TODAY'S TOURBUS TOPICS: COOLNESS SURVEY / EYEJOT / SKYGUY / SCRIBD

In today's TOURBUS, I have a special invitation for 20-somethings to participate in a survey that's designed to capture the essence of online coolness. I want to learn from the standpoint of people in this age group, what makes a website cool? What turns you off? What specific online services are the most useful? How do you communicate? What cool new service do you WISH you could have on the Web?

And most importantly, I want to know... what geeky or annoying thing should be punishable by a strong electric shock? :-)

COOLNESS SURVEY - http://InternetTourbus.com/coolness.htm

Although this survey is designed for people in the 20-29 age bracket, you can still take the survey regardless of your age. I will report back here with a summary of the results for 20-somethings, and other age brackets too. Click the link above to begin the survey.

More Cool Stuff

EYEJOT - I didn't have to take a survey to see that Eyejot was cool. This nifty (and free) video email service is completely web based. If you have a browser and a webcam, that's all you need. With Eyejot you don't have to install any software, master complicated video editing tools or struggle with email attachments. And Eyejot doesn't care if you use Windows, Mac or Linux.

Eyejot records your video, stores it on the web, then shoots an email to your friend with the video link. The recipient can view your video message with a single click. Give it a try:

EYEJOT VIDEO EMAIL - http://www.eyejot.com

SKYGUY - Do you or your kids have questions about space or astronomy? Ask the SkyGuy! Tom Vilot from Boulder Colorado has created a very cool site that present answers to astronomy questions in high-quality, entertaining short videos. So if you've been wondering... Why are galaxies shaped like a swirl? What is a solstice? Or how many stars are out there? Ask the SkyGuy here:

THE SKY GUY - http://skyguy.com

SCRIBD - Apparently the Internet is running out of vowels - especially the letter E. Scribd is a classic Web 2.0 site with rounded corners, clever icons, lots of whitespace, a focus on collaboration, and no E's in it's name. Not sure why, but that's all the rage these days.

Anyway, Scribd is a cool service that makes it easy to share documents online. Scribd created iPaper, a document format built for the web, which allows you to embed a Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint or PDF document right into a web page. With iPaper, there's no need to launch an external viewer to view or interact with the document.

Scribd is also a library of user-generated information on a wide variety of topics. They claim to have over 17 billion words in their library, five times more than Wikipedia. Check it out here:

SCRIBD - http://www.scribd.com

That's all for now, see you next time! -- Bob Rankin