My friend recently pointed me in the direction of an interesting web application called Venmo.

Venmo is unique in that it allows you to send your friends money using your cell phone account.

That’s right; just text Venmo your friend’s number and how much money you want to pay them / they owe you and it will be transfered to your cell phone account balance!

The only question i have after learning about this application is… how do you take money off of your cell phone balance? It appears that you would have to bring that up with your cell phone provider.

If you like texting and never carry your wallet / purse, check it out!

One of the beauties of Creative Commons is that it promotes the idea of open source software. What is open source software, you ask? Open source software is software where the creators provide the community with the source code and allow anybody to edit or add something to the software.

Obviously, Creative Common’s mantra of “Share, Remix, and Reuse” fits into the idea of open source software very well.

If you are a software designer and have a great idea for some software, why not put it under a Creative Commons license?

Songbird

If you’re a fan of the Mozilla Firefox engine and absolutely despise using iTunes to organize your music, I urge you to check Songbird out.

Songbird has a ton of perks. Look at all this cool stuff you can do!

• Customize. Hate iTunes’s color? Download a theme for Songbird just like you would for Firefox!
• Connect to Last.fm. It’s easy. It’s built into the software. What’s to lose?
• Automatically find out about concerts based on the artists in your library!
• Automatically download lyrics for your songs! (They’re even stored in the actually ID3 data!)
• Recover play counts. After your iTunes library tanks you lose all your play counts. That will never happen again with Songbird.

It’s sleek. It’s fun. It will introduce you to a new way of listening to music.

However… it’s still a little buggy. Use it at your own risk!

Digg is a social media site where popular web pages, flash games, images, YouTube videos, and news is shared online. Digg works because users submit online material they think is interesting or funny. If others agree with them, it rises in importance in the area it is pertaining to.

Several Digg users are “power users”. A Digg power user generally has a large fan-base and submits a lot of sites. I did some internet searches on helpful tips in order to get your submissions get more support and this is what I found.

• Use a catchy profile avatar and username. This will help you stand out a lot!
• Develop a network. Don’t be stingy on adding Digg friends; the more you have, the greater chance you have of getting a digg.
• Gather resources. Find several new related websites and get your new material from there.
• Specialize. Pick one area of expertise (Games, Sports, Technology) and focus on that first. You can still submit material from other areas, though.
• Be unique! Pick material that you might not regularly see on Digg. What’s the harm?’
• Pick regular topics. Realize that in order to get diggs, you need to submit popular material. Keep up to date!
• Add comments. Comment on other posts; it will spread your name around.

Hopefully these tips will help the budding power user reach his full potential. Using Digg is very intuitive and should be a blast if you’re doing it correctly.

If you like to code HTML websites, you should read this blog post!

The World Wide Web Consortium was created to provide a ruleset for writing HTML. This is important in order to ensure that web content will be largely synonymous across web browsers.

HTML is a certain type of markup language. It has a few different levels of strictness. Being more strict with the way you write your HTML can lead to better-written and supported code.

W3C has written an HTML validator that lets you know if your code fits to the standard you have chosen. This is great because it double checks your code for you and tells you if you are making silly errors.

Here’s the link: Validator