Three More Essential Apps For Air Personalities

This is part two of an article I wrote for Country Tune Weekly. Part one is located here.

Three More Essential Apps For Air Personalities

by Buzz Jackson, buzz@buzzjackson.com

Recently I shared three apps that I find indispendible in my daily prep routine. If you missed it, that article is here: http://www.buzzjackson.com/apps. Here are three more essential tools - two are mobile and desktop apps, and the third is a Google tool.

4) Dropbox. Imagine having important information like documents, airchecks, and images available on all your devices. That’s the idea behind Dropbox, a free service that creates a synchronized folder on all your devices.

A file copied into the Dropbox folder on one computer is available on all your devices - including iPhone, Blackberry or Android, and Mac or Windows computers. The free version gives you up to 2 gigabytes of storage.

What can you do with Dropbox?

• host a website in the “public” folder
• collaborate with others by sharing documents
• take information (such as images, documents, restaurant menus, etc) with you
• store music beds, listener and artist audio, prep ideas that you can access in the studio as well as at your home

Don’t have Dropbox? Click here: http://db.tt/p8PIaXpI (disclaimer:  by clicking and signing up for Dropbox, you and I will both get an extra 250 megabytes of storage as a referral bonus). Here are some other cool uses for Dropbox: http://blog.dropbox.com/?p=811.

5) Pocket (formerly Read It Later). http://www.getpocket.com. As I read the web each day, I often run across things I want to followup on later for show prep reasons. Pocket lets me save articles for later. Then when I'm doing show prep, all the interesting things I've run across are all in one place. Pocket works on your mobile phone, your desktop, your tablet and synchronizes across all those devices.

6) Google Alerts (http://www.google.com/alerts) are a cool way to stay on top of the competition. Nowadays everything is on the web, and if it’s on the web, Google probably knows about it. I set up Google Alerts for my competitor’s call letters, my call letters, my name, other stations in the market, etc. When Google runs across any of these search terms, it alerts me. So if the top-40 station across the street posts a page on their website about a new contest, I know about it - maybe even before they’ve talked about it on the air. And if someone posts something unpleasant about me or my station on a blog somewhere, I know about that almost as soon as it happens, too. 

If you've got some essential apps, let me know - drop me a note at buzz@buzzjackson.com.