I like maps. Always have. Now that Google software has put them on digital steroids, it seems there’s no end to the flow of interesting and useful mashups, applications and tools based on the Google Maps API. There are so many, in fact, it’s hard to keep up with all the creativity.

While researching a post on the latest and greatest, I ran across a London-based Web site that – as its Google Maps Mania name implies – does just that on a regular basis. The site also covers features and additions to Google Maps itself.

The lead post as of this morning is a really cool heat map of biodiversity data. If that’s a bit too arcane for you, some of the more recent posts feature everything from a 3D tour of Tokyo to new satellite imagery of the Great Barrier Reef to how map developers now can add Wikipedia and Panoramio layers to their Google Maps mashups.

Your kids might like playing around with dig a very deep hole.

As I mentioned in Part 1, I take my responsibility of family photos and videos seriously.  I envision my children enjoying them as adults and sharing them with their children.  While this is all nicey nice, we also have friends and family that like to keep up with us now.  As a new mom, it only took a couple weeks of e-mail updates and two snail-mail packs of pictures before I found some great ways to share digital memories with others in real time.

The Family Web Site

If you do not have much time to get creative, Easysite.com is ideal.  You literally just fill in the blanks and pick the design.  Below is a sample of the huge range of designs to pick from.

For only $50 USD a year, you can share photos and videos.  You can also have chat rooms, a blog and many other pages on your site with the click of a button.  If you’d like to have a little more control over design and layout, it might be worth checking out Blinkweb. It is a new site that allows drag-and-drop creation.

Warning Moms: You do have to keep this stuff updated.  Family will certainly harass you when your “news” is six months old or your “featured photo” is the first tooth of your now 8 year old!

Digital Scrapbooking

Digital scrapbooks are created as individual files that you can print, e-mail or share on other sites. They are not Web sites themselves.  Scrapblog.com has a very easy interface that feels like PowerPoint. It is Web based and free.  After creating all of your pages, you can share it on many social networking sites or export to jpeg and print.

If you like paper, there are sites that help you design and create beautiful scrapbook pages that can be printed for a fee, like howfasttheygrow.com.  You can throw that glue stick away!

Not Online

I do not know about you, but I have family that is simply not online.  The family Web site does not exactly help me keep them updated.  So when I am updating pictures on our site, I go ahead and add a few to Walgreens or Wal-mart photo center.  I pay for them online and have them printed at the local store for my family to pick up next time they are out.

Whether you are sharing or preserving your digital memories, technology is keeping up with us moms.  If technology could only provide us a way to somehow get in a few pictures so that future generations can see that we made it to a few of these important events, too!

There are many women like me who have moved around throughout their corporate lives, leaving grandparents, aunts, uncles and extended family many miles apart. At least I was fortunate enough to spend my early childhood with my great-grandmother on the first floor, my grandparents on the second floor and my immediate family on the third floor of a triple-decker. From my teens until young adulthood, I lived on the same street as my cousins, sharing three houses in a row.

Fast forward several decades and my children will have to travel to at least four states to see their cousins, grandparents, aunts and uncles. Add onto that challenge the increasing cost of travel, kids’ schedules, my own work schedule and travel limitations for my parents due to health issues. So what’s a mother to do to ensure some kind of family togetherness and visits to grandma’s house?

Well, my sister turned me on to voice over Internet protocol - what the techies refer to as VoIP.  When I updated my personal computer to my pink Dell laptop with an integrated webcam, I downloaded a free VoIP software application called Skype to communicate with my far-flung family. (BTW, there are other options I want to check out including the new Dell Video Chat. My colleague Anne Camden recently posted information on this.)

Since then, I’ve been checking in on my mom (more on getting my mom and family updated to the new age later), aunt, brother and anyone else for free!

Check out this vlog of my daughter using the Internet to share her recent summer vacation with her auntie in California:

When my friends are at the most happening parties in town, I am home doing my due diligence as a chic geek–experiencing technology at its finest by exploring the industry’s most surprising gadget. The sewing machine. Yes, you read right. The sewing machine. I sew, embroider, hem, pintuck, couch, ruffle and dabble in quilting and I am far from retirement. After attending a few sewing classes, I saw quickly that I am not a lone wolf for my generation.

My mother — an avid sewing IT professional, which also makes her far from the stereotypical sewer — bought me a Bernina on my 24^th birthday.  With no disrespect to the incredible embroidery my grandmother did or all of the Halloween costumes my mother made for me, it felt like a gift for the elderly. In response to my surprise, my mother told me something that could not have been more spot on –the technology in these machines is exciting and makes sewing so easy and addictive, that I would fall in love with sewing. She was right.

So what has the sewing industry done to make this old world hobby have new world appeal? Pack in serious technology. The same kind of technology we want in our PCs. Let’s take the new Bernina 830 for example, as it is the first thing I will buy if I win the lotto.

The high-res 7″ touch screen has brilliant colors and large icons for navigation. You can even drag and drop stitches to put them in sewing order. If the power goes out while you’re embroidering, the patented “Module with Brains” knows how and where to pick up so you don’t lose a stitch or ruin your design. The software is Microsoft Window’s based and comes with many embroidery designs to choose from, including word art. And if you don’t like the choices that come with the machine, have no fear. Just start up your Dell and create your own, through the Art Design software.

Talk about personalization! With these PC dream features, Bernina and others have brought sewing up to state-of-art technology and arguably a little beyond.  And now on to my obsession with fabric, as seen by my closet full of bolts. Has fabric caught up to technology, too? Stay tuned later this week for a post by Jennifer.

For several weeks, I’ve been looking for a good program to help me get a handle on my extensive book and music collection, and I ran across itaggit.

It’s a free online service that lets you organize whatever you collect and add photos and other pertinent items to the records.  One of the things I like best about it is that I don’t have to enter each item myself.  For books and records, you can search Amazon using the author, artist or title and when you select it from a list, it imports all the publisher’s information so you just click on it and you have a complete record of the item.

Itaggit also tallies the purchase price (retail) so you have a running total of how much your collection would cost to replace. A feature I haven’t used yet is the ability to post an item to eBay, Facebook, Craigslist or other leading Web sites. I have suggested that my husband put some of his collections on itaggit so he can easily upload items to eBay to sell.

There‘s even a blog feature so you can write about your collection and share information with other members of the itaggit community. In one evening, I entered several hundred items.  It’s really a great tool and you can’t beat the price.

Whether you want to save some information quickly, get an idea of what a remote user is viewing on their computer or need to record an image for a presentation, there are a number of ways to record a snapshot of exactly what you see on a PC.

To Capture Exactly What Is on Your Screen

Hold the ALT button, and then press the Print Screen button.  This places the image of your screen on your clipboard to be pasted into a new file or e-mail.

To Capture Only the Active Application

Hold the CTRL button, and then press the Print Screen button.  This places the image of your active application only on your clipboard to be pasted into a new file or e-mail.

To Capture a More Selective Area

The Snipping Tool in Windows Vista will allow you to select exactly what you want to record off the screen.  It makes it easier to save to a file and e-mail as well.   The easiest way to find it is to enter “snip” in the Start Menu’s search bar.

To Do Even More

TechSmith’s SnagIt has been the leading screen capture tool for some time.   However, who likes paying for software?  Not me!   Fortunately, they have a relatively new and free product called Jing.  It makes it easy to take a screenshot (or movie) of your work on your PC.

Not only does it save images and video (in the flash format), it can record any audio from your microphone.  Afterward, it saves the file to your PC or automatically uploads it to TechSmith’s screencast.com Web site.   You simply e-mail the link it provides to your video or use the built-in blogging features.  This is perfect for demonstrating how to do something on your computer or recording PC gaming exploits.

Simple image screenshots can be automatically tied to your flickr account as well.   You can view my first movie here.   It is a video of me finishing this blog post.

There are a lot of little gems sprinkled in Vista.  If you’re on the fence about upgrading to Vista, here is another great program that comes free with it.  The Vista Photo Gallery program offers a lot of features with a great, easy-to-use interface.

Number 1 - It Already Works With Your Digital Camera

I’ve plugged several digital cameras into Vista, one of them a few years old.  Vista recognized them easily, with no extra software to install.  It is very convenient to actually connect the camera to any Vista PC, with ever having to install any extra software that might alter the configuration.

Number 2 - Organization

After Vista scans your camera’s memory card, it automatically organizes photos by the date they are taken.  This is just the first step in viewing the photos you want to view, in the way you want to view.

Number 3 - Tags

Don’t you wish you could see just your vacation photos?  Or maybe just the photos of your kids?   Perhaps, all the photos of your kids while on vacation?  As you peruse your fond photographic images, you can simply “tag” each photo with the label “kids” and/or “vacation.”  You can create as many tags as you want.  Then simply assign the tag or tags to the photos.  As you select the name of the tag from the master list, all of the corresponding photos are quickly displayed.

These tags are embedded within the photo, so if you e-mail them, others benefit from your work.  When they add the photo to their computer, Vista will use and organize the photo by the same tags.

I’ll tag these photos of my son in the garden with “Flowers” and “Jackson”

Number 4 - Fix Your Photos

The dreaded red eye in a photograph is best explained here.  To avoid dealing with this issue at the Target photo printing kiosk, simple fix it yourself.  Just select the photo and choose Fix > Fix Red Eye.   It’s fast and effective.  You can crop the image from the same area, which can really improve the aesthetics of the photograph.

Number 5 - You’ll Actually Be Able To Find Your Photos

As you review your favorite photos, you’ll probably want to record some fond memories of the event.   When you select one or more photos, you can also add a caption by clicking on Info > Caption.

Best of all, you can then search your entire photo library for that caption.  As you enter text in the search field, your entire library of photos is filtered based on the text you provide.   This is a great way to view the handful of images you really want, across a collection of thousands.  From there, you can always sub filter based on tags you have assigned.

Note my search for the word “pink”

There is a lot more as well. You can also assign a one- to five-star rating to your photos.  Your photos look great in Microsoft Media Center for running a slideshow on your TV.  The photo slideshows can run based on the tags you selected as well.  Finally, everything I’ve said about photos can also be done with video clips.  All this takes a little time and effort, but the payoff is great.

I began fundraising for the March of Dimes when my twin boys were still in the NICU, after being born 13 weeks premature.  They are now 3 years old and I still fundraise every year.  Online and E-mail Fundraising has helped me to make a difference!

While I am very passionate about this cause, I am just an amateur fundraiser.  I have never coordinated a large event, and hadn’t fundraised since UIL as a child.  Fortunately, the ability to knock on doors is no longer a prerequisite for fundraising.

Fundraising software is available if you are starting from scratch.  If you are joining in with a large organization like I did, they probably already have all of the tools you need.  Just visit their Web site and get started.   The Top 10 Tips for Online Fundraising can help you make the most of your effort.

For me, fundraising has become a family effort, concluded with an annual walk together with those beautiful boys I mentioned.  Best of luck to you in helping whatever organization you care about!

Now that my favorite Web browser has been released, there are many exciting features that will enable you to personalize Firefox 3 to suit your needs. There are many add-ons, extensions and plugins available for download. I have installed many of these tools and seen no decrease in performance from this browser. Other browsers would be bogged down and slow to respond with all the cool features. It reminds me of the Timex commercial a few years back: “Takes a licking and keeps on ticking.”

One of my favorite add-ons is Foxy Tunes 3.0. It allows you to turn any Web site with music imbedded into a playlist. This works great for me since I enjoy all types of music while I am working.  It also supports more than two dozen players, including iTunes, WinAmp,  MediaMonkey and  Pandora .

Other Firefox 3 add-ons include  Appearances, Bookmarks, Social and Communication, Dictionaries, Feeds News and Blogging — and of course everyone’s favorite topics, Photos, Music and Videos.  Some of the most common applications are listed on the plugin section of Mozilla’s Web site. Not only are these additional tools available from Mozilla, but many other sites as well, including  Download.com and Jason Bartholme.com.

Firefox 3 add-ons are available for Linux users, too.  We sure don’t want to exclude our Linux followers since Firefox3 is the default browser within Ubuntu.

In closing, I would like to mention that the Mozilla Labs developers have started an Extend Firefox 3 Contest to encourage development and innovation in Web experience. Applicants will need to hurry and submit your entries. The deadline is July 28, 2008.  Good luck and enjoy all the fun stuff Firefox 3 has to offer.

Adam Pash, a senior editor at Lifehacker – a Web site I highly recommend btw – recently blogged about a new freeware tool from Microsoft called Windows Speech Recognition Macros. Since I’ve often found myself yelling at my computer during all night gaming sessions or when it inexplicably decided to install updates and shut itself down at very inopportune times, I have to say this is an incredible chance to give my computer the ability to react.

Below is a video example Adam posted on YouTube:

The tool features advanced dictation as well as the ability to fully control your computer by merely speaking to it. Included in Adam’s blog is a video demonstrating speech dictation using the tool, and also a well written overview of his experience with it. I’m usually not tempted to install freeware tools on my PC, but I think I’m sold on this one.

WSM is only available to Vista users so, if you’re interested, this may be one more reason to do that upgrade you’ve been putting off. To get similar functionality with Windows XP requires a third-party application like Dragon Naturally Speaking, which may end up pulling money out of your pocketbook.

I think I’ll have to install this software and rename my computer to HAL Jr.  Hopefully, it won’t get any murderous ideas.