Every once in a while a Firefox add-on catches me off-guard and becomes quite the handy tool. This particular one, though, simply knocked me over the head, picked me back up, and shoved me down Photo Browsing Easy Street.

PicLens by Cooliris instantly transforms web photo albums into a “full-screen, 3d wall experience.” Dragging, clicking and zooming through the interface is as smooth as butter, and photos load in at speeds that still baffle me. There is also integration with all the major photo sites such as Flickr, Picasa, Facebook, and many more. As impressive as all this is, what really makes this add-on worth its weight in gold is the fact that you can simply open PicLens at any time and perform a Google image search. No more tedious pagination. No more time-consuming page reloads. Google images simply appear out of thin air as you drag your mouse. Genius! And something I now can’t live without.

Every so often I stumble on a new tool that makes my life easier (how nice those moments are.) Hopefully this is another one of them. I just found a nifty Firefox Add-On called ScribeFire: Fire up your blogging. It basically lets you post to a number of popular blog formats, including a custom wordpress install like this one, right from within your browser. So, here is my first post (hopefully of many) using ScribeFire. Enjoy.

Now that I’ve had my iPod Touch for a few months now, I have truly grown to appreciate it’s version of the Safari browser. I haven’t seen a mobile device nail the task of web browsing quite like the iPhone and iPod Touch. As good as a job that it’s browser does displaying regular web pages (except for Flash, don’t get me started), every once in a while someone goes the extra mile, develops an iPhone version of their site, and puts a nice big smile on my face.

Just recently Encyclopedia Britannica did just that and launched a mobile iPhone edition of their site. I must say that it’s one of the better designed iPhone sites that I’ve seen so far. First of all, like so many other iPhone-specific sites, they took away the need to “double-tap” zoom to read their content. The home page is not only striking in appearance, but overly simple. One button to search and a few suggested searches to help get the user started. Mobile needs to be simple…to the point. The search button brings up the oh-so-familiar iPhone keyboard. If it works, why change it? (more…)

Distributed content on the web is nothing new. RSS feeds, widgets and other embeddable content (videos, images, slideshows, etc…) have been popping up in blogs, personalized homepages, and social networking profile pages for several years. As marketers however, this illustrates a major point that needs to be considered. People are off your site, much more than they are on it. We can’t expect people to come to us for information, we need to be where they are.

Technologies such as RSS are basic tools to address this, but recently Chip showed me an app that allows anyone to create dynamic flash widgets sprouts that can be embedded throughout the web. The technology is called Sprout Builder, and after trying it out I was amazed at how easy the interface was to use. As my friend Mike Gowan once said, “Any simpleton could do this!” It took me about 20 minutes to build a simple EPInteractiv sprout that was fed via RSS, a Google Calendar, and a set of photos.

When you get a moment, check it out. Thank TechCrunch for the beta signup.

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