Mail Goggles make sure you don't hate yourself in the morning

Have you ever played Drink and Dial? Had that irresistable urge after a few too many mojitos to call someone you've not spoken to in ten or twenty years and share your great mood? Or get that deep dark secret off your chest? Tell your boss what you really think of him or her? Woken up the next morning wondering why you're feeling crummy and then remembered with that sinking sense of dread just exactly what you shared in your tipsy candor?

I haven't ever been that silly, of course. I am a staid and pragmatic marketer. I did have a friend- yeah, that's the ticket - who, long ago when she was single, after a dinner of more wine than food, while at a conference in a city not her own, found an ex-boyfriend's number in the local phone book and gave him a call at or about midnight. She just wanted to catch up and reminisce about past good times, as I recall, but his wife was not as jovial as she expected her to be when she answered...but I digress.

In today's digital world, you don't have to fumble through the phone book. You can text or email whomever you wish from your contact list and bare whatever soul-searing secret you want. Google Labs has something on tap called Mail Goggles to save you from yourself. It forces you to do a few simple math problems to make sure you are coherent enough to get that email off your chest. It looks like, should you not pass the math test, Google won't send the mail.

Worth a look, but far better simply to just stay completely away from the computer in the wee hours after a few drinks. If you cannot say Google Goggles three times really fast, don't touch your email.

Handy pixels/ems calculator

http://riddle.pl/emcalc/

Best.Ad.Ever

This is the best example of how to use an ad to brand a company I have ever seen.

Issuu - free PDF-to-Flash online publishing

http://issuu.com
From the site: Issuu - You Publish
Issuu is the place for quality publications: Magazines, catalogs, documents, and stuff you'd normally find on print. It's the place where you become the publisher: Upload a document, it's fast, easy, and totally free. Find and comment on thousands of great publications. Join a living library, where anyone finds publications about anything and share them with friends.

After the holidays, I am going to give this a try for some of the nonprofits with which I work. One can also build a library of bookmarked publications on the site, which sounds pretty interesting as well. The testimonials are compelling.

Mashable - all that's new on the web

I love this site. Mashable provides insight into this moment's Zeitgeist for people who cannot spell zeitgeist, like me. Lots of articles about Twitter, iphones, Facebook, social networking, online marketing, startups, which companies offer good internships, and more. The stories are in plain English, with limited geek speak. They're thought-provoking, useful, and interesting - targeted to twenty-somethings, but that is part of the ....errrr....zeitgeist.

The Wayback Machine - Website, Music, Book Archives

From their site:
The Internet Archive is a 501(c)(3) non-profit that was founded to build an Internet library, with the purpose of offering permanent access for researchers, historians, and scholars to historical collections that exist in digital format. Founded in 1996 and located in the Presidio of San Francisco, the Archive has been receiving data donations from Alexa Internet and others. In late 1999, the organization started to grow to include more well-rounded collections. Now the Internet Archive includes texts, audio, moving images, and software as well as archived web pages in our collections.

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.