Survey monkey might be an intermediate (easier) alternative to Persues. The basic package is free, and their pricing page has a bunch of links to other services.

Sarah Nilsen dropped by 407 the other day to ask how she could make audio material available for her class on hip hop. Since UVM as yet has no published Copyright Policy, and copyright law is not a cut and dry subject in any case, our answers were a little vague. Even among ourselves, we do not agree on how to advise faculty on how to protect themselves and the organization when distributing materials. Nonetheless, here were a few of the options we discussed.
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John im’d me last night with a fun idea:

new idea, away message podcast? post a link to the article and a quick mp3 or mov of a isight describing a show or link, quick edit, about 2min? maybe 1? just thought u would find interesting

Being able to aggregate all of your buddies current & past away messages would indeed be pretty nifty. It might also be interesting to consider an rss feed of all the links, movies, and audio (including a/v chats) that you actually send and recieve. One of the most useful features of IM for me is the ability to send and recieve interesting links and tidbits from friends and coworkers. This is information that is bound to be more interesting to me than what would be in an email newsletter, web based news feed, or even an email sent to a group of people (cc or bcc list), as it is sent directly to me.

Besides this personalized word of mouth news service, it is also blazingly quick - I don’t even have to commit to typing or reading a subject line, as the link or item often describes itself. Nor do I need to decide if I want to look at something sent to me - chances are it’ll be worth looking at because the person who sent it knows me and so it’s already been “pre-approved”.

That said, I regularily find myself digging into my IM history, looking for links I’ve sent or recieved. Having the ability to cull links and other special items out of that history would be huge.

As an aside, sjc uses an aim “bot” to make posts to a private blog … in essence, using it to jot down quick notes. An interesting twist on this idea, as I imagine he can get a feed of some sort from that.

Every now and then, someone needs to exchange with me some form of sensitive information, such as a password. Sending information like this digitally, be it via email, instant messenger, or some other method is inherently insecure and is generally considered a Bad Idea. So, this means that in situations like this, a face-to-face meeting or a phonecall is needed to transfer the information.

However, there is a relatively safe alternative. The GNU Privacy Guard (or GnuPG) is a free, open source set of industrial strength encrytion tools that you can use to protect your documents and other information. It also allows you to digitally “sign” documents to let people know that it came from you.

Here are a few resources.

Kuro5hin has a nice article on getting started with GnuPG, with a brief discussion of the concepts..

The mac and OSX gui tools seem to work pretty well for me, including the Mail plugin.

However, you certainly don’t need to be on a specific system (you don’t even need a graphical interface - although it may seem easier) to use GnuPG tools. The GnuPG site has a list of resources available.

If you are interested, my public key is here. Perhaps a key-signing party is in order?

Lately I think I’ve been dealing pretty well with my del.icio.us addiction. It started out just perusing the main page, and /popular. Besides being a great place to find cool new tools/toys, it fed within me a fascination with what people take the time to bookmark. I think the term “social bookmarking” might not actually do this phenomenon justice. In a way, it takes “surfing” to another level - one could liken skimming the cream off the top of the internet. Remember that these are lists of what people want to make sure they don’t forget - that is searcheable and browseable to Average Joe. Oh, the Places you’ll go!

But I digress. What I meant to say was, I had thought I had been dealing with this unhealthy obsession pretty well, until murch got me back into it (the other night I got lost in a wonderful blog called coolosxapps, that I saw on his his delicious feed). A few weeks ago I added my feed to the side of this blog. You can add yours or anyones (even a combination of delicious feeds) to your website too, using the tools they give you on the site - it’s as simple as copy and paste.

I’m looking forward to flock maturing - it’ll be nice to have this sort of stuff really built into the browser, as opposed to a collection of bookmarklets and browser extensions.