A new job has me commuting 1 hour to and from work. Rather than blaring tunes on the radio, I spend the time listening to my favorite news and marketing feeds thanks to Jott.

If you haven’t heard, Jott is a service that lets you send emails and text messages with your voice, or send yourself notes. It’s great for productivity, with many free and paid features, and thankfully Jott Feeds is FREE.

In web 2.0 fashion it’s simple to use. Once you’ve created an account, add your feeds to My Jott Feeds. Then call (866) JOTT-123, and a woman, who I’ve named Alaina, asks “What would you like to Jott?” That’s when you say “Jott Feeds” and when prompted the name of the feed you’d like to listen too. And you’re off! Alaina begins reading back your feeds.

A downside to this service is you could find yourself eating up a lot of minutes. However, if you have T-Mobile like myself, just add the Jott Feeds number to My Faves.

One useful option that’s missing is the ability to speak a voice command into your blue tooth headset to skip posts you’re not interested in. Although you can accomplish this by pressing 3 on the handset, I’ve found it cumbersome when driving.

Stay informed on the go. Listen to your feeds thanks to Jott.

Rainy summer weekends are wonderful, these are excellent times to read a book, do some house cleaning or in my case, code a Joomla template into existence. Now I can confidently check that off my list of things to do before I die, including ride a sheep, but that’s a story for another time.

For those of you not in the know, Joomla is an opensource content management system (CMS). It allows you easily publish content to the web without having to know a lick of HTML or delve into nitty gritty code. Joomla is the CMS this website is built on, with Wordpress, ala MojoBlog squashed in for good measure and SEO purposes.

This image no longer links to a demo of Red Pepper.

Plus, in the spirit of open source I’ve released this template free to the community. Download Red Pepper and enjoy. Just be sure not to burn yourself. Please report any buggy code in the comments section.

With the 2007 travel incentive program winding down – trip departure in two weeks – it’s necessary to gather feedback from the 60 accounts going on the cruise to improve on the new year’s program. With Google Forms I can create a form whose fields correspond to the columns in a Google spreadsheet. You can link to a web page of the form, however for my list of cruise guests I’m going to use an I-frame to embed the spreadsheet into an email message sent with Aweber. What’s great about the form feature is the person filling it out does not have to have a Google account, and the information posts directly to the spreadsheet – making administration a snap!

Just brainstorming what information I might want to glean from this short survey:

There’s other creative ways to use this technology. For instance, alot of independent manufacturing reps schedule counter days regularly throughout the summer for my company’s contractor customers. However, contractors are busy, often working during counter days hours. How about I tape the presentation made by a manufacturer rep, edit, upload to a free video player like Brightcove, embed video on the company website along with a Google Form – submit your information to receive specs, more info, etc. I share the online spreadsheet with the vendor rep who follows up on information requests. Seems like a sound way to generate leads.

Do you have any ideas on how to apply this new technology to your business?