Refer A Friend, Earn Cash!

We have an announcement and we hope you are as excited as we are...

Tell your friend. Tell your family. Tell your friend's family. Tell everyone about TrueThinker and watch the cash roll in! You will receive $2.25 for every friend of yours that signs up to TrueThinker for a year. Your friends save too! Every person you refer will get a 10% discount on the yearly subscription price when they sign up as a new customer on the TrueThinker website.

We've made this so simple through several cool features we have installed.

• Personal invitation emails - all you have to do is enter an email address and we do the rest! We provide the what, where, and how, all you have to do is provide the who!
• Personal referral number - how do we know who you are referring? Simple, all you have to do is login in to TrueThinker, find the invitation module on your daily dashboard and accept the terms of the program. You are then assigned a personal referral number that gets attached to any emails you send out. No worries on your end!
• Personal invitation web page - Want to refer people manually to the page? This option gives you more control. When you agree to the program, you are also assigned a personal invitation page. Simply give the URL to people and if they enter the TrueThinker site through your page, your referral number is attached to it. Easy peasy!

Get started today and start stuffing your pockets with cash!

How Much Time Do You Waste?

In the spirit of posting tips, we thought we would ask the question, "How much time do you waste?" Hours of searching to find the one obscure link...then you bookmark it and it gets sucked into the black hole of lists of sites you have been bookmarking since the dawn of the internet. There has to be a better way...seriously. So, with so many people trying to locate information and with the vast amount of it out there, how do you work efficiently and quickly? Here are our tips:

1) Favorites, Favorites, Favorites! It’s old school people, but it still works. We all know the “Add to Favorites” exists in IE but, after years of adding to Favorites you get a laundry list of links that make it hard to find what you saved. What is an alternative to just using Favorites? Use a bookmark organization tool. This allows you to organize into categories and typically will save a cached version of it for you as well. Try a new spin on an old favorite (pun intended), http://www.truethinker.com/, a web-based version that goes with you anywhere.

2) Use your peers. Do you have hours to spend wading through thousands of search results? Didn’t think so. Chances are someone has already wanted to find the same thing that you have. Use peer collections of data from sites like http://del.icio.us./ and http://www.digg.com/.

3) Find new technology that works for you. Artificial intelligence is emerging onto the internet through various applications that help work in the background for you. Many applications are also going web-based, allowing you to go anywhere with them. Use alternate browsers. IE isn’t the only answer (we know, preaching to the choir) and other browsers work much better for other purposes. Explore them and use them accordingly.

Happy searching and happy storing.

School Is Back In Session!

On this Labor Day, typically the eve of a new school year, we thought what better way to start off a year than with some helpful hints? Whether you are in high school, college or a student or professor, you will need to conduct research. Finding something on the internet can sometimes feel like finding a needle in the proverbial haystack. Here are a few tips to get you started toward conducting faster and more accurate research queries:

1. Before you select a search tool, always think about your topic and what you are trying to find. Once you begin your research, be sure to try out a handful of sites. Don't rely on a single site or type of site. Try search engines, newsgroups, directories and peer sites. Search engines are broad and peer sites are narrow. If you have a very specific subject, try peer sites such as http://www.academicinfo.net/ or http://infomine.ucr.edu. Or invite others to help you out. A site like www.truethinker.com, which has communities, allows subject oriented communities to form and share links, a great way to compile subject related research.
   
   
2. Carefully select your search terms. Broad or general terms will return thousands of possible sites. Try to use terms that are more specific to your topic. To narrow your terms, look at sites that you already have found and that are relevant to your topic. Identify possible search terms from those sites. If you are using Internet Explorer, click the View menu and then click Source. You can see tucked in the code many of the keywords used for searching. This may help you form better search terms. You also can combine terms, using Boolean Operators such as “And”, “Or”, “Not”.
   
   
3. Learn the differences between search engines. Google, Yahoo, Alta Vista and MSN are not all alike! Yahoo uses a method called cataloguing (also called an index) which lists web sites by category. Each category has subcategories that help you locate sites related to your topic. Alta Vista and Google are search engines which use key words and phrases to search the internet. Many allow you to enter questions rather than simply a few search terms. Learn which fits best for you and your research.

Happy Labor Day and happy new school year!

Let Me Count The Ways...

As my friends and colleagues discuss plans for sending their children back to school, I was inspired to write a bit about what has been happening at TrueThinker. For those of us at TrueThinker, it never ceases to amaze us at the ways people think to use it! Every group takes TrueThinker and makes it their own. Most recently (and timely) we have seen an influx of interest from the scholarly realm. Universities are really grasping onto the idea of using TrueThinker as part of the toolset offered to active students. Now, let me tell you that we thought that TrueThinker would be of great use to professors and faculty because many times they are involved in research or collaborative projects. The use of intelligent organization and shared link communities is a perfect match.

What we didn't think of (and what gets us so jazzed about TrueThinker) is that people see its potential in a way that we couldn't possibly percieve! Why? Because TrueThinker operates best in each individuals' own working reality. As a highly adaptable and customized platform, TrueThinker is easily molded into each person's daily internet life, and subsequently, viewed in a very individual light.

So, when a few universities were shown TrueThinker they opened OUR eyes to the fact that it would be a great tool for students (after all they do research and work collaboratively too.) In fact, the Chronicle Of Higher Education recently held a forum with Gartner research to discuss how the internet was affecting university educational processes. I think we have just seen the tip of the iceberg when it comes to tools and ways for students and faculty to use the internet to their advantage and more importantly, handle the sheer volume of information out there.

The main point here is that while TrueThinker may have been created for one purpose, we are so excited to see its evolution through the eyes of others. We can't wait to hear from students and university staff to learn about the new ways they are using this social internet organization tool. Product evolution, isn't it a fascinating and wonderful thing?

What the heck is TrueThinker?

Our first post is going to be a bit different than the rest, but in order to "get" what we are about, it's important to understand what we are. So, what the heck is TrueThinker? TrueThinker was designed to meet the needs of today's social media user. With so much information out there on the internet, how do you keep track? How do you find it again once you've saved it? With so many choices how do you quickly find what you need? Enter TrueThinker.

There is nothing to compare it to because nothing has ever worked quite like this! So here is our attempt to relate it to things you are familiar with, our recipe, if you will...

1 part Digg - users have the opportunity to compile subject related links in their own communities.

1 part Simpy - users can choose to keep links private or public and share them with the TrueThinker community.

1 part del.icio.us - users can keep their bookmarks and take them anywhere they go (it's web-based.)

1 part artificial intelligence - this is the really fun part! TrueThinker learns from you as you use it. It sees how you like to organize and work and begins to autocategorize information for you. This isn't scary "Big Brother" artificial intelligence. TrueThinker acts as your thinking buddy while you are working away, allowing you to focus on finding the right information, not worrying about how and where to store it.

Mix all parts, bake in an internet browser and you get TrueThinker! As a web-based internet organization tool, TrueThinker takes unorganized bookmarks, guides you through an initial organization process, and then begins to learn how you work. Once TrueThinker is "trained" you can organize new bookmarks with ONE click!

Hopefully you can see how different and how cool this tool can be! Everyone uses it a little differently, so check it out and see how it can work best for you. Take it for a test drive for free and see if you are a TrueThinker.