Have you ever wanted a handy, always-there weather forecast, ready for viewing at the launch of an app (be that app on your iPhone or your Mac)? Thanks to Weather Underground, and Mac OS X Hints tipster allanBook, you can now easily add an automatically-updating weather forecast to iCal.

Load the Weather Underground site in your browser of choice, enter a city name or zip code in the Search box, then click Go. For instance, if you entered Savannah, Georgia, you’d get this page of weather info. Near the top right of the page you’ll see an “Add to My Favorites” link, along with icons labeled ICAL and RSS.

You can simply click on the ICAL link to add this particular weather forecast to iCal. However, if you do it this way, the calendar won’t automatically update as time goes by. Instead, Control-click on the ICAL icon and select Copy Link (if you’re using Safari; in Firefox, this is labeled Copy Link Location) from the pop-up menu.

Switch to iCal and select Calendar -> Subscribe, then press Command-V to paste the link you just copied and click Subscribe. A new dialog will appear onscreen, as seen at left. Edit the Name field—Savannah, perhaps—and a Description if you wish. Click the Auto-refresh button and set the pop-up menu to Every Week, then click OK. (Feel free to use a shorter interval if you think the forecast will change more often.)

Congratulations, you now have an auto-updating weather forecast for Savannah, Georgia (or whatever location you chose) in iCal. For more info on any day’s forecast, just double-click the entry. In the Info window, you’ll see a URL for the full forecast (for US locations, at least), along with a more-complete description of the selected day’s weather.

Every week, this calendar will update with the next weekly forecast. If you want the weather forecast to appear on your iPhone, you can (as of iPhone OS 3.0) do that, too. You can’t sync subscribed calendars via MobileMe, but you can do so in iTunes. Connect your iPhone, select it in the sidebar, and click on the Info tab. In the Calendars section, click on the newly-created subscription to sync the calendar to your iPhone.

While a one-line-view of the weather in iCal probably won’t completely meet your needs for weather info, it does give a nice “at a glance” view at the upcoming weather.

(via MacWorld)

Escaped a disaster? Tell everyone!: “Whether you’re fleeing tropical storm Fay – which is currently heading for Florida – or you’ve just been airlifted out of the Grand Canyon due to the the recent flooding due to a dam breach, or even ‘none of the above/other’, the American Red Cross has a way for you to let folks know you’re Safe and Sound. You can search for people in the list by family name, pre-disaster phone number, and pre-disaster address. Also, the American Red Cross has a twitter feed. But I don’t think twitter being down counts as a disaster…

(Via MetaFilter.)

Are you a Twitter fan? Twitter is everywhere in the news, it seems. It’s great for keeping in touch with friends, and even addictive, but a lot of people have been using it for more than just idle updates. Twitter’s concept is quite simple, but given the right tools, it can be harnessed into an instrument to help your business, like blogs have become. There are many apps out there, and I encourage you to continually search for the best out there. To get you started, I’ve compiled some tools you can try out.

1. Livetwitting. During the last Worldwide Developer Conference where Steve Jobs delivered his eagerly anticipated keynote to launch the next iPhone, the top tech blogs used Twitter to give almost real-time update to their readers. The speed at which you can broadcast information to a great number of people makes Twitter ideal for live events. Livetwitting extends this capability a little further by giving you the means to format and edit your tweets.

2. Twitter Groups. Ordinarily, your published tweets are sent to all your followers. However, there are times when we want only certain people to read certain updates. For example, random musings only to close friends, while work-related stuff to clients. Twitter Groups makes this possible by allowing you to organize your followers to certain categories, and send targeted tweets to each.

3. Tweet Volume. It’s a great and simple way to measure the popularity of a brand, a person, or a certain product on Twitter. TweetVolume counts the number of times a word or a phrase has appeared in tweets. Right now the data covers everything from the time Twitter started, but the site has plans to include an option for daily, weekly, monthly and yearly counts in the future.

4. Tweet Scan. Going a step further than Tweet Volume, Tweet Scan is a search engine for Twitter. It’s useful to see what people are saying about you or anything else of interest (like your competitors). You can search by keyword, author, and date with results available via email, RSS, and Twhirl.

5. Twitter PollDaddy. Want to know whether people prefer the iPhone over Blackberries? Omelets over pancakes? The possibilities are endless. PollDaddy enables you to easily conduct surveys through Twitter. All you need is a short question and a list of potential answers. This allows you to get a feel for the people’s pulse, and can be an invaluable tool for your business.

6. Twitter Feed. As tweets are really just another way to publish updates, Twitter Feed is a handy way to incorporate Twitter posts to blogs. It gets content from any site that supports RSS feeds and automatically places the link in your twitter account. A lot of people are already doing this manually anyway to get traffic, so Twitter Feed should make things easier.

7. Twit Response. If you have any time-sensitive announcements, TwitResponse will let you write them and publish them later. The means to hold this information until they’re ready is very important in some businesses where timing is everything, especially in dealing with events, holidays, and product launchings.

KDI Media is a new professional web design company located in Savannah, GA.    We offer complete web design, development and marketing support for your business, everything you will need to get your company website up and running efficiently and effectively.   Our goal is to take away the stress and anxiety of creating and maintaining your website and to provide you, our clients, with high-quality, unique websites.

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[KDI Media - www.kdi-media.com ]

KDI Media is a new professional web design, web development, and web marketing company. They offer everything you will need to get your company website up and running efficiently and effectively. There goal is to take out the stress and anxiety of creating and maintaining a website and also to provide for you, our client, a high-quality and unique website.

• Website Design & Development
• Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
• Content Management Solutions
• Website Maintenance
• Blog Design & Development
• Podcast & Internet Video Consulting
• Hosting & Domain Registration
• Website & E-mail Hosting

[KDI Media - www.kdi-media.com ]

Whether you’ve known it as Tybee Island or Savannah Beach, whether you love its history, beautiful beaches, dolphins and turtles, or salt water marshes, whether you come to sit in the sun, swim in the surf, or indulge in some great seafood, it’s TYBEE TIME come October 20th and 21st of 2007.

Tybee Island will celebrate its 120th anniversary with a two-day event starting on October 20.

“Everyone knows about the beach, but what we’re trying to do is highlight the other things Tybee has to offer,” explained Vernon. The celebration will center around Tybee’s history and cultural heritage, with period costumes, music and games from 1887.

“The whole celebration came about from a grant from the Georgia Council for the Arts and the goal of that grant, which was also matched by the City of Tybee Island [was]…to have more cultural-heritage-type events,” Vernon told us. “And the timing worked out perfectly too, being that we liked the sound of, ‘a dozen decades’ of cultural heritage.”

But that’s not all this anniversary has to offer. Food will be a main event next weekend with the Georgia Shrimpers Association providing locally caught shrimp for everyone to enjoy. The Marine Rescue Squadron will be having a Low Country boil and many local restaurants will be featuring special dishes.

View TYBEE ISLAND Postcard Gallery

Having local food in the festival helps support a local industry, something she wants to see more of on Tybee.And there’ll be lots to learn next weekend as well, with plenty of marine and wildlife exhibits on display. “I think a lot of the activities are geared towards families and children, a lot of educational activities, they’ll be a touch tank called the Sea Circus in Memorial Park,” said Vernon. “The DNR has something called an Ark and that’s a whole exhibit about the coast.”

The research vessel from the Georgia Marine Extension Service will also be docked at Lazaretto Creek on Saturday offering free tours of the ship.

And as part of the anniversary, 120 trees given to the island by the Savannah Tree Foundation will be planted on Tybee over the next two weekends. “The Savannah Tree Foundation received a grant, one of 12 in the nation,” said Vernon. “On Saturday in Memorial Park at 4:30, we’re going to have the planting of the memorial trees, a little cluster of live oak trees.”

The remaining trees will be planted on October 27 between 9am and noon. For information about the Tybee Island tree planting, visit, http://www.savannahtreefoundation.com/.

Vernon says the two-day Tybee celebration will have four main hubs:

“Memorial Park being the central location, then around the pier and on the beach, Lazaretto Creek and then the lighthouse is having a free jazz concert, courtesy of the historical society, and that’s the Skylight Jazz Band from the Savannah Arts Academy,” she said.

A shuttle will run between Memorial Park and the other locations throughout the day, and parking will be free island-wide all weekend long.

“This is about music, history, art, local cuisine, things we should really be proud of,” said Vernon.

The 120 years of Tybee celebration kicks off Saturday, October 20 at 9am with a pancake breakfast at St. Michael’s. For more information and a full schedule of events, visit http://www.celebratetybee.org/index.html.

Tybee’s Mayor has taken to the cyber airways in his fight to gain federal funding for replenishing the roughly 2.5 miles of beachfront on the island.

The town has posted a 10-minute video on YouTube.com, the enormously popular video-sharing site, starring Mayor Jason Buelterman.

"I’ve been surprised at the amount of response, particularly from the media," Buelterman said.

This YouTube lobbying effort was recently featured in the Washington, D.C. publication, The Hill, who’s readership consists of primarily political insiders.

Buelterman said he was inspired to try this approach by 1st District Republican Congressman Jack Kingston’s use of the Internet to get his message out.

Buelterman said that the YouTube spot was primarily an educational tool. "Unlike states with more extensive coastlines, there’s a learning curve about this issue," he said.

Currently, Tybee must request funding from the federal and state government for beach re-nourishment. The video features the top five reasons to fund this project.

To view the video, go to http://youtube.com/watch?v=5MTydJVT5mM.

Bosses everywhere are going to love The Weather Channel. With maps being the number one draw for weather.com visitors, they have teamed up with Microsoft’s Virtual Earth to offer users the ability to see real time weather reports for streets in the U.S.

The Interactive Weather Map can be viewed in either a "road view", or a much cooler satellite view, with different color blobs from greens to grays denoting the weather conditions. Want to see the directional path of the weather condition in your area? Check out the animation feature in the lower right corner, this plays a cycle of animated satellite imagery data, perfect for scrubbing through time while you watch storms and weather systems progress [ via DownloadSquad ]