My Quest for the Holy Grail of Organization

I used to have a laptop, but when my husband went back to graduate school he commandeered it. Thus I'm relegated to using my work PC, a loaner tablet PC, sometimes the “family" laptop, and sometimes the "family" PC. For an organization buff like myself I hate feeling so scattered, thus I’m searching for the best solution for a seamless transition between computers that is also FREE. I have found three that work:

• Netvibes is my favorite utility. I can just sign in on any computer and have access to my bookmarks, files I store on Box.net storage, my RSS feeds (with people magazine & NPR Books near the top of the list!), my calendar stored on airset.com, to do lists, and even weather and e-mail. My two runnerup choices are
• "Personalized Google"
• Goowy

There are many others though – Let me know what you think!:

• 24eyes
• eskobo
• Favoor
• Feed Pile
• fyuze
• Inbox
• Live / Windows Live
• MyWebDesktop
• Pageflakes
• Protopage
• Start.com
• My Yahoo

First use of del.icio.us tasted good

After reading an article on Web 2.0 "Yours, Mine, & Ours" one of resources listed were the Links Referenced in a Del.icio.us account. I checked them out and for the first time felt like social bookmarking made sense! I added some new bookmarks for myself, read about some new resources, and felt good that I already had some of the sites in my pantheon!

My web 2.0 services

After fooling around with many web 2.0 blogging and social bookmarking services – for the time being these are the ones I keep returning to:

• wordpress free blogging service – obviously!
• zoomclouds tag cloud
• blogmarks social bookmarking
• del.icio.us social bookmarking
• goowy start page plus more!
• onlywire simultaneous bookmarking tool
• rawsugar online bookmarking
• performancing blog writing tool
• stumbleupon web discovery tool
• 30boxes online calendar
• netvibes customizable start page
• rojo online rss reader plus more
• technorati blog search
• suprglu collection of my web sites
• educause.edu educational technology blog

Ultimately my goal is to access my “content” home, work, where ever.

Personal Start Pages

I sit at the computer at work – then on the weekends or an occasional weeknight at home. Without a laptop though I hate the fact that I can’t access all of the “comforts” my personalized work computer. I want a calendar, my e-mail, my links, my blog and just a sense of continuity. To that end I’ve been looking at desktops – protopage, page flakes, and Goowy. None of the sites have exactly what I want – page flakes is too unstable and takes too long to load even with my fast connection, Goowy looks cool and I like the e-mail interface, but I just am not in love with the rest of it, and Protopage is kind of boring. In a perfect world I’d really have my own personal web page with which I synch my work computer. Sort of an online Palm pilot. Hmm… more research needs to be done. At least I’m becoming familiar with this new Web 2.0 and its products – blogs, browsers, search engines, RSS and search tools. The common denominator may be their Web 2.0 technology, but I think it is really their crazy nomenclature: kiko, Meebo, Gooey, Eskobo, Zoozio, Skobee, Awasu, Squeet, Zoho, Zazzle, Boing Boing, Jookster, Squidoo, and Crazy Egg!!

Technorati Tags: desktops, cyberculture, bookmarks

PodCasting

I went to iTunes and easily downloaded the ITEC conference podcast from 2005, then I went to their website and downloaded the handouts for the speaker to which I wanted to listen. Wow! This is powerful distribution – I wasn’t there, didn’t even know about ITEC at the time – and now practically, in real time, I am listening as if I were there. Reminds me of the Seal line, “How do I get to where I’ve come from?”

Podcasting (from Wikipedia) is the distribution of audio or video files over the internet from the subscription to a feed and then listened to on mobile devices and/or personal computers.

Now I wonder what other podcasts I should be Subscribing to so I can listen whenever and wherever is convenient.

Stumbling Around StumbleUpon

“Extensions are small add-ons that add new functionality to Firefox. They can add anything from a toolbar button to a completely new feature. They allow the application to be customized to fit the personal needs of each user if they need additional features, while keeping Firefox small to download.” I’m playing with many of these extensions and honestly feel overwhelmed – do I really want to change the appearance of Firefox? Do I need a “purple bunny” to help me read and write comments about a web page? Adblock makes sense, but what about managing user scripts with “Greasemonkey?” I don’t even know what a user script is! I’m looking for a “fresh outlook” so I hope StumpleUpon will help me out!  Mostly I want to understand how that little yellow floating planel at the left hand top of any web page with an RSS feed works.  I experimented with a bunch of RSS feeds and I like this the best, but can’t even figure out from where I acquired it.  Yeeks.

Culture Shock Stages

1. Tourist or Honeymoon Phase

At first surfing the web, everything usually goes fairly smoothly. The newcomer is excited about being in a “new place” and experiencing a new lifestyle. The newcomer may have some problems, but usually accepts them as just part of the newness.

2. Emptiness or Rejection Phase

It seems like technology no longer cares about your problems – online resources seem to offer suggestions, but everything is more complex and complicated than it originally seemed.

3. The Conformist Phase

By gaining some understanding of the new “culture” one now has a new feeling of competence and pleasure in using the technology. The crisis is over when one starts understanding the “culture” and starts to have a feeling of direction.

4. Assimilation Phase or Complete Adjustment

One realizes that there are different ways to live and that no way is really better than another, just different. Thus, luddite or not, we are all okay.

Social Bookmarking

Blinklist, Blogmarks, del.icio.us, Feedmelinks, Furl, ma.gnolia, Rawsugar, Simpy – How  do I decide which to use?  Of course I want FREE – I’ll use the bookmarks to toggle between my home and work computers.  I’ll use them to share ideas about common projects that I’m working on such as a website.  I’m also interested in finding more sites that are similar to sites that I enjoy.  The RSS feed and how I can incorporate a social bookmarking site into my blog also interests me.  I’m doing lots of reading on all of this and have signed up with several to check it out, but I still feel in over my head.  I’m still suffering from culture shock!

wizzy-wig

WYSIWYG – “What you see is what you get” – Just learned that acronym even though I’ve been using FrontPage and Dreamweaver for some time.  How funny!  How can I be so computer literate on the one hand and so clueless on the other hand. 

Tag Clouds

Folksonomy:(From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia) refers to the collaborative but unsophisticated way in which information is being categorized on the web. Instead of using a centralized form of classification, users are encouraged to assign freely chosen keywords (called tags) to pieces of information or data, a process known as tagging.

Tag clouds are my new fixation – I’ll try to include mine.

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