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Next, right-click the shortcut you just created, click Properties > Shortcut > Shortcut key, type your preferred keystroke combination for opening the service, and press Enter. Now you can open the service ready to create a new file by pressing that keyboard shortcut.

Well, skipping the file-naming and storage location-choosing steps, for one thing. And having access to the notes from any Internet-connected computer, for another.

Should you find Writer to your liking, be sure to make a donation to its creator to help keep the great services coming.

You can create a keyboard shortcut to open Notepad, WordPad, Word, or any other word processor on your PC by right-clicking the program’s shortcut on the Start menu, choosing Properties > Shortcut > Shortcut key, entering your keystroke combination of choice (be sure not to overwrite one that’s already in use), and pressing Enter. I described how to get fast access to all your keyboard shortcuts in a post from last week.

Faster is almost always better, at least when it comes to computers. So what’s the fastest way to open a word processor?

Writer remembers your files by leaving a cookie with the identifying information. If you delete the cookie, you lose access to the files, unless you sign up for a free account. The account has the added benefit of providing access to your files from any Internet-connected PC.

Since Writer doesn’t require you to log in–or even to create an account–you need not give your files a name. Just stick with the default, and when you want to reopen the file, select it from your list of documents, which appears just below the text window.

Now press the keystroke combination to open the program, and start typing (or navigate to an existing file you want to open). When you’re done working in the file, press Ctrl-S, give the file a name (if it doesn’t have one already), choose a location to store it (or accept the program’s default storage folder), and press Enter. What could be simpler?

Unfortunately, if you’re not already logged in, you’ll have to enter your username and password before you can open the blank file. You can avoid the login step by creating the shortcut to the Writer online word processor that mimics the look of old DOS-based text editors running on a green-phosphor display. (The service’s bare-bones look is itself modeled after the free Dark Room word processor, which, in turn, is the Windows version of the WriteRoom word processor for
Mac OS X.)

Use the Writer online word processor for instant–and universal-access to your notes.

(Credit:
John Watson/BigHugeLabs.com)

Web word processors auto-save files
You can create a keyboard shortcut that opens Google Docs or any other Web word processor. Start by opening a new document in the service. Select the URL in the Address bar, and type Ctrl-C to copy it to the clipboard. Now open Windows Explorer to the Desktop or any other folder, right-click anywhere in the folder, choose New > Shortcut, paste the URL of the service into the location field, press Enter, give the shortcut a name, and press Enter again.

Monday: get more use out of Windows’ taskbar.

My advice: Buy the Home card now, spend the extra 10 bucks if you decide you want Web sharing, then reevaluate after a year. You’ll still come out ahead.

Find more deals, coupon codes, and bargains on CNET’s Shopper.com.

I’ve been testing an Eye-Fi for the last couple weeks, and it’s pretty cool. The only downside is having to leave your camera on while the photos get transferred, but it definitely beats having to fish out a USB transfer cable or pop the memory card out of the camera and into a reader.

(Note: The above link takes you to CNET’s product page for the Eye-Fi Home. On the right-hand side, you’ll see that several vendors are offering the card for $59. To get free shipping, choose either BuyDig or Beach Camera.)

If you want a little more versatility, BuyDig has the Eye-Fi Share for $79. In addition to beaming pix to your PC, it can automatically upload them to any number of online photo services (Facebook, Flickr, Snapfish, etc.). But wait: Starting Oct. 5, owners of the Home card can get the same Web-sharing feature for an annual fee of $9.99. (Eye-Fi also plans to roll out a free firmware update that will improve transfer speeds.)

By now you’ve probably heard of Eye-Fi, the Wi-Fi-enabled SD memory card that wirelessly beams photos from your camera to your PC. When it first came out last year, I thought it was overpriced at $99–but now you can scoop up an Eye-Fi Home card for just $59 shipped.

(Credit:
Eye-Fi)

I have yet to read Born Digital, but had the chance to sit down with Palfrey while on book tour in San Francisco to discuss these so-called digital natives, the way they’re growing up, and the crossroads he claims society is stalled at. He says we have a choice moving forward to either embrace technology responsibly and acknowledge its growing role in our of our lives or give in to fear and limit the growth and creativity that technology can help foster.

Born in the 1970s, I have found myself to be considered an “old timer,” at least according to the research of John Palfrey, an author and Harvard University professor. Palfrey’s new book, Born Digital examines the way kids born after 1980 are coming of age in an increasingly digital world, more heavily reliant on technology than ever before. I may be pretty tech-savvy, but I can also remember listening to tapes on a Sony Walkman, researching school projects in library books, and making play dates to actually play outside, not on a video game console. Sheesh. I’m really showing my age.

Dell says the new Studio Hybrid is 80 percent smaller than a traditional PC and it will come in seven different colors. But here’s some stuff that’s not in the video: It will retail for $699 with a monitor, and $499 without, according to sources familiar with the product. And, although it’s a desktop, it’ll have Intel’s latest mobile processor in it.

The company posted a teaser video to its blog today.

(Credit:
Dell)

In April, Dell pitched it as an environmentally friendly PC, and the video notes that it uses 70 percent less energy than a traditional desktop. The company also said then that the casing would be from totally recycled material, but the video doesn’t indicate that, other than the still of what looks like bamboo casing–but that would make eight colors, not seven. We’ll update as we get more information.

This post has been updated with pricing info.

The small form factor PC that Dell was talking up earlier this year will be released tomorrow.

Here’s the video:

The ad product uses an algorithm to find videos that are about to “go viral,” when word of mouth (or IM, or blog, or e-mail) promotes a Web site to a phase in which it spreads like wildfire. In this case, ads are overlaid on the bottom fifth of viral videos supplied by YouTube partners who share ad revenue with the search giant.

Until now, YouTube ad campaigns have been more targeted to specific demographics. Buzz targeting adds a broader option, though the ads still are sold as categories such as entertainment or how-to, a YouTube representative said.

Lions Gate was the first advertiser to sign up, using buzz targeting to promote a film, The Forbidden Kingdom, on 500 different videos. “Buzz targeting allowed us to reach a very large, diverse audience,” Danielle DePalma, Lions Gate’s director of digital media, said in a statement.

Making more money off YouTube is Google’s “highest priority,” Chief Executive Eric Schmidt said in April. The company is working on new YouTube ad possibilities, he said last week.

Google is starting to share more details about its high priority of making more money off YouTube’s popularity, introducing an advertising product on Tuesday called buzz targeting.

The issues plaguing the
iPhone 3G are indeed related to a chip inside the phone, according to a new report, but the solution could be easier than expected.

Apple is said to be planning a software fix for the iPhone 3G's reception problems.

(Credit:
Apple)

Business Week is reporting that, according to its sources, Infineon’s chip inside the iPhone 3G is the root cause of the reception problems that numerous iPhone 3G owners have reported over the last month. Nomura Securities analyst Richard Windsor first suggested Infineon was to blame in a research note earlier this week.

The good news, however, is that apparently Apple believes it can fix the problems with a software upgrade, according to Business Week. A Swedish researcher who had discovered sensitivity issues in the iPhone 3G’s chipset thought the problems would have to be solved through some sort of recall, but Apple and Infineon are said to be testing a software update that could be released perhaps as early as the end of this month.

The British video search site Blinkx has offered to acquire Miva, a digital-ad company that sprang out of Web 1.0 search ad firm FindWhat, for a price of $1.20 per share in cash. That’s a 54 percent premium over Miva’s August 7 closing price of 78 cents.

“A combination of the two companies–fusing Miva’s advertising network with Blinkx’s ability to leverage its technology portfolio into the online market–presents an exciting and compelling opportunity,” a release from Blinkx read. Miva has not yet responded to the offer.

Miva, meanwhile, has been going through some very rough waters. Longtime president and chief marketing officer Seb Bishop resigned on Tuesday. In its offer letter to Miva, Blinkx named “several challenges” that could make the ad firm agree to such a sale: “risk and cost associated with (its) new technology platform, a deteriorating cash position, continued deterioration of (its) Media EU business and continued decline in revenue and profitability.”

Several months ago, reports surfaced that both Google and News Corp. were interested in acquiring Blinkx, making the publicly traded dot-com’s stock spike.

Being more open isn’t a necessarily going to move people out of Facebook, MySpace, Bebo or other semi-permeable walled gardens. However, the combination of emerging open standards, such as OpenSocial, and the growing WordPress and Six Apart communities will have an impact on embedding a social dimension into the fabric of every application.

Andrew Mager posted an illustrated play-by-play of Saturday’s WordCamp, a conference devoted to the popular open-source blogging platform WordPress. According to Mager’s report, the hosted version of WordPress has 2.3 million new blogs in 12 months and 35 million posts, and more than 6.5 billion page views.

(Credit:
Andrew Mager)

As Mager reported, unlike the popular social networks, BuddyPress isn’t a closed environment: “Why do we need another social network? BuddyPress is not another “data silo” like Facebook and MySpace. It’s mission is to be more open source, handle better control of data, give people better choices, and build greater support for open standards.”

(Credit:
Andrew Mager)

BuddyPress is slated for 1.0 status in December 2008.

Of particular interest for the WordPress crowd is BuddyPress, a set of plug-ins that brings Facebook-like features, such as friends, groups, private messaging, status updates, and extended profiles, to the blogging platform. (WordPress competitor Six Apart also recently introduced a social dimension to its Movable Type platform.)

The letter, released Thursday, complains that Icahn only invested in Yahoo two months ago, and is just looking for a deal to “recover his investment and get back his money quickly, even a deal that does not provide full and fair value to you.”

The letter is part of the months of sniping among the companies, investors, and other interested parties, all leading up to Yahoo’s August 1 shareholder meeting.

In a new letter to shareholders, Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang and Chairman Roy Bostock claim that the latest proposal from Microsoft and investor Carl Icahn “will destroy stockholder value at Yahoo.”

Icahn and his proposed new board slate “lack the working knowledge of Yahoo and its Internet business needed…to successfully deliver a value-enhancing transaction,” the Yahoo letter says.

Not exactly a super newsworthy event, but increasingly news aggregation and filtering services, including Techmeme, Digg, Reddit, Blogrunner and a host of others, are filling in the gap between the overflow of content from the thousands of sources and RSS readers. Some RSS readers, such as NewsGator, are adding collaborative filtering to surface recommended stories. FriendFeed is adding a summarization feature to filter content. Twitter has a tracking feature for making better sense of conversations.

The ultimate filtering is to have intelligent software agents combing through billions of documents in real time, traversing 3D simulated worlds and finding the relationships, clusters, anomalies and other artifacts and presenting just the right content at the right time to users in an optimal form for consumption. That dream is still a long way off…

Techmeme has added a missing piece of functionality to its search feature–RSS. Now users can subscribe to results for any query and have them show up in widgets and RSS readers.