Pointers

Links to interesting destinations

Saturday, July 05, 2008

Tagged! How I keep track of most of it

Mitch Joel has tagged me (and several others) after responding to a query from Kevin Behringer, author of the Fly-Over Marketing blog. Here’s Kevin’s question:

How do you manage it all?!?

You read a lot of books, blogs, etc. How do you record it all or track it to actually use it? One of the things I’m struggling with right now.”

The easy answer is that I don’t manage it all. Undoubtedly, stuff falls through the cracks. I’m not aware that I’m letting them fall untilI try to recall them later and can’t find them archived anywhere. As a result, I either spend too much time tracking them down or just give up.

That’s the exception, though, and not the rule. Here’s what I do to keep track of, if not all, most:

FeedDemon

Mitch offers his unqualified support for the Google Reader. Despite regular pressure to adopt it, I remain a committed FeedDemon user for RSS feeds. I haven’t found anything Google Reader does that FeedDemon doesn’t; then there are the benefits specific to FeedDemon, mainly the synchronization feature. I have a copies of NewsGator’s software on my desktop and my laptop. I maintain a NewsGator Online account. And I have a copy of NewsGator Go! on my Sprint Mogul. Whenever I do anything to my account on any one of these platforms, it automatically updates the others. I’m also able to select items to include in my link blog and can store others in a bin that will remain available, exclusively for my eyes, for as long as I want to be able to refer to them.

Evernote

I’m becoming more and more hooked on Evernote, which is like having a memory that doesn’t fail. Anything I want to remember—a web page (or a snippet from the page), an email, an image, a note I create myself, you name it—goes into Evernote which I can access from a web interface or an even more useful app on my computer. Want to make sure you don’t forget anything? Evernote’s the answer.

del.icio.us

The big drawback to any feed reader, whether it’s the Google Reader, FeedDemon, or some other utility, is that you can only manage items in the feeds to which you subscribe. What do you do with links you find elsewhere? For me, del.icio.us is the answer, primarily because of its tagging foundation.

Jott

While the tools above are great when you’re on your computer, what do you do when you want to remember something and you’re nowhere near a computer? I call the note into my Jott account, which is programmed into my cell phone. I hear something on the car radio or read it in a book while sitting at an airport terminal, I just call Jott and dictate what I want to remember. It shows up as an email reminder right away, so I can then save it to del.icio.us.

The Bat

For a variety of reasons, I gave up on Outlook some time ago. The Bat is a simple, fast, clean email client that still gives me the ability to create folders and subfolders to manage the flood. Three key folders for me are REPLY NOW, RETAIN, and READING. Their functions are exactly what the labels suggest.

I Want Sandy

The Bat, as great an email client as it is, has a lousy calendar/scheduler. But that’s okay, since I use I Want Sandy anyway. Sandy gives me my day’s agenda and reminds me as appointments are coming up. Sandy also stores my to-do’s, all of which can be accomplished by sending Sandy an email or CCing her on an email to somebody else. I can even forward my Jott reminders to Sandy and they show up in the right list. Couldn’t be easier.

Cell phone notes

Finally, I keep about a dozen notes on my Sprint Mogul, items to which I may need to refer from anywhere. For example, I have all the login information to the two servers I manage, and the sequence of actions for addressing a database meltdown on my primary server.

Passing the tag along

Since Mitch tagged me, I feel obliged to tag others. So, how do you keep track of it all…

• Pete Blackshaw
• Neville Hobson
• Dan York
• Katie Paine
• Mike Manuel

Friday, August 03, 2007

Pointers: 08/03/07

I’ve noted in a number of posts that the reason businesses should jump into Second Life is that the web at large is going to evolve into a 3D world. I’ve also noted that several business publications have made the same prediction. The current issue of BusinessWeek features a two-page spread on the subject. From BusinessWeek.

Second Life has had the 3D social world pretty much to itself, but that could change as Multiverse launches. Based on the way Multiverse works, it could become (or serve as the model for) the platform that trasforms the web into a 3D environment.

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People who don’t like or understand Wikipedia always start with the same complaint: “Anybody can post or change an article. How reliable can it be?” Researchers at UC Santa Cruz may have come up with an answer. They’re developoing a program that analyzes the realiability of a Wikipedia contributor and uses color codes to alert readers. The reliability of an author whose entries don’t get edited at all is higher than the entries of those who get edited a lot. From BoingBoing.

Plaxo is launching a social network meant to go head-to-head with Facebook. (Doesn’t anybody talk about MySpace any more?) From News.com.

The Annenberg School of Communications’ Online Journalism Review has an article detailing steps for conducting your own web usability test. The story is here.

I’ve caught the local news channel reporting on a study claiming that fumes produced by laser printers can be worse than smoking cigarettes. HP—which bore the brunt of the study’s focus—responded, and the response is analyzed by the guys at ZDNet. This is also an example of transparency—the public scrutiny of a company’s response to criticism. Read the analysis.

A lot of us who blog have stumbled upon our own posts on blogs that are riddled with Google ads. In my case, this is a direct violation of my Creative Commons license. There are people trying to do something about these content scrapers. From the New York Times.

Wednesday, April 12, 2006

Pointers (4-12-06)

P Q Media has released a study that suggests ad spending for RSS feeds, blogs, and podcasts will reach about $50 million this year. While that’s a fraction of a drop of the total spent on advertising, it does represent a nearly 150% increase over spending on these media last year. Most of the ad dollars are going to blogs, according to the study.

If Hollywood can do it, anybody can. Here’s an item Blogspottingabout a movie production that was managed using a JotSpot wiki. Incidentally, Neville and I (and our agent) are using JotSpot to write our podcasting book.

Headline of the week. Maybe the month. Maybe the year.

Robin Good, over at Master New Media, has a terrific list of innovative uses of RSS

Working with NewsGator, Newsweek has launched a proprietary, branded RSS news reader. The My Newsweek RSS News & Information reader.

This is cool. FilmLoop has a free utility that lets you add scrolling photo loops to your blogs and web pages. Hat tip to Guy Kawasaki, who has a great example on his blog.

Tuesday, February 28, 2006

Pointers (2-28-06)

So your IT department is resisting blogs and wikis on the intranet? Maybe they’ll warm up to the idea if they derive some genuine value from these tools themselves. Nothing like enlightened self-interest to helpl clear a path. Linux Journal has a piece spelling out all the ways IT departments can benefit from blogs and wikis.

Speaking of wikis, Information Week talks about the various uses of wikis as a workplace tool.

PC World‘s Australia edition explains why companies without blogs are missing out on important customer insights.

Thursday, February 02, 2006

Pointers (2-2-06)

A graphic designer has taken a stab at redesigning the spartan Google homepage. He explains his redesign in detail, and the result has its merits.

A column in the Online Journalism Review offers up six ways to improve Wikipedia.

Here’s breaking news: If somebody in your company puts something on a web page, it can be found by a search engine. Dell Computers was shocked by the revelation.

Some remarkably stupid ideas are coming out of the newspaper business, which is already on the ropes. Despite the fact that search engines drive traffic to their sites they would otherwise never get, they want the search engines to pay them. However much they’re paying for whatever it is they’re smoking, it’s worth it.

Jakob Nielsen’s research supports the notion that investing in intranet improvements results in reduced costs and higher employee productivity.

Monday, January 23, 2006

Pointers (01-23-06)

Wired magazine ponders whether Howard Stern might not have been better off switching to a podcast instead of satellite radio. After all, he said it wasn’t about the money, but rather the freedom to speak his mind. Of course, half a billion dollars is a pretty good incentive for going the second-best route.

What does the pharmaceutical industry need to do in order to rehabilitate its image, which could wind up ranking somewhere below tobacco companies? BusinessWeek explores the PR issues facing the pharma biz in the post-Vioxx and Celebrex era.

The Poughkeepsie Journal offers two articles on IBM—one dealing with employee blogs and the other with employee podcasts.

The Salt Lake Tribune offers up an intriguing piece about the use of blogs and podcasts to provide coverage of festivals. The item focuses on the Sundance Film Festival.

Richard Edelman focuses on the latest case of a PR agency paying for placement and calls for “CEOs of PR firms (tl) sign onto a code of proper behavior, that forbids payments to reporters, that mandates transparency on arrangements with third party experts and that bars a media company from having a licensed PR firm in the family.” Good idea, of course, but these scandals just keep happening.

Wednesday, January 11, 2006

Pointers (1-11-06)

Another podcasting transcription service has sprung up, this one called Casting Words. The service uses a network of human transcribers (no voice-to-text software) and promises a quick turnaround at 42-cents (US) per minute. The idea behind podcast transcription is to get podcast content into the realm of content you can search via Google and other search engines. As Podzinger and other search engines that allow you to search audio directly improve, they’re likely to be integrated into the general search engines rendering the need for transcriptions obsolete. For now, though, it’s not a bad idea.

First there as the Million Dollar Homepage, where any advertiser could buy pixels and fill them with graphics that linked to their sites. A similar idea just launched with Pixels That Rock, which takes the Million Dollar Homepage concept and applies is solely to indie musicians. Today, TechCrunch reports that a new site has launched called 1000 Tags. Rather than fill pixels, the concept site will sell you one of its, well, 1,000 tags. The site is described as the first “commercial tag cloud.” TechCrunch says, “You can purchase a tag, pay by the character and font size, and hope that a lot of traffic to your site is the result.” You have to wonder how many of these concept sites can succeed before the novelty wears off and you realize you’re just looking at advertisements.

Another great mashup using Google Maps has launched with PackageMapper.com. Enter the tracking code, select from FedEx, UPS, or the US Postal Service, and see the route of your package on a Google Map.

RSS has found its way into your living room. The eStarling WiFi picture frame will take an RSS feed from Flickr and display photos from the photo-sharing service. That’s very cool. From Engadget.