and one for Make Use Of, I find myself spending more time checking my email and trying to keep all the messages under control than actually getting much work done. Luckily, all three email accounts are Gmail or Google Apps accounts, and so in an attempt to organise one account, I followed several steps that can be applied to all three. Gmail provides several tools that will help you declutter your inbox and, more importantly, keep it that way.

Achieving Inbox Zero is actually a pretty simple task, and maintaining it can be done with minimal effort on your part, as long as you have a decent system in place.

These are a few simple steps that can help you put that system into motion and, in addition, keep your archive free of large attachments that take up space, which even with Gmail’s huge capacity, after a few years, it can begin to run out.

Set up filters

The first step when decluttering your inbox is to create filters. This is useful because the filters can be applied to all of the messages that are already clogging your inbox. While Gmail filtersmake it easy to create these filters, Syphir takes it all one step further, effectively putting your filters on steroids.

With Syphir you can filter out mass forwards, archive emails once they’ve been in your inbox for a certain amount of time, push back personal, Facebook or Twitter related emails during your work day so you don’t get distracted and keep your inbox clean and tidy.

A key way in which you can use Syphir to keep your email tidy and organised is to create a label system that will suit your own personal needs, jobs and projects. That way finding older emails will be a snap. Of course, if you don’t feel comfortable giving a third party access to your email, you can make do with Gmail’s native filter system.

Creating filters is very important when it comes to decluttering your inbox because once you have all of your filters in place, your inbox will stay organised.

Convert Emails Into Tasks

After setting up your filters, the next step is to address the emails that are still in your inbox.

I tend to keep emails in my inbox until I’ve handled the related issue or task. More often than not, the task can be forgotten, and as you receive more emails, you run the risk of completely forgetting all about it. Before you know it, your inbox is once again full of emails you have read, but have not dealt with.

To stay on top of things, convert your emails into tasks immediately using Gmail Tasks.

Each task will be accompanied by a link to the related email, so you don’t spend time looking for it if you need to refer to or reply to it.

Reply To Routine Emails Using Canned Responses

Replying to routine emails using Canned Responses makes it easy to clear out those emails that have you typing the same response over and over again.

Using features like Gmail’s canned responses makes it easier and faster to get to your final goal of Inbox Zero.

Use Priority Inbox To Reply To The Rest Of Your Emails

Now that your Gmail inbox is organised, and you’ve replied to your routine emails using Canned Responses, all that’s left to do is prioritise the rest of your emails.

Use Gmail’s Priority Inbox to figure out what order you’ll be addressing or replying to the emails you receive.

Clean Out The Archive

As a bonus step, if you find yourself running out of space in your Gmail account, you might need a quick and easy to get rid of the emails that are taking up too much space. There are several ways you can search for the largest emails in your Gmail archive.

The simples and and most direct method is to run the search has:attachment. If you would like to specify the kind of attachment, since a word document doesn’t take up as much space as an audio or video file, search for specific files using filename:mp3, filename:avi, filename: mov and so forth.

If you want to hand over the task to a third party service, authorise Find Big Mail and it will automatically root out all the large emails in your Gmail account.

FindBigMail will perform a search and categorise your emails by size using labels in your inbox, which you can can then sift through.

What do you do to keep your Gmail inbox empty? Let us know in the comments.

Create Quick Access & Shortcuts To Your Files & Applications From The System Tray in Windows

A mouse might be one of the best things that happened to the personal computer. It makes the computing experience graphically friendly and pointing and clicking easy. But from the productivity point of view, most of us will actually work faster and more effectively with our hands off the mouse than constantly going back and forth between the mouse and the keyboard.

For example, selecting and copying several groups of text would be faster – and less tiring – using a combination of arrow keys+Shift and Ctrl+C, rather than using the mouse.

You will also work faster if you can use shortcuts to open your favorite files and applications instead of constantly rummaging through your Start Menu and/or Windows Explorer. That’s exactly the idea behind SE-TrayMenu: to put your favorite applications (and files) in your Windows’s System Tray for quick access, and optionally assign shortcut keys to them for even quicker access.

The Small Wonder

SE-TrayMenu is available as a normal Windows-based application and portable app. The download size of the compressed portable version is just a little bit over 100KB, and yet this minuscule app can greatly improve your computing workflow. The app will reside quietly in the system tray and every time you hover your mouse over the tray icon, a list of applications will pop out. You can click one of the items to quickly open it.

But the real power of this app lies inside the “Settings“. Right click on the tray icon to access it.

There’s the usual “Main Settings” with the usual items like the option to launch the app every time Windows starts.

There are also quick drop-down menus to access Layout options,

And color themes.

We’ll discuss this two items later on.

The main story is in the “Applications” tab. This is the place where you can add, remove and edit applications and files that you want to make available from the system tray.

The “Add” button gives you three options: to add executable files individually, add items from the frequently used applications list, and add items from the Start Menu.

The first option is actually set to add applications to the list, but you can slightly modify it to enable adding any kinds of files (including documents and multimedia). Click the drop-down list from “Files of type” and choose “All Files“. This action will reveal files outside of the application realm.

Choosing the second and third options will give you long checklist of applications. Adding them to the list is as simple as checking the boxes next to the applications.

To add shortcuts to open the applications, select one application from the list and click the “Edit” button. You could choose one of the available shortcuts from the “Shortcuts” drop down list or you could assign your own preferred “complex” shortcut combinations.

After saving the settings and closing the “Settings” window, you can open your chosen files and applications just by pressing the respective shortcut keys combination. If you ever forget the combination, just hover your mouse above the tray icon and click on the item that you want to open.

Beautifying The Look

Another thing that you could do to enhance SE-TrayMenu is modify the look to your liking by choosing the combination of Layout and Theme. The “Main Settings” tab provides you with quick options to modify those two, but if you want to customize them further, you can use the dedicated menu.

The “Layout” tab allows you to choose the number of columns, image size, margin, spacing, etc.

While the “Color Theme” tab gives you access to more detailed elements of the theme such as color and font type.

The combination of Layout and Color theme elements gives you many appearance possibilities for the applications/files list. For example, you could make it look like this:

Or this:

Even though the real purpose of this app is to minimize your interaction with the mouse and help you to be more efficient, it’s also nice to have a good looking list of applications.

As a keyboard lover, SE-TrayMenu is a must-have application for me. But what about you? Would you use this application to help you access your favorite applications and files? Or do you have your own favorite application to do it? Please share your thoughts and opinions using the comments below.http://www.trusstechnosofts.com

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Google Launches Instant Preview To Make Searching Easier

It’s only been about two months since Google launched their latest search engine feature, Google Instant, making it faster and easier than ever to get the results you’re looking for.

A few days ago, they launched yet another small but handy feature that will make it easy to filter through those results and determine which one is right for you, using Instant Previews.

On your search results page, each item is accompanied by a little magnifying glass. Clicking on the icon will activate the Instant Preview feature, and you will need to activate the feature for each search instance.

A small screenshot of the website will be displayed on the Google search page, displaying the general layout of the page, simply by hovering over each search result.

In an attempt to make things as easy as possible for you, Google has implemented keyboard shortcuts for accessing Instant Preview. Use the up and down arrow keys to navigate between search results, and the right arrow key to display the preview.

To see Google Instant Previews in action, check out the video below.

Are you using Google Instant Preview? Let us know what you think of it in the comments.