The first thing vendors must do to have a successful content syndication program is to create a strategic roadmap of where they stand today versus where they would like to be in the near future. Too often, vendors jump in to a content syndication program without a proper situation analysis.

The four phases of a good content syndication program are:

1. Control Brand Messaging and Integrity
2. Organize Content and Distribute Promotions
3. Create Demand and Generate Leads
4. Improve Partner Enablement

For example, before starting a content syndication program, one of SharedVue’s clients hired a research agency to measure the effectiveness of content on partner websites. They found partners were not representing the vendor message or portfolio in line with the corporate website. Thus, the vendor needed to start with Phase I: controlling brand messaging and integrity. We then helped roadmap a strategy that quickly took them from an overall lack of branding on partners’ websites to completely controlling a cohesive set of content that enabled partners with promotional opportunities, generated demand, and captured leads. They are now in Phase IV and are working on implementing a partner enablement program that gives their partners controlled email campaign templates complete with landing pages inside the syndicated content.

While vendors don’t necessarily need to do that same type of research to implement a good syndication program, there are a few questions to ask before getting started.

How often do I want to update content on my partner websites?

How often you create new product or marketing content will largely determine how often you want to update your syndicated content. If your product development teams try to come out with new marketing content every quarter and you want that content to go live on partner websites at the same time (or even before) it’s live on the vendor corporate site, it might be a good idea to set up your syndication program with slightly more frequent updates than that — perhaps monthly. This will give you plenty of time to know what content is coming down the pipeline so that you can prepare your syndication provider for updates. The key is not to overload your syndicating partners with tons of new pages every time you update. Instead, try changing content that already exists, retiring old content or moving it to a less prominent place in the content roadmap.

Sometimes, though, it can be difficult to be aware of what content updates are coming untill they are already in the last stages of creation. That leads to the next question;

Who will be responsible for content updates and quality control?

You need a content point-person. This is someone dedicated to keeping track of what different teams within your vendor organization are doing. This will allow that person to know what content is being created months in advance of the live date. Ideally, this is not the same person managing your syndication program. This is a separate person that focuses solely on content and has an intimate knowledge of your offerings, understands the ways in which content is consumer via the web, and can rewrite content to keep the partner joint-value proposition in the forefront. This person should work closely with all the content creators within your vendor organization and only be responsible for rewriting that content for syndication.

Keeping your syndication program manager and channel content specialist in separate roles will decrease the time it takes to update content because you will have someone intricately involved throughout the whole content creation process.

What metrics can I capture to help show ROI for the program?

All marketing initiatiaves should have a way to measure ROI, but a syndication program in and of itself is not necessarily set up to measure this kind of information. There is no way to capture historical data previous to the implementation of your program. What you can do, though, is choose to measure metrics that enable you to measure ROI. If you are using your content syndication program to generate more leads for partners, compare your past sales data to what you have post-launch for your syndication program. Or, if your program is meant to reduce the time and efforts spent on updating and controlling your message on partner sites, finding the difference between your previous investments versus what you are investing in your syndication program will give you a firm grasp on your net gain.

There are also other ways to show ROI for your content syndication program. Look at the adoption rates of the marketing materials you produce for partners. Since content syndication automates the process of pushing these live for partners, you can safely assume that your marketing dollars are going to better use.

The Takeaway

Overall, you want to achieve both your and your partners’ goals. A successful content syndication program takes proper planning to streamline content updates, internal collaboration through a sole content specialist and an plan to evaluate success with relevant metrics.

On the lookout for graphics that look good at any size, or some specialized font images? Google's search bots just started indexing SVG files, so you can find them on any site they're available (and wherever webmasters haven't blocked Google). You can find your scalable vector graphics with a filetype:svg search. [Google Webmaster Central via SearchEngine Land]

If you have a lot of windows open at once, you may find yourself doing a lot of rearranging. If you want to keep an eye on your frontmost window, though, you can move windows without focusing them.

File this into "small-but-awesome-tips-we-never-knew-about" category: it turns out that if you hold command and click on a background window's title bar, you can drag it around the screen without giving it focus. It's pretty useful if you're watching a video in your main window, or just want to check on something in a background window without clicking a bunch of times to re-focus all the right windows. Check out the video for a demonstration.

Shared by Josh
boo on this. generally unimpressive.

Windows/Mac: If you were hoping for a totally redesigned, less twiddly iTunes 10, you're out of luck. But Apple added a social tool, Ping, for following artists and friends' tastes and tracking concerts. And your music list looks a bit tidier, too.

Better Use of Your Album Art

If you just want to use iTunes to manage your music, it can still do that. And now your album list, instead of showing the same album name listed over and over next to songs from that album, will show the album art from that disc in that column instead (at a minimum of five or more album tracks). And the iTunes icon itself has dropped its note-on-a-CD scheme for a more modern, Apple-app-like look.

Ping Is a Music-Focused Social Network in iTunes

Ping is the big new thing in iTunes 10, though. Ping is, as Apple CEO Steve Jobs described it, "like Facebook and Twitter meet iTunes." Right off, it's helpful to know that it's entirely optional, like iTunes' Genius recommendation feature. You can either make yourself entirely open to the public, accessible only to approved friends, or off the Ping grid entirely.

You can follow artists on iTunes to see, at a minimum, where they're playing concerts and when they've got new music or videos out, but if they're sharing other things—photos, other tracks they like, free content—you'll get that, too. You can also bring in friends to follow your own music choices, and follow them back, but it appears that Ping mainly tracks music purchases, not the tracks you're playing or previewing. For example, Ping features a top 10 list of music the people you're following are buying from iTunes, but—at least from Jobs' presentation—it doesn't sound like it offers any help when it comes to what your friends are actually listening to. So it's a lot less open than, say, Last.fm, and contained entirely inside iTunes, or your iPhone or iPod touch. It doesn't appear to be accessible at all via a web browser.

One more small thing we noticed: iTunes has moved its close/minimize/restore buttons to the side of its window, at least on an OS X demonstration.

iTunes 10 was actually a small part of today's Apple music event. You can read up on all the new iPods, the much-improved iPod touch, and the total Apple TV revision at Gizmodo's complete Apple event coverage.

iTunes 10 will be available today for Windows and Mac systems.

For all the to-do apps and reminder services out there, some people, at some times, just want to email things to themselves. To make that lo-fi reminder possible, Notes for Later has a bookmarklet that quickly sends web page write-ups to email.

Submit your email address, verify it from the email you receive, and then you'll get a "Make Note" bookmarklet to drag onto your bookmarks/favorites bar. Click that bookmarklet on any web page, and you'll instantly get an email with the URL and the time and date you sent it.

If Gmail acts as your personal online storage vault, a service like Notes for Later makes decent sense. It's a free service that should work on any browser.

Having an Android along for your daily commute or occasional car trips can make the ride a lot easier, safer, and simply more fun. Here are our favorite Android apps to have on hand when it's time to hit the road.

Note: We've included links to each apps' homepage, which usually include a QR code for easy installing or Market search directions. We've also included a link to each app's page on AppBrain, where signed-in AppBrain users can easily beam the applications to their Android phone.

Note 2: For a look at the flip side of the mobile OS coin, check out the best iPhone apps for your car.

Maps, Navigation, and Car Mode

Maps, Navigation, and Car Mode all come with your Android (version 2.0 and higher), and they're all crucial to the Android-in-the-car experience. Maps is less useful when you have your hands on the wheel, but the ability to "Star" locations from your desktop or laptop browser, then quickly pull them up for directions on your phone, is very nice. Navigation, as we've previously detailed, is an entire turn-by-turn GPS navigation package, as long as you're not driving too far away from a data signal. The Car Mode makes pulling off Voice Actions and getting Navigation directions safer while your hands are occupied, and Maps' break-out app, Places, gives you a chance to see a simple list of nearby restaurants, gas, ATMs, or other spots. [Free on Android phones, but check Market for updates]

Vlingo or Voice Actions

If your phone's running Android 2.2, you can upgrade your phone's built-in Voice Search to the Google-built Voice Actions. And if you're double lucky, Voice Actions won't frequently crash on you, as it does currently on at least a few of the Lifehacker editors' phones. With Voice Actions, you can write texts or emails with your voice, search Google, activate directions or Navigation, find or call businesses—all after only touching the screen once, making it a very helpful and safe car tool.

If you're not on 2.2, or can't get Voice Actions to play nice, you want Vlingo. Actually, you might want Vlingo anyways, if only for the SafeReader function.

Vlingo's a third-party app that does pretty much everything that Voice Actions can do, but uses its own server to pass your voice commands along. It even offers its own keyboard with a dedicated Vlingo button for entering your voice in any text field (great for those stuck on much older firmware), and can take over the default action for holding down your Search button. Even if you like Google's own Voice Actions better, you can install Vlingo and use its SafeReader function. Set up the app with your email accounts, and it can read your incoming email, and text messages, out loud for you, whenever you've activated SafeReader from a home screen widget. Pretty amazing functionality, really, for a free app. [Homepage: Voice Actions, Vlingo] [AppBrain:Voice Search (Voice Actions), Vlingo]

Waze

Google's Maps & Navigation wants to get you where you're going through search, data points, calculations and voice recognition. Waze, too, gets you there with turn-by-turn directions, but it also wants you to run over cupcakes, share interesting spots and details about your trip, and help you avoid traffic jams, accident scenes, speed traps, and find good stuff through the power of social reporting. Anyone who's running Waze on their BlackBerry, Android, iOS device, or other phone while driving is feeding into Waze's maps and traffic data, and those who really dig Waze can compete on picking up power-ups, share traffic tips, point out free parking, and otherwise lend to the community spirit. [Homepage] [Waze]

Listen, Pandora, and NPR News

Your car is probably the one spot where you can really enjoy new tunes, get in-depth with your podcasts, and listen to the news uninterrupted. For Android owners with time to listen, Pandora, NPR News, and Listen are the best. Listen is Google's own podcast app, with great search capabilities, subscription syncing to Google Reader, and a pretty smart setup for deciding when to refresh and download your audio. Pandora is, of course, the very nifty streaming service that creates "stations" based on artists and songs you like, and it works just fine wherever you can get an internet signal. NPR's own app for Android can stream your local station and download entire show episodes, but also has a very handy ability to cherry-pick segments of shows like Morning Edition or All Things Considered, then queue them up in a playlist. [Homepages: Listen, Pandora, NPR News] [AppBrain: Listen, Pandora, NPR News]

GasBuddy

GasBuddy does one thing and one thing well—points out the places where you can fill up your car for less. On an Android, GasBuddy can map out or list nearby stations using your location, or search out spots where you're heading to. You also get details about the station, including an address you can navigate to. [Homepage] [AppBrain]

ParkDroid

In cities, at stadiums, and other places where you walk a long way from where you park your car, you might have once said, "Boy, I should draw a map!" Now you just open ParkDroid, tag your location with your GPS powers, then go about your day until you're ready to head back home. ParkDroid is more than just tagging, though. It pulls up paid and free parking locations from the web and maps them out, then also takes in free and paid parking finds from its users (unless you opt for "Private" when tagging). If you're parked at a meter, or need a time limitation, you can set that up in ParkDroid, too. [AppBrain]

Guest Writer Josh Tucker (@itninja)

It may not give you invisibility or the ability to walk through walls, but Windows 7 has it’s own GodMode.

Create a new folder anywhere on your machine. Then, change the name to read:

GodMode.{ED7BA470-8E54-465E-825C-99712043E01C}

Once you hit enter, you will discover a world of Windows 7 hackery and tweaks. Open the new file that is created and you should see a screen that looks like the one below.

Be warned, with great power comes great responsibility, of which I share none with you.

Use this at your own risk.

Up, down, left, right, A, B, start!

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If you’ve ever uploaded a picture to Facebook or tried to attach a file to an email using the “add attachments” button, you know it can be a pain using the tiny pop-up file uploader window to navigate through your folder structure to the file you want. If you’re on a Mac (and some versions of Windows) you can make this process much quicker by dragging the file to the upload window.

The next time you want to upload a file, keep the folder it is in next to your browser window (or on the desktop). When the upload window appears, simply drag the file over top of it and drop. The upload window will automagically snap to the correct folder and highlight the file. All you have to do is click the upload button.

Android 2.0+/Maemo: We were impressed by Fennec's pre-alpha builds, and happy when they started releasing nightly builds for more stable testing, but Firefox Mobile has finally graduated to alpha on Android. Sure, development is moving a bit slowly, and it is still is in a very young alpha stage, but it's got some pretty cool features, most notably syncing bookmarks, passwords, and open pages with Firefox on your desktop. Hit the link to give it a whirl, and let us know what you think in the comments. [Fennec Alpha via Download Squad]

So you've been computing for quite a few years now, and you've built a nice collection of hard drives, internal or external, collecting dust in the corner. Here's how to put them to good use.

10. Turn an Old Hard Drive Into an External Drive

If you don't have a ton of external drives lying around, you might still have a bunch of old internal drives, and the best thing you can do is put them in a USB enclosure so they see some use. Furthermore, this trick also works for upgrading existing external drives: if it dies or becomes too small to be useful, you can always swap the current drive out of the enclosure for a better one you have collecting dust.

9. Back Up Your Computer

If you haven't set it up already, one of the most popular (and most important) uses for an external drive is an automatic backup. Whether you're using Mozy, SyncBack on Windows, or Time Machine on OS X, an automatic, local backup is a must to make sure you don't lose any of your important data to the ever-looming possibility of drive failure.

8. Clone Your Current Hard Drive

While backing up your data allows you to restore it should anything bad happen, using those external drives for direct clones of your current drive gives you a much faster solution. It requires more manual work, but in the event of a drive failure, you can be up and running again in no time (as opposed to reinstalling your operating system all over again and then transferring all your data, which can be done when you have the time to do so). We've walked through how to clone your hard drive in both Mac OS X and Windows.

7. Backup Your Backups Using Windows Home Server

Local backups are great, but they're still vulnerable to lighting strikes, fires, floods, and other immediate disasters. While you can automatically backup your computers to a Windows Home Server, it's nice to have a backup of the server, too—even if it's a backup of critical files and not a full backup—to keep in certain, more protected places.

6. Use an Extra Drive As a Scratch Disk

If you have a FireWire capable drive and do any kind of video editing, using it as a scratch disk instead of your internal drive can really speed things up. Caching files to your internal drive can put quite a load on it, because it's constantly reading and writing from the same drive. By shifting that cache to another drive (connected with FireWire or something speedy), you can increase the speed of your renders and exports, making you a happier video editor.

5. Swap the External Drive with Your Computer's Drive

Sometimes, you'll actually buy an external drive for one purpose or another, but realize you don't need the space. In cases like this, you can actually open up the enclosure and replace your laptop's hard drive with the better one, and use your older, slightly outdated drive in the enclosure (you can even buy an external drive just for this purpose—it's remarkably cheaper than an upgrade from Apple).

4. Use The External Drive's Controller to Connect Other Peripherals via USB

External drives work by having a controller than converts SATA or IDE connections to USB. If you have an old IDE optical drive that you only need every once in a while, you can take the circuit board from an old, IDE-based external drive enclosure and connect it to your computer via USB. It's remarkably useful for netbooks that don't have optical drives, or those really rare occasions you need to install something from CD on your newer, IDE-less computer.

3. Back up and Play Your Wii Games from an External Drive

You love your Wii, but your discs are fragile, disorganized, and easily misplaced. By backing up those games to an external hard drive, you can decrease your load times, protect those disc from harm, and always have your games on hand whenever you have a hankering for some Wii.

2. Move Your iTunes Library to an External Drive

If your music is the reason your hard drive always seems full, consider moving those music files to an external drive. Not only can you do so while keeping your preferences and playlists intact, but you can then use previously mentioned iTunes Export to take the most important music and export it back to your space-challenged laptop.

1. Run XBMC From a USB Drive

If you don't want to build a full-fledged XBMC computer, you can always put XBMC Live on a USB drive and connect it to an already built computer for certain occasions. And, while you could do it with a USB thumb drive, a larger, external hard drive would allow you to store your movies and TV shows on it, thus saving you precious space on your main computer.

If you need to pretreat a laundry stain but you don't want to use harsh commercial pretreaters this DIY recipe for "soap jelly" is gentle and easy to make.

Tipnut, a tips and tricks blog, shares a simple recipe for making a skin-safe and inexpensive laundry pretreater. You'll need a glass jar, a bar of non-perfumed soap, and hot water.

• Shave the bar of soap until the shavings fill half of the jar.
• Fill the rest of the jar with hot water (boiling if the jar can handle that hot without shattering). Cover with lid.
• Allow the water to soak into the soap a bit to soften it up then shake hard until soap is dissolved (or stir well).
• Once the soap is dissolved, allow to cool completely. The soap & water mixture will form a soap jelly that is ideal for using on laundry stains.

Once it has cooled you can scoop a little bit of the jelly out and work it into stains when necessary. Check out the full article at the link below for additional tips including what to do if you mixture doesn't gel the way you expected it to and how to make it even more economical. Have a laundry hack of your own to share? Let's hear about it in the comments.

Vendors have a big job when it comes to budgeting for sales and marketing activities. Compared to channel partner enablement, it is simpler and more cost-effective to empower internal teams by helping them communicate a marketing message, providing them with sales tools and tracking success metrics. This is because vendors have to run a complete communications campaign just to get channel partners to use all of the tools available to them. It’s easier to get a direct sales team on board.

Yet, no direct sales strategy can compete with a partner channel that is both agile and streamlined. The trick is being able to control a cohesive message, provide sales tools and show ROI for hundreds or thousands of channel partners. That’s where content syndication and marketing automation come in to play.

When you increase the body over which you are broadcasting that message — through a partner channel — it becomes exponentially more difficult to maintain and update. But a channel strategy increases the number of touch-points a vendor has with the end customer. No direct sales strategy can even come close to meeting the same volume. Thus, there is a trade-off. It is much simpler to control a marketing message about a product or other offering if it is confined within a direct sales organization. However, if a vendor’s main POS is on partner websites, a content syndication strategy is the best way to control and update content on hundreds or even thousands of partner websites. And as a complement, a marketing automation platform makes it easy for partners to drive leads to those partner websites with cobranded email campaigns and auto-generated landing pages, complete with lead capture and ROI tracking. In the end, controlling a marketing message becomes just as easy and cost-efficient as doing it through direct sales, plus you increase the number of leads.

With a direct sales strategy, it is vendor vs vendor. There is only competition for the customer’s attention. In an industry where so many vendors sell similar products, it becomes necessary to increase the number of places for customer interaction to stand out. With a partner channel, vendors can compete on two levels: the customer and the channel partner. And channel partners will showcase a vendor over its competitors if vendors make it easy enough for them. So a vendor could potentially beat the competition not because it has a better product, but because it has a better relationship with partners.

One key way to help channel partners become better marketers of vendor products is by automating processes that take additional time and resources for them to implement. With a direct sales team, a vendor must have a complete infrastructure to support any enablement efforts. With a partner channel, vendors can use a content syndication and marketing automation platform to make it easy for partners to perform marketing activities. For example, if you have email campaign templates partners can download, cobrand and send, don’t just put them in a partner portal for partners to download. That isn’t what a vendor would do with a direct sales team. It would be sent for them. Give partners the same — an automated place where they can select a campaign template, upload or purchase a list and create all the appropriate lead capture and metrics tracking in a few easy steps. Also, vendors don’t make direct sales teams update content on the corporate website, so you can’t expect your partners to have the appropriate resources to update product content on their websites. Setting up a content syndication pipeline will dramatically improve a partner’s website and your relationship with them.

Whether it’s with direct or channel sales, it is important for companies to find the most cost-effective methods of getting product information and promotions in front of the end consumer in the quickest way possible. The bottom line is that vendors need to do things that will increase partner loyalty and dependence while improving channel partner relationships without sacrificing direct sales resources. With that being said, the methods channel marketers use to make their partners better marketers will largely determine which vendor partners focus their time and resources on selling.

Now that summer is almost over, you’ll probably be traveling a lot more to get in that last minute vacation time. Hopefully, you won’t leave out any fruits or vegetables while you’re gone. If you do, you’ll probably end up with fruit flies. Those little pesky bugs can stick around for weeks while you try to smash, squish, and obliterate them all. It can be become pretty frustrating.

If you want to get rid of fruit flies — and get rid of them quick  — all you need is some apple cider vinegar, an empty plastic bottle, and a piece of notebook paper.

All you have to do is fill an empty plastic bottle (a 16oz bottle will do) about 1/3 of the way full with the apple cider vinegar. Then, roll the paper into a tube that has a significantly bigger opening on one end than the other. Take the smaller end and put it in the open end of the bottle  and set it near the spot where the flies are circulating most. Note: You don’t need to put the paper in the vinegar. Just use it as a funnel.

The fruit flies are attracted to the vinegar and land on the large end of the notebook paper. They crawl down inside the bottle, through the smaller end, and are then stuck. They cannot fly back out of the small hole they crawled in through.

Usually the flies will all be gone overnight, but it is a good idea to leave out the vinegar an additional day or two, just to be sure.

You already know Gmail integrated with Google Voice for free phone calls (and cheap international calls) from your inbox. But apart from using it to a friend, Gmail's new phone calling capabilities introduce a lot of cool capabilities to your inbox.

Get Caller ID from Your Computer

Let's say you've got a landline set up with Google Voice and you don't want to pay for caller ID. Or you just spend a lot of time staring at your computer. If you're logged into Gmail, and someone rings up your Google Voice number, you can see who's calling on your computer without digging your phone out of your pocket.

Transfer Calls to (and from) Your Computer to Save Cellphone Minutes

Assuming you've already added your Gmail Chat account as a number that can be reached through Google Voice (which also assumes you've signed up for Google Voice), you can transfer calls from your phone to your computer to save cellphone minutes. Here's how it works:

1) If you're logged into your Google account, go to the Google Voice phone settings page. At the bottom, you should see a new option for Google Chat (like in the image). Make sure it's checked.

2) Now, when you're in the midst of a call on your cellphone—let's say you were talking to someone in the car, and now you're home—just hit the * (asterisk) on your phone's number pad to send the call to another Google Voice phone. If your Gmail account is open, your inbox should start ringing. Pick up in Gmail and hangup your cellphone.

The opposite works, as well—i.e., transferring calls out from Gmail to your cellphone. Oh, and remember: If you've got a decent Bluetooth headset, you should also be able to stay relatively mobile, even if you're talking from your computer.

Find Your Misplaced Phone

Misplace your cellphone under a pile of clothes or deep in your couch cushions? If you left your ringer on but don't have another phone on hand, just log into Gmail, dial your cellphone number, and follow the faint sound of ringing.

Use It for a Quick-and-Dirty Speakerphone for Group Calls

Google Voice is already pretty good at setting up conference calls (demonstrated in the video above). Now that you can call from your computer, you've also got a quick-and-dirty speakerphone perfect for the group of people sitting around a table on your coast.

Make a Quick Followup Call in Response to an Email

This is less of an "amazing new thing" than a nice, practical side effect of having one more thing integrated with your inbox. Say you get an email from a colleague. You want to send a quick followup, but it's going to be a lot more appropriate talking than typing a reply. Dial the person up in Gmail and talk it out without disrupting your workflow.

Secretly Record Calls

Google Voice has handy recording function, but whenever you enable it (hit 4 to start and finish recording), Google Voice announces "This call is now being recorded." Prefer to record a conversation surreptitiously? Calling from Gmail puts the audio on your computer, where you can use any number of tools to record your system audio on-the-sly. (For example, despite what I thought at the time, Whitson later told me he wasn't aware I was recording the call in the video above.) File this under the know-your-state-laws category.

Prank Time

Speaking of neat things you can do now that your computer hardware is accessible for both inputs and outputs, consider this: If you set your onboard system audio as your default input device rather than a microphone, you can, say, play the caller a little song. That's maybe a little boring. On the other hand, it's even easier to navigate to your favorite prank call soundboard and have a little fun.

Make Free Calls Anywhere You've Got Free Wi-Fi

Your mileage may vary on this one, but anywhere you've got your laptop and free Wi-Fi—like, say, any Starbucks in the U.S.—you can fire up a free phone call to anyone in the U.S. or Canada and chat away. There's a good chance that many free Wi-Fi hotspots don't provide you with enough bandwidth to make high enough quality calls, but if you're desperate to save on minutes (or just don't have a phone handy), it's worth a try.

Got a great use for phone calls in Gmail that we missed? Let's hear it in the comments.

Big thanks to my pal Jason Chen for help brainstorming and testing.

's real-time search, powered news sites and social networks like Twitter, has just gotten an overhaul. Apart from streaming real-time search updates from its own page, it also sports location-based searching, conversation views, and email updates.

We were pretty excited about Google's new endeavor when they released it in December, but it seemed to lose its mojo fairly quickly. Having real-time Twitter updates seemed great in theory, but when you didn't want them there, they just cluttered up your search results. Now, though, it has its own page, so when you're searching for information on more timely news, you can choose to go there instead of regular Google search.

It also has a few cool features that come with it, too. You can search for results from news outlets and social networks near you, or from any other location you desire. You can also view the entire conversation stemming from the initial comment, so it's more organized, as well as get email updates from Google Alerts if you don't feel like frequenting the search page. Check out the video above for a demonstration, and hit up real-time search's new page to check it out.

Note that at the moment, it seems like their URL (http://www.google.com/realtime) will 404 if you type it in, but if you click their provided link (or the link below), it will work.

Lifehacker reader cking777 shares a simple but effective use for Post-It notes to catch the dust from drywall drilling and make cleanup a snap.

When drilling in drywall, stick a post-it underneath the drill, folded to catch all the dust. Then just throw away.

Doesn't get much more simple than that. For another clever way to contain the mess of drilling, check out how to use an old DVD spindle to control the spray of shavings from a paddle bit. Have your own tip for easy post-DIY cleanup? Let's hear about it in the comments. Thanks cking777!