I have been playing around with Adobe’s new product, Adobe Air, for most of the day (I know, my life is soo difficult).  I have to admit, I am pretty damn impressed!

Adobe Air is platform irrelevant and melds together the Internet and your desktop.  Not only is it fast and lightweight, it has a very small resource footprint so you don’t need a killer machine to run it.

To get started, you need to download Air.  Then, visit the Air Marketplace (most of the apps are free).  Here are some of my favorites:

• Sundial - A time tracking/project tracking utility the lives on your desktop and automatically shuts off when you computer goes idle (great feature).
• Ora Time and Expense - A lightweight application to help you track time and expenses, and generate invoices.  Useful for a designer or someone who does work on the side.
• StockQ - An Air application that provides streaming stock quotes for one or multiple portfolios.  Great for having your portfolio and a prospective portfolio!
• Spaz - The best Twitter desktop client out there - hands down…
• Google Analytics Reporting Suite - No longer do you have to log in to Analytics to check your sites stats.  Beware: If you are a compulsive stats checker - stay away from this application.  It’s too easy to go overboard when it’s just sitting on your desktop!

If you find any others, let me know!  I am definitely going to be using Air for a while, and will probably end up tackling the programming side of it before too long.

Google Gears has been added to the infamous Google Reader.  I noticed it today as I was checking up on feeds.

Once you install the plugin (I was running Firefox at the time), Google indexes 2000 feed items and I think it keeps them synchronized.  So, the next time your Internet connection goes down, you will have something to read!

I am looking forward to what Gears has in store for us in terms of accessing content and information offline.  Once the functionality is added to Google Docs and Spreadsheets, Microsoft will have a serious contender on their hands.

It’s always a good morning when I wake up to receive an email saying that a company wants to sponsor my blog. Yesterday, I just closed a deal for a year long text link on JDsBlog.com paid through Paypal. The nice thing is TLA doesn’t get a cut, and I control the deal!

Getting Private Sponsorship is usually a little more difficult than receiving an email, though. Often, when looking for advertisements for my sites that aren’t program or referral based, I do a couple different things.

• I go to Google and type in a keyword that the site caters to. All those Adwords/Adsense links on the right hand side pay to be there. So I click on the link and email the webmaster/company asking if they want to do a private sponsorship.
• I will find other comparable sites and email their sponsors, asking if they will sponsor me.

There are a couple different variations of a form letter that I send to them, which I will include on a later post. But overall, it is pretty effective.

Either method you use, the thinking is that they are already spending money on the Internet for advertising their product or their service. Why not have it be through you? You don’t have to sell them on the benefits of sponsoring sites because they already know. You just need to make it known that they would do well by throwing you some money for a link or banner placement.

photo credit: sbisson

I have long been a Firefox user.  I love the add-ons and the theme switching capability.  In fact, I have an HTML page that I use to run through all my favorite extensions every time I install the browser.

TechCrunch reports that Firefox has almost 17% market share, which is amazing for a open-source browser being spread with grassroots campaigns.  It would be amazing if more businesses could achieve that much growth.

But I wonder, of the 500 million reported downloads, how many time have you pulled the app off their servers?  Personally, I can report (pretty safely) that I have downloaded Firefox over 60 times.  That includes installing it on each of my 4 computers probably 5 or 6 times over, plus all of the client’s computers I have put it on.

The problem is, I am notorious for wiping out my hard drives and installing clean operating systems on a pretty regular basis.  Windows has a way of generating so much junk..

So, how many times have you downloaded Firefox?  I am anxious to hear!

When I was young, knight rider was as much a part of my existence as was ice cream. I had to be 8 or 10 years old, and I was hooked. How could a car talk and drive and solve problems all by itself?

Over the weekend, I was playing around online and saw the advertisement for the new Knight Rider. And let me tell you… I was instantly giddy. I am not one to get emotional about anything - happy, sad, frustrated, pissed off.. But seeing the new Knight Rider was sure to be a treat. In fact, I structured my whole day around the show.

Looking back, I think Knight Rider was where I get my love of technology. I was too young to realize it then, but I was simply infatuated by electronics all through my childhood. Maybe that’s why I chose the career path that I did. And who knows, maybe I will get a team together to build the first driving, talking, problem solving car in the world…

I have a long way to go, but anything is possible if you put your mind to it!