How Instapaper Will Make You a Better Student

Who knew that reading on the Web could be so clean? Photo by flickr user cote and licensed under CC BY 2.0.

Yikes. I really missed the boat on this one. There's this awesomely (and awesomely simple) Web app out there named Instapaper. You've probably known about it for the last few years. It must be my old age or something, but I just got on the Instapaper bandwagon. Maybe it has something to do with my recent acquisition of an iPad (I caved!).

Instapaper is a central bookmarking repository for things you would like to read. Don't have time to read that awesome article a friend just posted on Twitter? Instapaper it. You can read any bookmarked page at a later date on your iPhone, Kindle, iPad or just on Instapaper's site. It also will translate articles into essentially plain text, so you don't have to be encumbered by sites ill-formatted for mobile devices.

Let me go through how I'm using Instapaper for myself and how it could change your life.

Learn how after the jump!

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What the New Facebook Means for Students

I can't think of a single student here at Trinity who doesn't have Facebook; hardly surprising considering the site is closing in on 500,000,000 (!!) users.  Facebook has been a go-to time-waster for most of us since high school, but if today's F8 Conference is any indication, it's about to become so much more.

In what I can only assume is an opt-in feature, you can have Facebook follow you everywhere on the net with a toolbar that will rest on the bottom of your browser at all times, keeping you logged into Facebook chat and updated on your profile activity and very-important Farmville crap.  Sites will also be able to (and they will) add "Like" buttons to their content, effectively meaning that your entire web experience will be linked to Facebook.

This is all well and good, but I think what might ultimately have the greatest effect on students is the new Docs.com feature.  Anybody will be able to connect to Microsoft's Docs.com with their Facebook account to upload documents and collaborate with friends.  While this isn't really any different than Google Docs, it's much more likely to be embraced by the less tech-savvy members of your group projects.  Not everybody has a Google account or is comfortable with Docs. EVERYONE in college is on Facebook and has at least a cursory understanding of Word.

Any way you slice it, college students' favorite site is about to change the internet, so get ready for a dozen annoying "1,000,000 strong against the new Facebook" group invites.

Kelly at 140conf

Earlier today, I was on a panel at 140conf in New York City. There were plenty of amazing people talking at the conference including MC Hammer, Ivanka Trump, Michael Ian Black and more. My panel was titled "Growing Up with the Real-Time Internet" and was received well by the crowd. I mention HackCollege a few times. Take a watch and let us know what you think in the comments!

Watch the video!

Is Your Organization Doing it Right? Tell Us!

Think about the clubs and groups you're passionate about on campus. Which one is owning it? Is your blog ousting the campus newspaper? Is your small business idea helping students party more? Is your sorority raising money for a good cause in a unique way? Is your club sports team inventing new strategies in dodgeball? 

HackCollege is looking for one such stellar, innovative organization and we're awarding it with a free year-long subscription to RingCentral (worth $300).

Communication is key at any growing club. The winning group will get access to a comprehensive digital phone service to keep your club, staff or leadership in perfect sync. This package gives you a fancy 800 number and several extensions that forward on to all of your members/officers. The winning org will also be put in the running to win a grad prize that includes a new logo design, business cards and a bunch of web hosting. 

As long as you're innovating, we're interested. You could be saving time with a clever leadership stucture. You could be making a splash in social media. You could be doing an unconventional fundraiser to earn cash. Think about the ideals of "hacking" college and if your club is doing it, we want to hear about it! If it's good enough, we might even feature you on HackCollege! 

Email your submissions to our tip line. Just a simple summary of your idea and a link or two will suffice! You have until Wednesday, April 21st at 9pm Eastern -- so don't hesitate! 

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Library of Congress Cataloging Public Tweets

Your tweets, we haz them. Image via Flickr user okbends. Licensed Under CC v2.0. Wow, I don't know what to think about this. Last week the Library of Congress tweet (of all things) that it would be cataloging all public tweets from March 2006. LOLWUT. The Chronicle of Higher Educations Wired Blog. It's mad cool, because we have an written history of millions of people and their day to day interactions. Here's the article:

Twitter Makes It Into the Historical Record

Could tweets be counted on as a viable resource for a paper? Who knows, regardless I'm a bit worried people in the future thinking we worship Justin Bieber as our savior. 

Are you happy your tweets (possibly drunken) will be a part of history?

This Week's Best Questions on Discuss Campus - Week of April 18, 2010

Which is cooler, Tessa or the laptop skin?

Woah, has it really been another week? We handed out our first laptop skin to Tessa St. Marie this week for reaching 1,000 reputation points! Awesometown. Here are this week's questions.

Keeping up with your to-do list

I never have problems keeping up with my assignments, but I frequently find that the mini-goals I set for myself fall by the wayside. For example, I long ago put in my to-do list that I should update all of my passwords in order to make them more secure, but it has long since been buried under tons of entries in my to-do list.

What are some strategies for keeping up with these "non-essential" to-dos? What can I do to catch up?

How do you obtain and listen to music?

It seems like we're living more and more in a post-radio society, and I'm wondering how other people find music they like and play it. MP3s from friends, internet radio, podcasts, online streaming, buying physical CDs, downloading mixtapes, watching Glee over and over again on Hulu, finding the most listened songs on Hypem-- there's a lot of options out there.

What's the combination that works for you? Who are the tastemakers in your community? Does your city/school have an accessible music scene, and if it does, how do you get into it?

What are the alternatives to P2P sharing on campus?

If I am not a super-heavy user of pirating software, but I don't really want to pay for everything I listen to to/watch/play (on occasion), what are my alternatives that will not be strictly against the bandwidth traffic code [above] of my school?

Think you've got an answer? Head over to Discuss Campus and share your answers!

Start Packing Early to Prepare for May

You don't want to deal with all of this during the last days of finals. Photo courtesy of Flickr user Vieux Bandit licensed under CC BY 2.0We're quickly approaching the end of school, and if you're still living in the dorms then it's time to start thinking about packing. It's still early, but last year I got a head start on the generally horrendous process of moving out and was much better off for the effort. Here are some things you should be doing RIGHT NOW to make the final days of school a bit less miserable.

Get a go-box

Last year in early April I went out to a storage unit and bought a fairly large cardboard box. I set it up and found a place for it in the corner of the room, and it was one of the best decisions I made all of freshman year. Over the next few weeks, you want to put anything in this box that you don't anticipate using the rest of the year. DVD's, unused school supplies, novels, and winter clothes are all good candidates. It doesn't have to be neatly packed or particularly organized, it's just a wide net to absorb some of the packing blow before mid-May panic time.

Set up a storage unit early

If you're storing things in town over the summer, go ahead and get a storage unit as early as you can. Many have great student deals starting as early as April. If you don't have many near campus, their offices are usually packed once May gets here, so start early. It's nice to be able to move things over gradually over the course of a few weeks than making an entire day of it during finals. This requires you get into the mindset that moving out doesn't have to be a one or two day marathon; it can be a gradual winding down of the semester. Last year I was essentially down to the bare essentials by the last week of school, and most of my creature comforts were packed safely away.

Have a yard sale

You probably came to college with tons of stuff you never used. DO NOT store these things; they'll just waste your space next year too. Put out a few Facebook notifications that you're selling a few things, and see if you get any bites. If you have a few bigger-ticket items you could also try out Ebay or Craigslist to get a few bucks in return for less clutter. If you feel a little bit less self-serving, or just don't want to deal with the hassle, drop some stuff off at Goodwill. Our good founder Kelly Sutton brought this concept to its logical extreme with cultofless.com; check it out for some inspiration.

Have any other early packing rituals?  Any moving-out horror stories? Let us know in the comments.

Make Your Mobile Business Card Cool with HCOMNBC

Last Friday I was sitting through an uneventful symposium at LMU and decided to create a Web app out of my online business card. I had set up a Web page so that a user could click on links and those links would dial up the correct application. After showing it to a few people, it was obvious that more people wanted one than just me. So what did I do? I built it out into an app.

The name of the app is called Hey, Check Out My New Business Card! or HCOMNBC for short. With it, you can create your very own little nifty business card to hand out to your friends. I find it much easier to use than Bump. It's pretty nifty to be able to hand out a URL that's more functional than both a native app and a physical business card. Don't worry, vCard functionality is coming soon. The name comes from an old Revision3 video that Lesinski and I did with a few other awesome folks in San Francisco. Chris improv'd the line and I've been laughing ever since.

You can see a John Smith demo, if you'd like.

If you've got any feedback, shoot me an email!