pimg src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/images/peoplebrowsr_icons.jpg"Imagine a href="http://www.tweetdeck.com/beta/"TweetDeck/a as an online application. Now imagine that you could use its paneled dashboard interface to keep tabs on your other online identities, too. With a href="http://peoplebrowsr.com"PeopleBrowsr/a, you can. This new application, currently in alpha, lets you update your networks, follow your friends, organize your favorites, and search for content across networks that include a href="http://twitter.com"Twitter/a, a href="http://flickr.com"flickr/a, a href="http://youtube.com"YouTube/a, a href="http://linkedin.com"LinkedIn/a, a href="http://www.digg.com"Digg/a, a href="http://seesmic.com"Seesmic/a, a href="http://identi.ca"identi.ca/a, a href="http://www.photobucket.com"Photobucket/a, a href="http://upcoming.com"upcoming/a, and a href="http://friendfeed.com"FriendFeed/a./p p align="right"emSponsor/embr /a href='http://d.openx.org/ck.php?n=12781amp;cb=12781' target='_blank'img src='http://d.openx.org/avw.php?zoneid=861amp;cb=12781amp;n=12781' border='0' alt='' align="right" //a/p h2About PeopleBrowser/h2 pKeeping tabs on all the happenings across the social web can be a challenge. For some, a href="http://www.friendfeed.com"FriendFeed/a is the destination of choice as it lets you see streams of information from all your friends as they share, comment, and participate in social media. Others find the application too noisy, as it requires a lot of manual tweaking and filtering to remove unwanted content. /p pA good alternative for those who want to keep up with the social web in a more organized fashion is a href="http://peoplebrowsr.com"PeopleBrowsr/a, a virtual dashboard for tracking your online identities. It's very much inspired by TweetDeck with panels that you scroll through horizontally. It also has a "Groups" feature, but its implementation was somewhat confusing. We'll give it a pass for now, though, as the application is still in alpha. /p a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/sarahintampa/3076841943/" title="peoplebrowsr by sarahintampa, on Flickr"img src="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3225/3076841943_84a7e7c4cd.jpg" width="500" height="405" alt="peoplebrowsr" //ap h2How To Use It/h2 pTo get started with a href="http://peoplebrowsr.com"PeopleBrowsr/a, you simply add your online IDs and authorize the PeopleBrowsr service when necessary, as with a href="http://flickr.com"flickr/a and a href="http://youtube.com"YouTube/a. Once you're finished, you can then switch over to the PeopleBrowsr app itself. /p pThere are actually two different views to choose from: the stream view (which resembles TweetDeck) and the Gallery view which lays out the avatars of your friends across the page. You must select your view of choice upon login. In the Gallery view, you can click on friends' avatars to see their latest updates and then interact with those updates accordingly, depending on what network you are browsing at the time. /p pTo select the network you want to see, there's a navigation bar at the top left side of the page. You can scroll through the various online sites listed, selecting those you want displayed. In the Stream view, this is more practical as it loads up each new network in a separate panel, letting you then scroll horizontally from Twitter, to flickr, to YouTube, etc. /p a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/sarahintampa/3076781771/" title="peoplebrowsr_navigation by sarahintampa, on Flickr"img src="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3139/3076781771_9e7209b2f8_o.png" width="311" height="68" alt="peoplebrowsr_navigation" //a h2Your Streams/h2 pEach network provides different options for the types of views you can add to your paneled view. Clicking on the network from the navigation bar (see above) will add some default views to the window, but you can also choose to add other views from the navigation bar above the streams themselves. For Twitter, the views to choose from may include things like Replies and your Friends Timeline, for Flickr it includes options like Favorites and Friends' photos, and for YouTube, it includes your videos, your favorites, and so on./p pa href="http://peoplebrowsr.com"PeopleBrowsr/a also has "PeopleTags" which let you tag friends in order to create cross-network groups. This feature wasn't entirely intuitive to use because the "My Groups" option appears at the top of the page even when no groups have been created. It seems to respond to a click but does nothing even though you're assuming that it will open up a pane for group creation as in TweetDeck. However, as you click on the individual posted items in your streams, you have the option of tagging them in order to create groups which then makes the "My Groups" link functional. /p p a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/sarahintampa/3076877597/" title="peoplebrowsr_streams_001 by sarahintampa, on Flickr"img src="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3245/3076877597_b081018b5b_o.jpg" width="602" height="261" alt="peoplebrowsr_streams_001" //a p a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/sarahintampa/3076877795/" title="peoplebrowsr_flickr by sarahintampa, on Flickr"img src="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3061/3076877795_2fa67ab53f_o.jpg" width="599" height="258" alt="peoplebrowsr_flickr" //a h2PeopleBrowsr Shows Promise/h2 pFor an alpha app, this is a great first start. There are still some tweaks, like the Groups feature for example, that need to be made. Also, although it was possible to add a FriendFeed ID, FriendFeed did not appear in the top navigation for some reason. Without its inclusion, this would be an incomplete application. The app was also slow at times, once even crashing Firefox entirely. However, it's hard to tell for sure whether that's the app at fault or the pre-beta OS the testing was done on. That said, a href="http://peoplebrowsr.com"PeopleBrowsr/a definitely looks like a promising tool to organize your social streams in ways that make sense to you. /p stronga href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/peoplebrowsr_a_visual_dashboard_for_your_online_identities.php#comments-open"Discuss/a/strong pa href="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~at/GuHyyQbEFNbRr6IDgDNuTPP_ChQ/a"img src="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~at/GuHyyQbEFNbRr6IDgDNuTPP_ChQ/i" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pdiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/readwriteweb?a=WIjLqXpX"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/readwriteweb?d=1035" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/readwriteweb?a=9hTy7560"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/readwriteweb?d=41" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/readwriteweb?a=V9H4NJfA"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/readwriteweb?i=V9H4NJfA" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/readwriteweb?a=Yk7JEhXj"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/readwriteweb?i=Yk7JEhXj" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/readwriteweb?a=cIa14YfO"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/readwriteweb?i=cIa14YfO" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/readwriteweb?a=yHWhG7mY"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/readwriteweb?d=52" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/readwriteweb?a=g9BAOv8T"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/readwriteweb?d=1034" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/readwriteweb/~4/Q6FwW9_BXT8" height="1" width="1"/

Can someone recommend a really good USB mic?

I'm wanting to voice-over some videos I'm putting on YouTube amd my lousy RadioShack highball sounds terrible.

I have about $150 budget and in looking at some mics on ZZounds, there seems to be some good ones, but I've found these guys are kind of expensive when checking their competition.

I'm just an old codger using 3 Macs and I just discovered GarageBand a couple of days ago for tweaking my audio, but the RadioShack mic is a pile of junk and I need something better. Check out my lousy audio on a video I put on YouTube by going to my moniker, "TUUTUTANGO" and look for my Ford van having a new engine put into it. Please don't judge me by this video! I actually have an Emmy Nomination for my work in TV years ago, and these days now that I am an old-codger, I just like poking around with camcorders and not making a fuss about much.

Thanks.
S.B.

img class=face src=http://planet.ubuntu.com/heads/spacey.png alt= pMaking myself comfortable with Thunderbird:/p ul listrongCalendar and Tasksbr / /strongInstall a href=http://www.mozilla.org/projects/calendar/lightning/Lightning/a. In Ubuntu as easy as:br / codeapt-get install lightning-extension/code/li listrongThe addressbookbr / /strongEvolution exports to vcf. Thunderbird import from ldif and csv and such.br / Solution: a href=http://labs.brotherli.ch/vcfconvert/Conversion tool/a (online and downloadable for offline use)./li listrongGPG support. /strongbr / codeapt-get install enigmail/code/li listrongGeneral settings/strongbr / Different from Evolution, for Thunderbird you need to save your signatures in text files. Also different, for e-mail #8220;aliases#8221; you don#8217;t make new accounts but you can add them to a mail account behind the #8220;manage identities#8221; button./li /ul pAfter adding all my IMAP boxes and tweaking some other settings I only use Thunderbird since one hour ago./p pstrongemAlready found my first annoyance: Adding attachments. /em/strongWith Evolution you can simply drag and drop files from nautilus, with thunderbird you have to use a file chooser. Not friendly with multiple files and takes more effort, you have navigate to the right directory and its harder to identify the file(s) in question./p pemstrongShared calendar:/strong/em Next on my list is playing around with a shared calendar (caldav), but I guess that has nothing to do with going from Evolution to Thunderbird. Although I heard that with Evolution it quite sucks, since the clock applet needs access to your keyring all the time. The downside of Desktop integration I guess./p pI also wonder if Thunderbird searches for new messages in subfolders of my IMAP account. I#8217;ll find out soon enough./p