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Baby sites for the new baby boom

A recent report claims more babies were born in 2007 than any year in U.S. history. Since then, baby Web sites have become all the more important as a tool for parents who want to document and show the world how their little one is growing up.

I've found four baby sites that provide parents with the option to share photos with friends and family. They also let them track milestones in the baby's life. And they're all worth trying out.

Baby sites

BabySpot

BabySpot is a social network for parents to share some of their favorite pictures of the baby in their life.

Once you get to your baby's page, BabySpot lets you upload pictures and tag them. You can connect with others and share your photos. You can even write blog posts, post events, and upload videos of your favorite moments. Think of BabySpot as a Facebook for babies.

One of my favorite BabySpot features is the ability to add applications to my profile. Though there aren't nearly as many apps as you'll find on Facebook, one app, called BuboMe, lets you customize your baby's photos. You can add holiday themes, bubbles, and more. It's a neat tool that will help you add some flair to your pictures.

BabySpot is well designed, has an active community, and creating a profile that's filled with all your baby's special moments is easy.

Lil Grams

Lil Grams helps you secure your memories and send them off to friends and family, no matter where they are.

Once you get to your personal Lil Grams page, you can start uploading pictures of your kids. If you don't have access to the portal, you can add pictures to your profile via e-mail. Lil Grams even has a desktop app so you can drag-and-drop images into your profile without using your browser.

It's a nice touch, but the real value of Lil Grams shows itself when you start sending those images to family members. You can e-mail them a link to view the photos, you can send them an SMS if it's easier to reach them on their mobile phone, or, if you want to send photos to your parents who don't have a computer, Lil Grams will let you create prints and send them through snail mail. I didn't order any prints, but I did share some photos of my cousin's child through e-mail and SMS and it worked beautifully.

Overall, I was quite impressed with Lil Grams. Though you can share images through services like Flickr and Shutterfly just as easily, Lil Grams uses its focus on babies to attract parents.… Read more

Five tools for the world's best teacher

There are a variety of online tools available to teachers. And though they all focus on something slightly different, they can help make classroom instruction more effective.

Most online tools for teachers provide the option to both create and keep a grade book. Teachers can upload assignments and keep track of their students' attendance. The tools also let teachers share grades with parents. And since the syllabus and assignments are online, students will have access to the class resources no matter where they are. The classroom is truly anywhere the teacher (or student) wants it to be.

The majority of online teaching utilities are designed well. They guide teachers through the process of creating a grade book, uploading content, and making that information available to parents and students. The learning curve isn't steep.

If it's instruction help they're looking for, teachers can join social networks to find best practices or video sites to get class instruction ideas.

Here are five teachers' aids that stand out from the rest.… Read more

How to hide your tracks at work

We all spend some of our time at work doing things that have nothing to do with our job. We surf the Web. We play games. Sure, we all need our downtime, and the enlightened manager knows that. But still, we'd rather just surf in private than deal with the raised eyebrows.

That's why we need ways to ensure that when our boss surprises us or sneaks up behind us, she'll think that we're actually working. Here's a list of apps and services that help.

Camouflaged Web services

SpreadTweet If you're a Twitter fanatic, … Read more

10 Evite alternatives: The good and the bad

I recently used Evite to send invitations for a party at my house. Overall, I was pleased with the experience. The selection of invitation styles was huge. The invitee tracking tool was informative. But the site's user interface made it too complicated to send an invitation. Worse, Evite hasn't really embraced the social networking space--there's no Evite app on Facebook nor Twitter integration. And the closest it comes to going mobile is sending SMS invites and offering a mobile site.

So I set out to find some alternatives to Evite to see if they could provide a better service.

CircleUp Though it's not specifically designed to provide invitations and tracking, CircleUp does let you invite others to an event and track their attendance. The page detailing whether or not invitees will be attending the event is especially good. But CircleUp simply isn't as useful as Evite, nor as convenient.

Crusher I like Crusher. It's simple and clean. Creating invitations can take less than a minute. But if you're the type who wants to tweak an invitation to fit your needs, the site also has a CSS editor. You can add video, chat, photos, and much more. It's great for the Web geek and the Web novice alike. And it's better than Evite.

Enclude Unlike Evite, Enclude lets you send e-cards. But its invitation creation tool doesn't provide as many planning options as Evite's. And if you really care about the design of the invite, you'll find fewer cards on Enclude. I also wasn't impressed with its invitee tracking tool. Simply put, it's no Evite.

Facebook Most of the people who I would invite to a party are my friends on Facebook anyway, so creating an event and sending out an invitation through the social network is quite convenient. Creating an invitation in Facebook takes less than a minute. Everyone can see who will be attending the party. Attendance tallies are updated as soon as the invitee responds. If you don't need to invite too many people outside of your Facebook friends list, Facebook is a fine invitation tool. It's much simpler than Evite.

Invitastic Invitastic is ugly, too simple, and unable to compete on any level with Evite. That said, it might come in handy when you want to quickly send out an invite to a couple friends and you don't want all the extras Evite provides. But even in those circumstances, I'm hard-pressed to find a reason to use Invitastic instead of other simple services, like Zoji.… Read more

Twelve alternatives to Facebook's Music app

Music (formerly known as iLike) is a music listening service that allows you to add tracks to your Facebook profile, share playlists with friends, and play games. It practically owns the space on the popular social network.

But it's not the only music app on Facebook. Quite the contrary, there are a variety of apps that provide the same basic service as Music. Some of those apps do it quite well.

Free Music Player When you search for a song in Free Music Player, it tries to find the track on YouTube. If it's available on the video site, you'll be able to view the music video and sing along.

Imeem It's not the easiest app to use, but if you want to add practically any song you can think of, plus some music videos to your profile, Imeem will help you do it. All the songs can be added for free. And they can be played anywhere you can access your Facebook profile.

Last.fm All of your favorite Last.fm features can be enjoyed on Facebook. Whether you want to listen to songs, create a shared playlist, or check out what your friends are listening to, you can do it with the Last.fm app. (Disclosure: Last.fm is a part of CBS Interactive, which also publishes CNET News.)

MixPod Playlist MixPod Playlist lets you find songs on the MixPod service, add tracks to a playlist, and listen to them as often as you like. You can also share that playlist on other social networks, like MySpace and Bebo.… Read more

Socializr gets into aggregation with 'Event Connect'

Online-invitation service Socializr is hoping to be the FriendFeed for your social life. The site announced on Wednesday that it now aggregates invitations from MySpace, Facebook, Yahoo's Upcoming, Meetup, Google Calendar, and industry leader Evite (owned by InterActiveCorp) in addition to letting members send their own invitations. The new feature is called "Event Connect."

Socializr, which was hatched by Friendster founder Jonathan Abrams, also has implemented Facebook Connect and MySpaceID so that members of those social networks can invite friends to Socializr events. A third new feature of Event Connect lets members tap into their accounts on … Read more

Slightly underexposed

As a media management application for iPhone and iPod Touch, PhotoList's capability to store and sort images by the name and star rating you assign them is a convenient way to quickly find images in a large collection. As with any application that requires you to build a media library from scratch, set-up takes time, enough of it, in fact, that those with large collections in their iPhone camera roll to use PhotoList only for best-of collections. The sorting, rating, and adding photos is intuitive, but we experienced delays after saving a rated and labeled image.

For a $1.… Read more

PhotoList for iPhone lets you rate, label pictures

Touting itself as a media management app for iPhone and iPod Touch, PhotoList ($1.99) lets you create photo albums on the iPhone and then fill them with images you can label and rate. You'll be able to further sort images by their name or their star rating, which can be a convenient way to quickly find images in a large collection.

As with any application that requires you to build a media library from scratch, setup takes time, enough of it, in fact, that those with large collections in their iPhone camera roll might want to only use … Read more

SMS search tool Kwiry to shut down next week

Kwiry, "the remind yourself to do a search about something later" company, is closing up shop next week. According to a company blog post, the service is shutting itself down due to "economic realities."

In the meantime, users are kindly being given the next 10 days to grab all their previous searches, which can be saved as a CSV file and exported into other reminder services.

I hate to see the site go, but it was a concept that was a hard sell to casual users. Aimed at users without smartphones (or data plans), it started … Read more