Tech Geek

Recently I was helping my Office Manager with a project that she was working on. We needed to move some information around between different windows and she was using the mouse and menu items at every step. As a keyboard user, this was about driving me nuts! So I thought maybe reviewing a few common keyboard shortcuts that I take for granted might save some of you a few moments in your day.

The most common keyboard shortcut that I use repeatedly throughout the day is [ALT-TAB]. To get this shortcut, press and hold the ALT key and then tap on the TAB key. On a Mac, this is achieved by pressing [COMMAND-TAB] in the same way. This will cycle through the open program windows that you have on your system. Depending on the specific version of Windows that you have it will show a small icon or live mini-screen indicating what programs you have open. This is much faster than reaching over for the mouse and clicking the program in the task-bar at the bottom of the screen.

Related to the above command is [CTRL-TAB] on PC or [COMMAND-~] (~ is the tilde, at the top left of your keyboard) on a Mac which will cycle through multiple windows in the same application. For example, I use it to go between tabs in Firefox, my Internet browser. Some applications open multiple instances, so you need to use [ALT-TAB] to cycle between windows.

The next set of keys that I use on a very regular basis are the ones for cutting, copying, and pasting text or other items. I'm going to talk about text, but you can use these same keys to operate on files, pictures, or other objects. First, you have to highlight the text or item, often by using the mouse. You can also highlight text by pressing SHIFT and either one of the arrow keys or the HOME or END keys to go to the beginning or end of a line.

Once you've gotten the text highlighted, you can use [CTRL-X] or [COMMAND-X] to cut the text. Cutting removes it from its current place and places it on the clipboard. Pressing [CTRL-C] or [COMMAND-C] places a copy of the highlighted text on the clipboard and also leaves it in its original location. Then you move the cursor to the new location by using the arrow keys or mouse and press [CTRL-V] or [COMMAND-V] to paste the text there. You can also copy text in one window or application, use [ALT-TAB] or [COMMAND-TAB] to get to another application, and then paste the text there. Sometimes the formatting gets all funky, so I'll open up Notepad and paste the text into Notepad to remove the formatting.

Sometimes you're working on a document and you paste something into it in the wrong location. Or you just type the wrong thing. This is where my favorite keyboard shortcut comes in, [CTRL-Z] or [COMMAND-Z], the undo key. It would really be nice to have an undo key in other parts of life sometimes! This will undo the last action that you did. Some programs even support multiple undos, up to ten or even more of the last actions you performed can be undone.

Then, if you undo something that you find you really liked after all, you can redo it by pressing [CTRL-Y] or [SHIFT-COMMAND-Z] and it will be back where it was before you undid it!

When you're done working and want to close windows and applications there are some keyboard shortcuts for that as well. To close the current window that you're working in, press [CTRL-W] or [COMMAND-W] and it will be gone. It may pop up a window asking if you want to save your work. If you've closed all the windows and the application is still running, press [ALT-F4] or [COMMAND-Q] to shut down the application.

The one Windows only shortcut that I find myself using often is [WINDOWSKEY-E] which pops up a new Windows Explorer window so I can find a file.

What are your favorite keyboard shortcuts that you couldn't imagine living without? Leave a note in the comments below!

Jacob Smith (@j8ke on Twitter) believes it is no longer necessary for a youth group to have a webpage or website. A web presence is vital but, the ubiquity of Facebook has made it unnecessary - and ineffecient - to have a separate youth website.

There are five questions I use to judge the effectiveness of church websites, these same questions can be used to judge the effectiveness of youth websites:

• Does our website meaningfully answer “The Big Three”? The first three questions most potential members ask are: “When is the next event?”, “Where do you meet?” and “Will I fit in?”.
• Does our website clearly articulate the Gospel? This will be different for every youth group, but a visitor needs to understand that this community is a community of faith.
• Does our website have a defined audience? Is this for youth, for parents, for all members for potential members?
• Is our website seen as valuable by our staff, volunteers and church members? If people at all levels don't see the website as a valuable tool, it is likely to be displaced by other communication methods.
• Is our website sustainable? Once an effective website is launched it has to be able to maintained or it will fail.

A Facebook Fan Page or Facebook Group can be set up to meet all of these criteria. The choice between a Facebook Fan Page and a Facebook Group is an important one. A Facebook Fan Page makes your youth group's information more public and discoverable. This can be a good thing if you are encouraging your youth to tell others about the group, but has a significant downside - you can't message page fans. They can sign up to receive SMS status updates from your Fan Page, just like they can receive your personal status updates via SMS.

A Facebook Group allows you to send a Facebook message to all members, an important way to contact youth. As with the Fan Page, this also gets you mobile communication "for free." If youth are set up to receive updates from Facebook on their cellphones, then messages will reach them wherever they are.

With the ability to have discussion, share photos and video, post events and send messages a Facebook Group provides everything I can think of that a youth group website needs.

Of course it's not all (root) beer and skittles. This method means your youth (and parents) have to have a Facebook account in order to participate. While that may seem like not a big deal now, five years ago it would have been obvious that everyone had a MySpace account. The popularity of social networks will wax and wane and their closed nature means that if Facebook is replaced by another network your content may be "stuck" and you'll have to do a good bit of work to re-create it.

Additionally, there may parents who don't want their kids to be using social networking.

Both of these objections can be overcome by the fact that your group's Wall can generates an RSS feed (for more on RSS feeds read Andy's post here). Using free tools like Widgetbox you can turn that RSS feed into a feature on your church's website in moments. This makes sure that everyone can have access to some level of updates from the group. If you're using Google Sites for your page, there are multiple Google Gadgets that will link to an RSS feed as well.

So instead of having to maintain yet another website, consider ditching your youth website and "leave the driving to Facebook." Would this fly with your group? Have you tried it and have something to add? Comment it up people.

Jacob Smith's big idea is Every Church Online, a way to provide low cost, effective websites to churches. You can find out more at http://everychurchonline.org. He lives with his wife, Erin, a Lutheran Pastor, in New Castle, Pennsylvania. You can contact him at jake@shoeinthedoor.com.

Last week you may have noticed the Twitter T along with Tweet the E! in the sidebar of the e-news, right below my post. It's inviting those of us who tweet to go ahead and add the #ext10 hash-tag into our tweets that are connected to the Extravaganza. For those of us attending, this will be a great way to stay informed about plans. For those of you who aren't able to be there, you can follow these tweets to get a little flavor of the event. And if you want to learn more, keep reading, and attend a workshop while you're in Charlotte.

We've claimed the Twitter hash-tag #ext10 for the Extravaganza in Charlotte. If you use a Twitter client of some sort (there are tons of them listed at http://twitter.com/downloads) it should be fairly easy for you to add a search for the hash tag. Using twhirl by Seesmic, my current client, I clicked the search icon, entered the #ext10 hash-tag, and clicked Activate.

If you don't use Twitter, or if you don't use it through a client, you can visit http://search.twitter.com and enter the hash-tag, or just click here. Or you can go the the ELCA Youth Ministry Network homepage at http://www.elcaymnet.org and there is a widget there that is scrolling all the tweets with this tag. You can also follow @elcaymnet, the ELCA Youth Ministry Network Twitter feed.

Scott Hensley over at Shots, the National Public Radio Health Blog, just posted an item about the Centers for Disease Control's new nine-page Twitter primer. The whole primer, http://www.cdc.gov/SocialMedia/Tools/guidelines/pdf/microblogging.pdf, is a bit bureaucratic, but it does raise some good best practices that are usable everywhere. Shots summarizes these best practices at the bottom of their post.

If you're a Twitter user and have a connection to the network, post your name below in the comments. You can see a bunch of us by looking at http://twitter.com/elcaymnet/followers (after signing into Twitter).

See some of you in Charlotte!

FIFTY-THREE hours per week. For most of us in full time youth ministry, that's probably just about a regular work week. I don't track my hours that carefully, but I have some twelve hour days in my regular week, as well as some eight hour days, and every once in awhile a short day. I usually get at least one day a week off and I'm happy with how things work out. I hope that you are able to keep your work and personal schedules in balance as well. Is fifty-three hours a week normal? (Keep reading, I'm not talking about work weeks.)

According to a study released last week by the Kaiser Family Foundation called Generation M2: Media in the Lives of 8- to 18-Year-Olds, this is the average number of hours per week that an 8 to 18 year old spends consuming media. The news release on the study was full of fascinating information.

• 7:38 (7 hours, 38 minutes) - the amount of time an 8 to 18 year-old spends using entertainment media in a typical day.
• 10:45 - the amount of content actually consumed due to multi-tasking!
• 76% - of people studies have iPods or other MP3 players.
• 2:52 - the reduction in the amount of time consuming media spent by youth that have restrictions placed on them by there parents.
• 1:35 - the amount of time spent texting during a typical day! (Which this study did not include in the total amount.)

An Los Angeles Times article about the study quoted Becky Kirsh, a parent from Lombard, Ill.

She offered one example of how gadgetry can alter relationships with her four children, ages 9 to 15. In a simpler time, the car was an ideal place for heart-to-heart chats (captive audience, no eye contact).

But when her kids go right to their cellphones or immediately retreat into their headphones in the car, "it's no different than if they were in their bedrooms, with the door closed," said Kirsh, an educational coordinator at a local church. "That's when I really put my foot down."

When I'm on a trip with my youth group I have a rule we share what we're listening to by playing it on the stereo. I'll play any kind of music, as long as the kids vouch that it doesn't have inappropriate language in it, even if I don't like it. I also throw in music from our Lutheran friends as well! When I first started enforcing this rule, I faced a near revolt. Some students do sneak their ear-buds on, but they put up with it for the most part and sometimes I even hear them having conversations!

Have you noticed media consumption taking over the lives of the youth you work with? How do we respond to this study? What policies do you have in your youth group about media during time together? Throw some thoughts up in the comment section below. There is also a video released with the study that might provoke some additional comments or responses.

Where did I put that piece of paper that was on a Thrivent (or was it Mission Investment Fund) notepad? It had a great list of ideas that I was going to use for the Tech Geek posts. It must be somewhere. *rustle* Dig through another pile on the desk. Nope, it's not there either. If only there were a way to keep these ideas somewhere that I could always find them. Obviously to anyone who has seen it, any place in my office is not the answer.

I stumbled upon Evernote a month or two ago when I was exploring Dial2Do. It is a service that does exactly what I need a list keeper and a stack of sticky notes to do. Using Evernote I can track notes and access them from anywhere and just about any device.

First, I installed The Evernote Web Clipper extension into my FireFox browser. This lets me "save interesting stuff you see on the web. No more bookmarks, tabs, or open windows. See something you like, clip it and you'll have it forever." I also installed the Evernote for Windows application to give me direct access to my notes from a desktop application. The notes are fully accessible from any web browser at www.evernote.com. Finally, I put the iPod Touch application on my iPod Touch and I actually had the vacuum bag numbers that I needed when I was at Sears!

Along with the website, which is usable from about any Internet connected computer, net-book, or phone, Evernote has applications available for Windows, Mac OS X, iPhone/iPod Touch, Android devices, Blackberry devices, Palm Pre/Pixi, and Windows Mobile devices. Each of these will sync your notes when they have a live connection so that you are always up to date.

You can add items to your Evernote account using any of the clients above or the website. You can also e-mail to a customized e-mail address, use Dial2Do, or Tweet items into your account.

An Evernote, if that's what they're called, is a text note, an image, an audio file, or a PDF file. Free users are limited to 40MB of data transferred per month, which is a fairly generous allowance. If you start uploading every picture, you could go through that pretty quickly, but just using text like I am, it will probably take awhile.

Premium users ($5/month or $45/year) can use up to 500MB/month and upload additional types of content, including Microsoft Office documents and videos.

To learn more about Evernote, check out their page of videos at http://www.evernote.com/about/video/.

Once I find that piece of paper, I'll upload my ideas for future posts to Evernote. If you have any ideas for future posts or questions you'd like me to explore, add them in the comments or send me an e-mail them to me.

Got your Extravaganza Registrations in yet?

I imagine that many of you, like me, seldom read a printed newspaper. You may read your local paper online or you may get all of your news from Jon Stewart, America's Most Trusted Newscaster. Either way, there is something that I miss from the old newspapers I delivered during my teens. I never did read the paper all that carefully, but I do remember flipping through the pages and scanning the headlines and pictures to see what interested me. Sometimes I'd pause and read an entire article in the middle of the paper.

Google Fast Flip, a Google Labs experiment, recreates some of this experience online. Instead of flipping through one newspaper, you can flip through the web pages, complete with pictures, from a variety of sources.  The service works in all the major web browsers and also has a Mobile version which is optimized for the iPhone/iPod Touch and Android devices. You can click on a headline page to zoom in and click again to go to the original source and read the entire article. It may not sound like much to read my description, but it can be a fun way to catch up on the news of the day.

The page is broken down into 4 sections which you can customize using your Google Account. Some of them are static and others, like Topics, update depending on what or who is in the news. The sections on my page this afternoon are:

• Popular: Recent, Most Viewed, Recommended, Headlines, and My Likes
• Sections: Politics, Business, U.S., World, Sports, Sci/Tech, Entertainment, Health, Opinion, and Travel
• Topics: Hillary Clinton, Meredith Kercher, Toyota, Human Rights, Economy, Knicks, and Susan Boyle
• Sources: PRI, The Atlantic, PC World, Macworld, Technology Review, Smithsonian, and All sources.

Google is pulling information from a wide variety of online content. You can see the list by clicking on All sources. Stop reading this article and go check it out now at http://fastflip.googlelabs.com/.

P.S. - Remember to write Twenty-Ten (2010) on your checks!

I do not own Adobe Acrobat and I probably never will. I'm sure it's a very fine program, but I doubt I'll ever be able to justify the high cost for the limited amount of time that I would use it. But there are times that I need to do a little more with a PDF file than just view it. I recently found a new-to-me tool that gives you a lot of functionality for free and lets you do even more for only $20/year.

PDFill PDF Editor lets you create and edit, including adding form fields to be filled in later, PDF files. I may very well buy this and use it next year to create my Medical Release Forms in a PDF format that can be filled out on the computer and then printed. I haven't played with those features yet. I have played with the features that allow you to easily merge, split, and re-order the pages in PDF files.

After you download PDFill PDF Editor from http://www.plotsoft.com/download.html you will have a trial version of the editor installed that adds watermarks to anything you do. You will also have the Free PDF Tools and the Free PDF & Image Writer that come with the package. These do not require you to register in order to gain full functionality.

When you first run the program, it will scan your system to see if you have GhostScript installed. If you don't, a window will pop up asking you to download it, either automatically or manually. I clicked the Download Automatically button and it started the installation automatically. You must install GhostScript in order for the software to work. GhostScript is an open source PDF interpreter and PDFill provides a graphical front end for this software.

Once the GhostScript installation completes, you will have a new printer driver installed that lets you print to a PDF file or to an Image (PNG, JPG, BMP, TIF, or GIF) file. First, run PDFill PDF and Image Write (Free) from your Programs menu and select the output settings you could like. I un-checked the box next to Simple GUI (Hide this Dialog in Saving File) so that when I use the printer driver it asks me what format I want to end up with. Then go to whatever program you're working from and use the Print command to send the file to this tool.

The other free tools are under PDFill PDF Tools (Free), which you can also run from your program menu. From http://www.plotsoft.com/pdf_tools_free.html you can see all the capabilities of this tool:

1. Merge Merge two or more PDF files into a single PDF file.
2. Split or Reorder Extract pages from a PDF file into a new file.  Reorder the page sequence into a new file.
3. Encrypt and Decrypt with Security Options Encrypt or Decrypt PDF documents (Master Password or User Password may be required).  Protect PDF files with passwords and prevent PDF files from being printed, copied, changed, filled, extracted, signed, assembled or merged. Supports Adobe® Standard 40-bit Encryption and Adobe® Advanced 128-bit Encryption
4. Rotate and Crop Rotate a PDF page by 0, 90, 180 and 270 degree. Crop a page to modify its layout of Print or View by specifying its margins.
5. Reformat Put multiple pages into one page to save paper and inks when printing hard copies. Add note lines for handout.
6. Header and Footer Add Headers and Footers to present information, such as date, time, page numbers, or the title of the document, in the top or bottom margins of a document.
7. Watermark by Stylized Text Add Stylized Text Stamp.
8. Watermark by Image Add Stamp using image file (bmp, jpg, gif, png, tiff, and wmf).
9. Convert Images to PDF Convert images (bmp, jpg, gif, png, tiff, and wmf) into a PDF file with layout options.
10. Convert PDF into images Save PDF pages into images (png, jpg, bmp and tiff) with DPI options.
11. PDF Form Fields: Delete, Flatten, List Delete, Flatten or List the PDF Form Fields inside a PDF file.
12. Convert PostScript(PS) File into PDF Convert PS file into PDF so that adobe reader can read it.
13. Add Information Add information (Title, Author,  Subject, Keywords, Created, Creator, Producer and Version) to the PDF document.
14. Free Scanner Scan your Paper Form or Photo into images (PNG, JPG, BMP, TIF and GIF) or PDF
15. Create Transparent Image Create a transparent image with options to adjust one Color and the left Colors' transparency.

I haven't had the need to use all of these tools, but the ones I have used have worked well. One way, for example, that I use them is to pull the Leader Sheets out from the PDF files of the Here We Stand Confirmation Curriculum. Then I e-mail just those two sheets to my small group leaders and they can have the chance to look them over before our class meets. I also extract and e-mail the Learner Take-Home sheets to each student's family, because I've found that my kids don't always remember to take them home. (I'm sure that none of you have ever run into that problem!)

The interface isn't always the easiest or prettiest, but this seems to be a pretty powerful set of PDF tools and I hope you find them helpful.

Blessed Advent,
Pastor Andy

One day last fall my colleague and I had gone to Polson for a clergy meeting with our bishop and the clergy from our cluster and the cluster to the south of us. I'm sure you can guess the general agenda of our conversation, but that's not what I want to talk about here. After the meeting ended and we had eaten lunch, we had one more stop that we wanted to make. Both of us, with growlers in hand, knew roughly where Glacier Brewing was, but neither of us was quite sure.

We didn't have a GPS with us and we certainly weren't going to stop and ask for directions. So we headed in the direction we thought it was and I pulled out my cell phone. I don't have a fancy cell phone with a big touch screen or anything like that (not that I don't want one, but that's another story). I just have a regular old flip-phone. I dialed 1-800-GOOG-411 and a nice computer voice said "Calls Recorded. Google. Say the business and the city and state." I said, "Glacier Brewing in Polson, Montana." The helpful computer voice said, "Glacier Brewing Company on 10th Avenue East in Polson, Montana. I'll connect you."

Well, I didn't really need to actually call the brewery, so I said "text message" and the service sent me a text message with the address and other information for the business. If I'd stayed on the line, it would have connected the call for me. I did just that the other day as I was pulling out of my driveway to pick up a Costco pizza. GOOG-411 connected me to Costo and the pizza was waiting for me when I strolled in 11 minutes later!

GOOG-411 is a free service that works from both mobile and landline phones, although it doesn't work from pay phones. It only works for business listings, you can't use it to find home phone numbers. It could really come in handy if you needed a tow truck in a strange community and didn't have access to a phone book. Or if you thought you knew the address of that church you were meeting a colleague at, but found out that you hadn't remembered it quite correctly.

Google has a full list of the commands that the service recognizes posted here http://mobile.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=76436 and a video explaing the service here http://www.google.com/goog411/.

Why does Google do this? There isn't any advertising and they may not be making any money on it. But they are gathering a phenomenal amount of data. Specifically they are learning how different people pronounce phonemes. It is, perhaps, some of this research that has given Google the ability to add captioning to YouTube videos, as described here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoneme. I'd also write something about Google Voice here, but I don't have it yet!

Blessed Advent,
Pastor Andy

P.S. Thanks to a tweet from @lensweet, I'm listening to some Gaither Christmas Music from http://www.gaither.com/news/2009/11/christmas-gaither-radio/. Not my thing for every day, but a nice addition to my office on a very chilly afternoon!

Full disclosure: The story I described above is fiction, but it certainly could have happened the way I described it! We did have a meeting in Polson this fall, and we did go the brewery after the meeting. But I didn't have to use this service at that time. Actually, last spring, I had to use GOOG-411 last spring to find the church, since my colleague wasn't sure exactly where it was. And I have also used it to find the brewery, though with my parents, not my colleague. I didn't want to admit to knowing where the brewery was and not the church! :)

As I have freely admitted before, I am a Google fan, and I think they get how the internet should be used in a way that I agree with. I am excited about the Android operating system that they have brought to mobile phones and how open that is. I look forward to having one of those phones myself, but I'm holding out to see if something better than the Droid comes around. It looks great, but there are some rumors I'm waiting on.

I have used, and still do use, Remember the Milk for much of my task management. It's a great product and I only scratch the surface of what it can do. I haven't gotten into using tags, locations, contacts, or many of the other features. I just add things to my list, often using Dial2Do, and then I take them off when they're finished. Or, sometimes I just leave them there forever, like my oldest task of setting up an annual physical which is over a year old, which sort of defeats the annual part! I also use the Remember the Milk for Gmail gadget and Firefox extension, available at http://www.rememberthemilk.com/services/gmail/, so that I can see my tasks from within my Gmail account.

Remember the Milk does also have some integration with Google Calendar, but I found it wasn't for me. I wanted something that would sit alongside my calendar and let me add things easily and have them show up both in the list and on the relevant calendar date. I also wanted to be able to modify the list from my iPod Touch, whether I had internet access or not. I could have paid for a pro membership to Remember the Milk in order to use their iPod Touch application, but I didn't feel I was using the service enough to justify paying for it.

Awhile back, Google came out with Google Tasks, a task manager of their own. It isn't nearly as robust as Remember the Milk, but it does much of what I was looking for. I've found myself using it more and more, even though it doesn't have Dial2Do integration, yet. (I have contacted Dial2Do and asked them to consider adding Google Tasks to their service.) I find that Google Tasks also works well for the check-off lists that we probably all use to keep track of things like who has paid for a retreat! I just create a new list and add the names of everyone who needs to pay. Then, when they pay, I check them off. I don't "clear completed items" until everyone has paid. If I need to make a note, I can leave the name as the "task" and add a note in the Notes field.

To access Google Tasks from Gmail, click on Tasks, which should be right under your Contacts. This pops up a Google Talk style window with your tasks listed in it. You can add notes and due dates by clicking on the ^> at the right hand of each item. If you click on the pop-out arrow, your task list will float in a new window.

To access it from Google Calendar, click on Tasks, which should be right under Quick Add. This will open a sidebar to the right of your calendar screen and it will have the same tasks in it as you see from any other method of accessing Google Tasks. Once you start using Google Tasks, you'll also notice a new calendar under My Calenders which is, appropriately enough, called Tasks. Selecting or un-selecting this will control whether or not your tasks are displayed on your calendars.

You can also add Google Tasks to your iGoogle page, if you use that, by adding the Tasks gadget. Or you can visit gmail.com/tasks from your mobile phone or iPod Touch and access your list that way.

Finally, I found an iPhone/iPod app called GeeTasks which lets me quickly add tasks to any of my lists whether or not I'm connected to the internet. There is a YouTube video explaining the application at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lXy5jY5lSUQ&feature=player_embedded. It's a $2.99 application, but that's close enough to free for me! There is always a chance that Google will change the API enough that the developer won't be able to keep it working, but it has worked well for me for a couple of months and there have been a couple of new versions that have improved the user experience.

Good luck with whatever you end up doing, and get rid of those sticky notes!

If you've been following my posts since the beginning, you probably remember me talking about the Jott services. Jott offers a set of voice-to-text services that give you the ability to call a number and have a text message sent to any one of a number of services. Jott Voicemail will also convert incoming voicemails into text messages and send them to you. I used both services and even paid for a one-year subscription to Jott Assistant, but when it came time to renew, I decided I'd try and see what else was out there that might still be free.

When I started searching, I came across Dublin, Ireland based Dial2Do, a similar service to Jott. They don't have an 800 number, but my cell phone has free long distance anyways, so that isn't a consideration for me. I dial the number that they gave me, a 213 (Los Angeles) and say what I want to do. There are an extensive list of services that Dial2Do support, some of which are new to me and some of which I will be looking at in upcoming posts.

Here is the list of services that Dial2Do support today:

• Blogger: Post to any of your blogs on Blogger at http://www.blogger.com
• Business Card: Send contacts to your phone as business cards
• Calendar: Listen to your Google or 30 Boxes calendar and add appointments
• Corkboard: Corkboard helps you remember what you want. Whatever it is. Wherever you are. http://corkboard.it/
• Email: Send emails, Listen to your inbox and even reply! Supports gmail, aol, yahoo and more.
• Evernote: Evernote allows you to easily capture information in any environment using whatever device or platform you find most convenient, and makes this information accessible and searchable at any time, from anywhere at http://www.evernote.com
• FriendFeed: Post to your FriendFeed page at http://friendfeed.com
• Giga Om: Listen to the Giga Om RSS feed at http://gigaom.com
• HelloTxt: Post your status once and have it appear automatically on all of your networks with HelloTxt. http://hellotxt.com
• Huffington Post: Listen to the Huffington Post feed at http://www.huffingtonpost.com
• Identica: Listen and post to Identica at http://identi.ca
• Jaiku: Post to your Jaiku page and listen to the latest updates at http://www.jaiku.com
• Jajah: Voice-enable your Jajah account - set up cheap calls and sent texts with Jajah! http://www.jajah.com
• jkOnTheRun: Listen to the jkOnTheRun RSS feed at http://www.jkontherun.com
• Lifehacker: Listen to the LifeHacker feed at http://lifehacker.com
• LiveJournal: Post to your LiveJournal account at http://www.livejournal.com/
• Mashable: Listen to the Mashable feed at http://mashable.com
• Mosio: Get an answer to any question with Mosio at http://mosio.com
• New York Times: Listen to the New York Times feed at http://www.nytimes.com
• Perez Hilton: Listen to the Perez Hilton feed at http://www.perezhilton.com
• PingFm: Post to your default Ping FM services at http://ping.fm
• PingMe: PingMe takes a unique approach to keeping track of things you need to do - it's mobile and interactive. Just create a Ping, set a date and you'll receive a reminder by E-mail or TXT to your phone. http://gopingme.com
• Read Write Web: Listen to the Read Write Web RSS feed at http://www.readwriteweb.com
• Remember The Milk: Listen and post to Remember The Milk at http://www.rememberthemilk.com
• Reminder: Let Dial2Do help you remember stuff! Record a reminder and we convert it to text and send it to you in an email.
• Seth Godin: Listen to the Seth Godin feed at http://sethgodin.typepad.com/
• Tech Crunch: Listen to the Tech Crunch feed at http://www.techcrunch.com
• Text: Send a text message to one of your contacts or groups with Dial2Do. We can even send you a copy!
• Textamundo: Textamundo is the only service that answers your questions from anywhere in the world. Just ask a question, and you’ll get the answer back as a text message. http://www.textamundo.com
• 30Boxes: Post and listen to your 30Boxes Calendar and Task list. http://30boxes.com
• Toodledo: Listen and post to your Toodledo task list at http://toodledo.com
• Translate: Translates what you say into another language and sends it back to you as a text message.
• Tumblr: Post a message to your tumblr page at http://www.tumblr.com
• Twitter: Post messages to your Twitter page, and listen to your timeline. You can even record replies for your friends while listening! http://www.twitter.com
• TypePad: Post to your TypePad account at http://www.typepad.com/
• Vitalist: Listen and post to your Vitalist task list at http://vitalist.com
• Weather: Listen to the weather in your location
• Web Worker Daily: Listen to the Web Worker Daily feed at http://webworkerdaily.com
• Wordpress: Post to your blog on Wordpress at http://wordpress.com
• Xpenser: Post expenses to your Xpenser account at http://xpenser.com 
• Yahoo Finance: Listen to the Yahoo Finance feed at http://finance.yahoo.com
• Yahoo News: Listen to the Yahoo News feed at http://news.yahoo.com
• Yahoo Sports: Listen to the Yahoo Sports feed at http://sports.yahoo.com

I have not explored the capability, but it may be the case that you could use Dial2Do to send text messages to a group of people for free. Tatango used to provide this service, but they are now charging for it as the market for text-message advertising has collapsed. I'm currently using Dial2Do to send expenses to Xpenser and calendar items to Google Calendar and it's working well for both!

Do any of you have a similar free service that you've been using?