February 28th, 2007
This technique uses a gadget called The Quote to display one- or two-sentence ads to yourself throughout the day. The Quote is a great tool for displaying advertising concepts that are more verbal than visual. Like the Photos gadget, it lets us use the power of repetition - one of the tools advertisers use on us all the time - to magnify the effect of our messages.
The content for the gadget is contained in a text file that contains a list of statements, separated by blank lines. The Quote gadget randomly selects one of them at a time and displays it in a box on your Google Sidebar.
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February 22nd, 2007
This is the article the whole gadget series has been building up to. As I said before, The Google Photos gadget is my favorite method for delivering ads to myself. It’s designed to display a slide show of images on your desktop, from whatever source you choose, and rotate them as frequently as you want.
Whatever else you’re working on, those pictures are rotating on the edge of your screen - and your awareness - all day. I think this is analagous to a lot of the advertising we receive in our environment. We’re not directly watching many of the ads, but some part of our consciousness takes them in. The slideshow method also takes advantage of another strategy advertisers use on us: repetition.
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February 19th, 2007
In the last article in this series I showed you how to install Google Desktop so we could get the very cool Google Sidebar, which is the container for the even cooler Google Gadgets. This article describes how to configure the Sidebar, how to use Gadgets, and how to customize your Sidebar by getting more Gadgets.
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February 16th, 2007
Collages are a very low-tech/high return method of advertising to ourselves. I think one reason they are so effective is that the time you devote to cutting and pasting your collage is a moving meditation on your goal. Collages also employ the basic principles that many of our methods are based on:
* Find images of what your life will look like when the goal you want has been achieved.
* Place those images in a place where you will see them a lot - like on your computer or refrigerator.
We can display pictures collections to ourselves in many other ways - for example a screensaver or widget slideshow. However we choose to display them, innowen’s article reminds us that it’s very powerful to create a collection of images around a specific theme - especially when they show us concrete details about the future we want to achieve. As she says, showing ourselves these pictures can make the difference between staying on the sofa or getting up to achieve our dreams.
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February 12th, 2007
Google’s widget engine is buried inside a larger application called Google Desktop. Google Desktop is an application whose primary purpose is to index every document, photo and email message on your computer, and make that material searchable for you. Regardless of whether you think making all of your documents searchable is a good idea, I recommend that you consider installing Google Desktop just to get the Google widget engine. It’s that good.
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February 5th, 2007
Desktop widgets and gadgets are really useful for personal advertising because they can display your ads in your peripheral vision while you are working. One of best methods I’ve discovered for advertising to myself is to set up a widget with a little slideshow of rotating pictures and position it in the corner of my screen. I also have another one with rotating bits of text.
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