There was once a time when booking a holiday meant going to your high street holiday agent, seeing what trips they had on their books and choosing the one that best suited your needs. However, the rise of the digital age has turned this on its head, with you now able to use technology to find a holiday without compromise. You can find everything you want rather than being limited to a number of choices. Meanwhile, with the internet in particular, you can now easily compare products, search for inspiration, and travel in a way like never before.

There are a huge number of ways to plan your holiday, and the internet is a great place to find inspiration. You can look at holiday blogs to get personal insight into some of the best and most recently travelled to destinations. Alternatively, choose one of your hobbies that you want to indulge in, whether its sun bathing or mountaineering, and build your dream holiday around it. And with a range of holiday websites such as Opodo and Expedia, you can easily build up the holiday of a lifetime whether you just want flights, or the whole deal including accommodation and care hire.

As with many things, the internet has provided the chance to easily compare vehicle rental to get the best deal. One of the best ways to take out such an opportunity is to ensure that vehicles can be easily picked up. If for example you’re travelling to Portugal and looking for car hire, Faro airport has a great range of booths where you can get instant access to transport. Here too technology has made life a lot easier, with software on both your phone and computer allowing you to have easy access to paperwork such as licences and rental receipts. Evernote is one such piece of software, allowing you to clip webpages, snap photos, take screen grabs and much more. You can then save all the data on your computer or phone, allowing you to have digital copies of all necessary paperwork whilst you travel.

Smartphone GPS driven devices have also revolutionised the way in which you can search for attractions, whether it’s the local Mexican restaurant, or a museum that’s been recommended by a friend. AroundMe, for example, can show you where the nearest taxi terminal or cash point is, whilst leading holiday websites offer the ability to instantly look up reviews and recommendations of attractions and entertainment wherever you may be. Even city magazines such as TimeOut now have their own smartphone applications, enabling you to search for the latest must see event in town even if you’ve never been to a location before.

Holiday planning has changed dramatically with the rise of technology, allowing you to compare prices easily and save a fortune. Meanwhile, much more planning can be done on the move, with internet access as easy as a click on your phone. And whilst a certain amount of pre-planning should always be done to ensure you get the best experience, with travel apps and location devices, doing something spontaneous can be extremely rewarding too.

The site makes its money through a few paid invitation designs and from printing if you prefer them to print them professionally and send them to you. Otherwise, there are plenty of free designs to choose from to make invite cards, thank you notes, favor tags, and more.

The system is very easy to use. Once you log in, you’re presented with a list of thumbnails to choose from to get started. Each is a design that can be used to create any of the card types available.

When you first look at each of them, you’re presented with a larger version of the design so you can look it over as well as what printing and card options are available for it. Invitations, for instance, can be printed at two or four per page.

Once you’ve made your choice for the design, you then fill in the information: introductory text for the event, the name of the event or honoree (or both), event details (time/date), location, etc. Filling it out is easy to understand as the design is shown in the background with the text you’re entering on top of it.

You can then choose the colors, fonts, and so forth and use the WYSIWYG to see what it looks like. You can then save it as a PDF file for download (or immediate viewing) and print or you can select to have InvitationLand print it for you, for a fee.

There are invitations for just about every category imaginable. Weddings, holidays, anniversaries, baby showers, and more.

This is a great site and for those occasions when seriously professional cards aren’t really warranted or when the event is small enough that you’re much better off doing it yourself (or have no notice to get a printer), this is perfect. Incidentally, it works really well for other types of labels too.

I created a group of favor tags to be used as labels for our kitchen herb garden. Just an empty line to fill in the plant type (sage, thyme, etc.) and tape it to the container.

There are lots of great uses for InvitationLand and only your imagination limits what you can do with the site. One of the more fun sites I’ve looked at recently, for sure.

There is a definitely niche of enterprises that fall through the crack between those small enough to use a simple, Web-based solution with fewer tools but lots of collaboration and those large enough to set up their own services to host MS Project. It’s the goal of Liquid Planner to fill in that gap.

At first glance, the service seems to fill that need and do it well. While not as robust in features as Project, it’s not quite as over-simplified as a lot of its other online competition. Liquid Planner offers faster integration and a much lower time-to-proficiency time frame than Project, but includes many of the features of the MS app that are considered “must haves” to those who use it.

The immediate views are really well done, with organization in a Gantt chart with quickly-recognizable color coding to give at-a-glance overviews. There’s enough power for real depth to show as well, though.

Switching to a prioritized task list with one click, you can then look at the most crucial or pending tasks and how they’re progressing as well. Drag-and-drop capability allows for easy reorganization and fast changes to keep up with your project’s flow.

Priorities can be set globally for either teams or entire organizations, so you can quickly ad resources to a new priority or a task that’s falling behind without a lot of cut-and-paste rewrites. Multi-leveling of projects and tasks allows you to go as deep as you’d like with them as well, so if you want to get down to a task micro-management level, that’s infinitely possible.

Tasks can be converted to whole new projects and visa-versa so something that becomes larger than it is (or spins off) can be handled quickly.

In today’s world of outsourcing, far-flung offices, work-at-home contributors, freelancers, and more, this tool is one of the better larger-project apps out there. While it’s likely over-robust for most freelancers or small shops, larger outfits will find it extremely useful. At $25/month (prepaid yearly) or $35/month (monthly), Liquid Planner is definitely not overpriced.

All of us have at least one person we’re following who keeps sending self-absorbed, boring Tweets. You know the type. The ones who tell us every move they’re making, who talk about their lives as if we’re intimately familiar with them. Those people who can compress ten tons of banality into 140 characters.

That’s what TweetingtooHard.com is about: those annoying, self-centered Twitter users.

Yep, they’re out there and it appears that they’re everywhere. Twitter is uniquely situated for these people. Ashton Kutcher proved that, for sure.

The term “followers,” used to refer to those who receive your Tweets, is probably the core of the issue. Power Twits use Twitter not as a communications tool or a way to stay connected with a wide range of people, but as a way to lord themselves in some kind of egotistic King of the Mountain game.

Well, now we can fight back through Tweeting Too Hard. Pretty simple concept, but very effective (potentially). How?

Think of it as Hot or Not for Twitter. Basically, Twitter users can submit tweets they think qualify as egotistical and self-absorbed. These get put onto the site and can be voted upon, either by repeat submissions from other Twitter users or by clicking the up-down arrows to vote.

The most often submissions of self-absorbed content will rise to the “top,” where they’ll receive the coveted (ha!) “I Am Very Important!” badge. To get your Twitter followers to vote for your submissions, you can send out a tweet using the “Share this morsel of twisdom” button.

Hopefully, Tweeting Too Hard will get popular enough to start curbing the self-absorbed Twits who keep sending their lame tweets to all of us. Worth a try, anyway.

Avatar Photo (avatar.pho.to) is a free online service from Pho.to that allows you to take any graphic and turn it into a cool avatar. Of course, since they’re avatars, they focus on facials (headshots). The app has some nifty features, but the coolest is its great AI that uses facial matrix intelligence to pinpoint facial features in a photo.

To experiment with Avatar Photo, I needed a head shot to fiddle with. I decided to use one of my favorite people, so I image.Google’d a good bust of Bruce Lee. This is the photo I started with.

When you select to upload a photo onto Avatar Photo, it accepts the pic and then immediately takes you to a screen where you can crop, modify colors, and do some basic filtering on it to make it right. I tried a few of the options, but settled with just a simple cropping in order that this original could serve as the base line for the other (more fun) filters to be had on Avatar Photo.

Once you’re done with the general editing, you are taken to the next page. This is where the fun filters are that show off both the power of the facial recognition in Avatar Photo, but also create some great effects. Most are animated gifs once completed.

The samples use Britney Spears as the model. These include emotional filters that ad smirks, winks, cross-eyed movements, and so forth to your avatar. This is where the facial mapping comes into play. The next set are collages like kaleidescope, water effects, and so forth. The bizarre list of filters includes Matrix filtering, flashing, Terminator and skeleton imaging, and waterfalls. The last group, the animated masks, creates things like snowfalls, bubbles, and various eyeball-enhancements.

Below are the samples I did from each of the four categories of filter options. As you can see, there’s a lot of cool stuff you can do with Avatar Photo.

At the very least, Avatar Photo is fun to play with and makes for some cool, fun, and often hilarious effects. Plus, it’s free!

Quub

It officially launched on April 28 and has now sort of matured a little after a slightly rocky start—which was expected, really. Even though it’s still in beta, it’s extremely strong and well-thought-out, I think.

Basically, Quub aims to make life easier for the over-socialed, over-networked people of today. Some of us don’t just have accounts on multiple networking sites like VOIS and Facebook, but we have multiple accounts on those sites as well. Personal, business, and even family accounts are not uncommon now as we juggle everything on our PCs and smart phones.

Quub links with Facebook, Hi5, LinkdIn, MySpace, Plaxo, Plurk, Tumblr, and Twitter. More than just an across-the-board status updater, though, Quub has a few extras that put it over-the-top compared to some of its competition.

First, it’s extremely easy to use and generally holds your hand through the entire process. This without being condescending or too dumbed-down for power users. Better than that, though, it’s intelligent.

Quub uses a small AI that recalls what you’ve written before and makes guesses as you enter what you’re doing now. So if you put in a lot of “Going ot the gym,” and “Just got off work” updates, it will repeat those for you easily. This not only makes it faster to send updates, but it gives it a more tailored feel to the prefab info we tend to use.

Another bonus is that you’re not locked in to update every network you have linked to it. Every time you send an update, you have the option of de-selecting sites from the list, so if you just want to Tweet and Facebook Status your update and forget the others, you can do so.

One downer to Quub right now is that it doesn’t work on most mobile platforms and doesn’t have a browser plug-in or desktop app yet either. Those are coming down the pike, though. Right now, Quub can be used through your browser on the Web and on Android and Blackberry handhelds.

Finally, let’s wrap up with another of Quub’s great features: contact and message grouping. You can group contacts from each network into groups and time-line message threads and group them as well. The dashboard for this is very easy and looks similar to others in that game.

Another thing you won’t find on Quub are URL shorteners (like TinyURL) or photo uploading. No word on whether those are coming soon or not. I’d like to see them, myself.

Overall, since it’s still in beta, I’d say that Quub is a great app so far and definitely has a huge amount of potential. It runs quickly, syncs nicely, and is very easy to use.

ContactHelp.com is a corporate contacts information wiki. Unlike others out there, though, it focuses mainly on customer service or helpdesk numbers—the ones that go directly to someone’s desk, not through some automated nightmare.

So far, ContactHelp boasts that their list of direct-contact numbers for customer service and tech support covers more than 500 of the world’s largest companies. And it’s growing daily.

Looking for a direct number to a real, live person at Amazon? They’ve got it. AOL? Yep. UPS? Uh huh. All there.

Michael Goldfarb, the co-creator of ContactHelp, says that the site started out as a database being shared amongst friends and the people using it just sort of grew. Eventually, they made it into a website and ContactHelp was born.

Here’s an example of how the site can work. I tried using it to call America Online—definitely one of the worst places to try to call for tech support on the planet. Trust me, even the Dell Computer support rep that barely speaks English is better than AOL.

The site doesn’t have a direct-to-a-person number, but they have a quick guide for hopping through the automated system to get to one quickly. Close enough.

So, I called on a Wednesday afternoon and here’s what I got without using the guide. It took 18 minutes to weed through the menus, listening to every option before hitting a button. Then another four minutes on hold to get to someone. I tried again with the guide. It took 3 minutes to weed through and another 5 minutes on hold to get a person.

The best part is that even if AOL decides to change their system to thwart ContactHelp users, anyone who learns of this can update the database to reflect the changes. Gotta love the wiki!

This site is definitely a winner in my book.

GRAZEit is a browser plugin that shows you relevant content while you’re surfing. On the flip side of that, it allows you to include your own site content so that other Grazers will notice it during relevant surfing. So if your blog is all about pizza reviews and someone visits Dominoes.com to order pizza, they’ll see a GRAZEit of your review of Dominoes.

There are a lot of potential uses for this service, though I can quickly see it being inundated with get-rich-quick types who’ll stuff it with their irrelevant garbage. Also, to be honest, it can be somewhat annoying while you’re surfing. Almost like if Google’s AdWords were force-fed to your browser while you surfed.

While it’s not really social networking, GRAZEit does allow you to build friends lists so that their Grazes will be featured over others while you surf.

The service and plugin are free to try while in beta. I’m guessing, though, that the “advanced options” they plan to charge for in the future might include AdWords-like payments for preference in results. The group that built the service is being quiet about their future plans.

In any regard, GRAZEit is becoming a popular service, so there may be something to it. I personally found it to be kind of annoying and some of the results to be less than relevant. While reading an article about nano-technology for building lithium-ion battery cells, for instance, I was shown a Graze to a person’s Facebook page. Two mentions of “lithium-ion battery” on their page (talking about their e-skateboard, no less) are what triggered the link. Huh?

Some might find it fun and useful, however, and there are some ways to filter and change results as well as manipulate what is and isn’t linked to your own content. So it might be worth a try if you’re interested in trying something new as a way to enhance your surfing.

In a nutshell, DNtwits is a tweet list for both buying and selling domains. If you have a domain to sell, you can send it as a tweet to “dntwitsSELL.” Likewise, if you’re looking for a domain name or type to buy, tweet “dntwitsBUY.”

The website itself is just two tweet feeds, one for each, along with some links to explanations of how it works. Since it’s so simple, there isn’t much to explain. It’s basically a place where buyers and sellers of domains can find each other easily and quickly. This is probably why it’s catching on so fast.

Even better, if you just want to see what it’s about, you can point your browser to the site and not sign up for or link your Twitter account to anything and just watch. When you see something you’re interested in, respond with a tweet. Otherwise, voyeurism is free!

For the small niche of people in the domain name biz, this is a great service. It’s catching on very quickly and is becoming active, so if you’re not a Twitter freak, you might want to hold off on following it and just browse via the site or a dedicated Twitter account. If you use a filtering service, of course, that might also work.

The best ideas are the simplest and the most successful are the ones that aim at a specific crowd. DNtwits does both.

Welcome to the 21 st Century, era of the Task Management headache.

If you’re also like me, you probably neglect at least one or two of your to-do lists. Maybe you forget to check in, or don’t “mark off” an item or just plain blow it off. I think my Doris list is up to two screens of “to do” items now…

So if this is your problem, and no one else can help, maybe you can hire…the ForceDo Team.

OK, by “hire” I mean participate in the open beta. If I had used a different word, the A-Team reference would have been lost. Give me some artistic license here.

ForceDo is a to-do list with a drill sergeant’s attitude. It sits in the corner of your screen constantly reminding you that there’s stuff you really should be doing. Of course, with a name like ForceDo, it’s going to have a couple of Star Wars references as well. “Use the Force.”

Not only is ForceDo a constant reminder and procrastinator buster, but it’s also extremely intuitive. When entering tasks, it will prompt to break them down into smaller pieces or, in reverse, combine tasks with similar names into one overall task group, organizing your to-do list intelligently.

By doing this, your tasks are not only in pieces you can digest, but they’re organized so that instead of skipping around from one job to another, you can focus on a single overall job and get it finished quicker. I like that.

While not as well-vetted or feature rich as some other to-do tools out there, ForceDo definitely has some promise. If they deliver on even half of the promised improvements, it will be a force to be reckoned with in the competitive to-do site environment.