Within a minute of visiting the site, I was able to find several potential rides to San Jose and other points south (Luckily I work out of Blnktags converted live/work warehouse in San Francisco). You can easily search for a recurring rideshare partner or just a one-off trip.

Zimride’s business model is innovative too. According to Techcrunch, the servce is capped at fifty people from any one business or school. Once fifty people have signed up, Zimride approaches the business or school directly with their paid options which all more people to use the service. Several universities are already onboard, including Stanford and UCLA. The cost is $9500/year which is a lot less than each school or business developing and maintaining their own in-house ridesharing system. I was pleasantly surprised to find University of Wisconsin La Crosse (the college from my hometown) on the shortlist of featured networks.

Next time I need to get somewhere that BART & Caltrain don’t easily reach, I’m going to try Zimride.

A lot of what we do at blnktag means showing people how to do things, like blog, use some piece of software, or edit a design template.  If you’ve ever tried, you probably know that describing what you’re doing isn’t that easy over the phone or in a text email.  And anyone who’s ever used the print screen key on a PC, copied the image into Microsoft Word, and emailed it to a friend knows it’s not easy to do using a PC either.

Two really great programs, only available for OSX, allow you to grab images from your screen or web cam and immediately post them online.  Skitch was the first one to fill this niche, and it has the added bonus of letting you easily edit or manipulate a screen shot to add emphasis to what you’re saying. 

The other program, GrabUp, doesn’t have the features of Skitch but is amazingly fast and posts files to any URL you can log-on to using ftp.  Strongly recommended.

For those of you who use Adobe Lightroom to manage your pictures (I’m a big fan), I’ve found this solution.  It gives you (almost) all the flexibility you need to process and rename images and, best of all, hasn’t crashed on me yet.

Spellr.us aims to alleviate this issue by scheduling regular scans of a website’s content and reporting any spelling errors and unknown words to site administrators. They claim “It’s like having one of the smart kids do your homework!”. We’ve been using spellr.us on some of our sites for a few months, but now that they have officially launched, anyone can try them out for free.