It’s time once again for the first of our twice-monthly feature, MUO Team Spotlight, the posts that let you know what our staff have been getting up to when they are not writing for us.

As well as providing our writers with another form of online promotion, this feature also gives you the reader a wider range of posts to read.

This month, we will be profiling blog posts from Justin, Ann, Evan, Jack and Beth.

1. e-Waste: The Global Catastrophe We Hope to Avert

by Justin Pot @ Boulder Community Computers

When not writing for MakeUseOf, Justin helps out at Boulder Community Computers, a not-for-profit that repairs old computers and sells them to people who otherwise couldn’t afford them. Of all the excess of modern civilization, waste computers are perhaps amongst the most harmful.

Read more about what makes e-waste such a problem and how Boulder Community Computers hopes to help out offsetting it. If you feel this is a good idea, feel free to emulate it in your own community!

2. Build Lists Of Your Competitors

by Ann Smarty @ Who I Compete

This tool lets you find domains that got ranked for a number of related search queries. Type up to ten search terms, the tool then goes through Google search results for them and find “overlapping” domains. You can thus tell the strongest sites in your niche.

Besides that, you can see detailed reports for each of the domains: which URLs were found for each search term you used and what exactly was the Google search position of each.

There’s also a video overview.

3. How To Filter Your Facebook News Feed With The New Version Of Facebook

by Evan Wondrasek @ Techerator

If you have a lot of Facebook friends playing games like Farmville, Mob Wars, etc, it’s easy for your News Feed to become completely overrun by glorified spam.

In this guide, I’ll show you a few tips to managing these unwanted messages so you’ll finally be able to see what’s really interesting – what your friends are up to.

4. How Do You Take Your Lecture Notes?

by Jack Cola @ Jack Cola

If you are a university student, or have recently graduated, I am currently conducting a short 5 minute survey on how people take notes during lectures. The aim of the survey is to determine whether using a laptop will benefit a student in terms of grades compared to using pen and paper when taking notes in lectures.

I would very much appreciate your time and effort in participating in the survey.

5. The College English Wiki

by Beth Ritter-Guth @ College English Wiki

Free teaching and learning resources for High School and College level courses in American and British literature, Women’s literature, composition, technical writing, journalism, and communication studies.

Image Credit : Visualogist

Tagged: muo spotlight