From Google Grants. The value of their grant varies and depends on how the non-profit uses their grant. Google says it is about $300/month. But the goal is to allow non-profits to use AdWords to get donations, volunteers, and other good things.

If you’re a non-profit that qualifies and is accepted, or you have a non-profit who meets their criteria, this could be an excellent program. There is no end date to the grant as long as the non-profit actively keeps up their AdWords account.

From Before & After magazine. It’s part of their process to collect email addresses so you have to provide an email address to get the document. However, I find their monthly how-to emails often interesting, not pushy.

This article shows a series of basic steps you can follow to take a photograph and extract many different possible color palettes. Picking colors can be hard, especially for business people on a budget. Even with a budget, it helps to know the color picking process if you manage or hire designers. In this case, their article shows how to use colors in one element of a document, a photograph, to then extract palettes from a color wheel. It’s a very good primer on that process.

UPDATE: This document on how to pick colors that work together also works great with an online color wheel to pick analogs, tetrads, and so on. Color Scheme Designer, for example, lets you define an RGB color value (to the lower right of the circle on the left side of their page) and then all its different color relations. Color Scheme Designer also lets you see how your color choices look to color-impaired people. You still have to pick your colors and ensure they work together in a palette, but an online color wheel can make the process faster and easier.

From Salon. If you have not figured it out already, the avatar, the small thumbnail sized picture you use on Facebook and LinkedIn, among other places, can say alot about you. This blog post describes six different issues to consider as you pick and change avatars.

If approved by the City Council, responsibility for protecting the internal data and public records would be shifted from the city to Google, according to a report submitted this week to a council committee that will weigh the proposed $7.25-million contract.”

From the LA Times. A few years ago, there were stories about countries like Brazil promoting open source as an alternative to Microsoft Windows and Office. Now it’s cities talking about using Google’s network and software to replace antiquated software, in this case, GroupWise email. And companies like Motorola and Genentech apparently find Google secure enough to use for their businesses.

Most striking, to me, in our age, is that Neil Armstrong, the man who actually stepped on the moon first, has deliberately avoided the public limelight. He doesn’t appear in People magazine every few years by choice. He’s never on TV. Instead, he’s lived out the life he wanted in Ohio. That’s truly odd, and wonderful, in an age that worships and promotes celebrity.

In 1969, personal technology meant a TV, radio, and telephone. Technology like Apollo 11, and mainframe computers, were too expensive and too complex to be run by anyone other than governments and well-funded corporations. Today, of course, personal technology includes updated versions of TV, radio, and phone but it also includes a host of internet-related services that most people take for granted. Especially if you have a phone with internet connectivity and a web browser.

While no government has matched what happened 40 years ago today, you could say that instead we created technology that helps billions of individuals. And much of that achievement has been based on the Apollo and other space and science missions. And much of that achievement has been from individuals from many countries who took government created technology, specifically the internet, to create technologies such as Google, eBay, Flickr, Facebook, Twitter, open source, and all the rest. We have had the technology revolution promised by Apollo. However, it has happened on earth, not space. And it’s been created and used by millions of people, not carefully selected astronauts.

All that said, as a web designer and coder, chained to computers all day and tormented at times by lousy Microsoft web browsers, my dream job is to herd goats in some mountain village somewhere that has no internet, no phone, no TV, no radio. You have to read books and talk to people to keep amused. You have to be outdoors hiking, swimming, or sitting around and watching the day pass. I would like universal health care, of course, and a professional government. My daughter tells me Norway might be just the ticket.

Awhile back, I found Xobni, a software tool with an odd name that should be in every version of any email software. Now they have a Plus version, for $29.95, that solves the major issue I had with the software. Both the free and paid versions are a huge value if you collect a lot of email for projects.

Xobni works as a plugin to Outlook. When you set up, it can take a few hours for the software to index thousands of emails. But that is a small price to pay for the features. Once indexed, Xobni sits on the right side of Outlook or it appears when you call it. Typing in part or all of a name or search term in Xobni calls up all your emails from that person or emails that contain that term. You also get the contact information from your address book. And attachments. And email threads, the chains of email by email subject line, nested and sorted by date. The ability to dig out ancient and obscure emails in seconds floored me the first time I used it.

Xobni also is useful in going back to tell your clients the exact email, by date and subject line, that had the information you sent them months ago. You know the phone call: the client calls up and says, “Did you ever do this?” Lawyers and anyone who needs backup often months later will find Xobni extremely easy and helpful.

While I religiously create project and client folders in Outlook and sort email every day, Xobni makes it possible to avoid that chore. Indeed, Xobni really is a totally different way to look at your email and work with it. Which is the reason every email client should have a current email view and the Xobni view.

The only issue I’ve found happens after I archive my emails, when my Outlook file goes over 2GB which happens every year. Happily, Xobni keeps a copy of the text of emails, and contact information, but not the attachments. Often that’s all I need.

Their new Plus version, however, includes the ability to search across multiple Outlook files. So I can have old archived emails as easily found as the ones in my current email file. The Free version still is limited to one Outlook file which may be fine for most people because it keeps the actual email text of archived emails (assuming you run Xobni before you archive your emails, of course).

Bottomline, Xobni is well worth a try if you have to manage large amounts of email. And even if you don’t the ability to quickly find any email based on author or content is amazing and valuable. The free version has a lot of capability. The Plus version, at $29.95, is a huge value even if you only use it to search across your archived email files with their attachments. It’s a small price to pay to support useful innovative software.

All of this is brilliant and powerful, exciting and motivating. But I’m also worried. I’m worried about the rhetoric we use when we talk about technology. Given what we’ve experienced and what we witness today, we tend to believe that these technologies are the great equalizers, that they can help ANYONE participate, that the technologies in and of themselves can revitalize democracy. In other words, we tend to believe in a certain utopian myth of the internet as the savior. What if this weren’t true?”

From “The Not-So-Hidden Politics of Class Online”, a presentation by danah boyd. Found through a NYTimes.com Blogwise item, Does Social Networking Breed Social Division?.

Both the presentation and the NYTimes.com post are important to read. However, the research points up something that should be rather obvious: people associate online with the same people they associate with offline. The class divisions in any society will be carried into the online world. Technology is neutral. If social equality is the goal, and I would sign up for that goal, perhaps technology needs to expand to make connections online that might be impossible in the real world.

These items also point up the flip side of some technology policies, for example, Facebook’s invitation only model. Building a service on invitation naturally reinforces the carryover of our offline social networks online. But it also makes it difficult to break out and identify and connect with people who share our interests but would not connect with offline. Facebook groups help break the walled garden dynamic. But you have to find a group, join, and then participate actively to make friends outside your real world friends.

Perhaps humans also should create technology that passively suggests connections based upon participation (e.g. key words in posts, group affiliations) and level of activity (e.g. suggesting only people who are active online). People could choose to not connect. But they also could choose to connect with confidence there was sufficient basis for connection based on interests.

What disturbed me were the disparaging comments about people who use the other service, in this case, MySpace, made by the teenagers boyd interviewed. While it is human to engage in us versus them thinking, teachers and parents should work to balance that way of thinking with the equally real notion that we live in a big world with lots of people who are very different from us, that we are indeed equal at the human level, that we should be open to others even if they are not like us or even disagree with what we think and do.

Ms. Smalley, it turns out, is a 100 percent human customer service representative for Comcast. She is one of 10 representatives who reach out to customers through social networks, rather than waiting for them to find Comcast’s support site.”

From the New York Times.

This is a fun and simple overview about how you might manage your online social networks. For me, the more interesting bit is the links to sites that help you create avatars, for example, Be Funky. Many of these effects you can get in Photoshop. I also liked the mention of the Firefox plugin, LeechBlock, that lets you ban specific sites (oh, you know, YouTube or Facebook or ___) during certain hours of the day so you can get work done.

But for those willing to dig around, searching for search engines can reveal a treasure trove: The net is rich with specialized search services, all trying to find a way to get their slice of the billions of dollars Google makes every year answering queries.

For this article, we surveyed some 50 specialty search services and picked out our favorites. What follows is not a systematic ranking or review, but a general guide to a very vibrant world that few have bothered to explore in depth.”

From Wired. There are a number of great engines to check out based on this article. Collecta looks useful for companies who want to find out what is said about them online while ParkingSpots can help you find a parking spot.

This article highlights the search trend away from generic search to topic specific search and action specific search. My guess is that some of these new search engines will be bought up by the bigger players like Google.

However, as the numbers of systems grow within an organization, so does the effort needed to maintain the quality and consistency of the user experience. For many organizations, it is now impossible to assign much, if any, time of a user experience specialist to all implementation efforts, and experience has shown that the UI guidelines and principles approach to propagating a single user experience standard does not scale well.”

From Boxes and Arrows. Besides a quick discussion of issues around how traditional guideline documents don’t scale, and alternative solutions, this article includes an excellent set of links to UI pattern libraries.

From Typography for Lawyers. Found through The (Non)Billable Hour. This is a truly excellent introduction to typography geared towards all lay people. While it is hard to explain typography with words, showing people two examples of fonts that say the same thing, as this site does, explains it all to the average person.

My only quibble is that the layout is too wide even for 1024×768 screens. And you need to click into the site to get to the content, starting with the About page. However, that’s exactly the way legal documents usually work so it is no wonder.

From Need Something? Talk To My Right Ear in Science Daily. Found through HiveLogic.

Best part is that the tests were done in a noisy nightclub asking people for cigarettes. Probably the worst place to have a conversation. This research suggests that when you pitch your clients, you should always directly face their right ear.

However, articles like this are a mile wide and an inch deep. For example, some of these free services take up to 60 minutes to notify you if there is a failure. There also could be lag time between the time the monitoring service is notified and the time they send an email or SMS to you. At least one solution involves placing a file on your web server, which yields more detailed data to monitor. In short, the free option for many of these services is limited in ways that might not be useful. So it is caveat emptor, or buyer beware.

I have played with Montastic and Basic State. Montastic is fine. Basic State yesterday caught a server failure within fifteen minutes, which is great for free. Their daily status emails also are useful. I’d also check out the comments on these articles for more vendors. I found Server Density that way.

My recommendation is to compare all services, try the services that meet your needs and then, if you need to, pay for the service. Despite what these articles promise, it is possible but unlikely you will find a free service that does exactly what you want. But free is enough to try these services, to find what works for your website(s).

From FixOutlook.org. You’ll need a Twitter account to participate, although anyone can go to the Microsoft site and and complain/suggest they either fix their Word rendering engine or not use it in Outlook 2010. It’s rather odd, too, given the outrage a few years ago when Microsoft pre-emptively switched the HTML rendering engine to their crippled Word HTML rendering engine. While that decision made business sense — it’s less cost and less complexity to use one tool across multiple software packages, it is amazing they still have not fixed the very broken Word HTML rendering engine. They’ve had years.

In any event, the FixOutlook.org site also is interesting because they’re gathering all the tweets and avatars. So it’s a visual representation of the hive mind. Very cool. Now is a good time to speak up on this issue.

And, if you missed it, Steve Ballmer of Microsoft recently told Blooomberg that, in response to the Obama Administration closing a corporate tax loophole, “We’re better off taking lots of people and moving them out of the U.S. as opposed to keeping them inside the U.S.” While corporate profits are important, so is the ability of Americans to have high paying jobs so they can buy houses, send kids to school, take vacations, and buy stuff like Microsoft software. It’s a matter of balance. With this Outlook 2010 decision, and comments about destroying US jobs to avoid taxes, Microsoft seems very out of balance lately.