Sentient Customer Service by Phone

http://gethuman.com/ and http://get2human.com/. The first is by Paul English, a guy who is the CTO of kayak.com, my favorite travel site. The second is by Walt Tetschner, a friend of his who maintained gethuman.com for awhile but moved on amicably to build get2human.com. Both have lots of links to get you to real people when you need customer support,. not automated phone trees.

Cool Tools: My Favorite Christmas Shopping Site

I may be a marketer by trade, but I am curious by nature. I am also surrounded by beloved friends and family - engineers and gadget geeks all - who intuitively understand how things work much better than I ever will. So, I use Cool Tools to keep up with all things useful and ingenious, inexpensive and opulent, simple and complex. I use the site to surprise the geeks in my life with presents that help muddy the waters about how cool I actually am.

Kevin Kelly, the site's guru, co-founded the Hackers' Conference, and, unlike me, he is inarguably cool and eclectic. He has been affiliated with Wired magazine since its inception, was with the Well back in the day, and sits on a variety of boards, including The Long Now Foundation, which seeks to take a long view of history. In that pursuit, it has purchased a mountain top in Nevada to house a 10,000 year library and clock.

On Cool Tools, he finds and reviews (or posts reviews others have authored) about an amazing array of useful stuff ranging from simple screwdrivers and the latest incarnation of Sculpey sculpture clay to the best explanation of relativity and a guide on building an underground dwelling for $50 and up. Eclectic? You bet'cha. Useful? Indisputably. A nice place to get lost for a few hours and emerge with gifts for curious and outdoorsy friends and family - and a few new interests to explore yourself? I highly recommend it.

Check out your Google page rank

The quick free link of the day? A site to check your site's popularity, keyword popularity and more. It loads so slowly it timed out, but it's worth a quick peek.

Local Denver business NewsGator offers award-winning products for extending your online presence

NewsGator
They tout business value through social computing. I will take a look at some of their products (the ones targeted to small businesses and individuals) in the near future.

For developers, they offer the NewsGator Widget site.

Getting started with Feedburner

http://www.google.com/support/feedburner/

Feedburner enables you to expand the reach of your website or blog. People can subscribe to it and receive updates by email, through a news reader, or via a web portal like iGoogle or My YAHOO. You can also deliver your content as widgets for cell phones and other mobile devices.

Signing up for Feedburner is a snap. Yes, it is owned by Google, and yes, I think that is nothing but good. But those who dislike Google will likely want to use digg or some other service.

More free images

Morguefile.com offers a wide variety of user-provided images. The authors provide guidance on how you may use their pictures. The site is undergoing a revision, and as of December 4, we could not gain access to the beta site. That should change soon, and there are images available in the interim.

http://morguefile.com/