For what it's worth, after nearly a decade playing around with different web apps and services, here's how I leverage web tech to organize personal information:
- Web browser links bar -- this is almost a dashboard for me. Right now, I have five folders with 3-7 url's in each, and a few nested folders, plus 10 links right on the links bar. No part of the links bar is a repository; it's a selective list of the most-used services and resources: weather, jango, Google Docs, my commuter train schedule, plus -- in folders -- news titles, writing tools, and some personal favourites.
- Delicious.com and Google Bookmarks -- delicious was launched as a "social bookmarking" site, but Google gets it right by removing the "social" from the same service. I use these as a genuine repository of stuff; like when you're surfing the web and you come across a neat cottage for rent outside of Galway, a nice quote, a book review, etc. I'm torn between the two services; I like housing everything under Google's roof, but I still have a soft spot for delicious. Check out these two tag-centric uses: music; wine-review. It's also a great place to store news stories.
In other words, the links bar is kind of like a kitchen -- you go there each morning to get stuff done. Delicious/gBookmarks is more like the library in your basement.
- Twitter -- Twitter is like the hovercraft or personal computer: it's neat at first, then seems over-hyped and not that practical, but does have great potential. For some, Twitter is literally micro-blogging; it's blogging in a world where there are too many blogs, so you slap everyone's wrist and say "spit it out in 30 words!" For me, it's actually an amazing window into certain celebrities. But, since this is the anti social media (without the hyphen) post, let me say I see another facet to Twitter; it's an alternative to delicious in that you can very very quickly archive and annotate a link to review in the future. E.g., you start reading a deep article and you cannot finish it, so you tweet the piece and reflect on it in like 25 words, and that evening you might go back and finish the article , departing from the point of your reflection. Following this, you can of course blog about it, etc.
- Google Tasks -- you write down things to do and then check them off. Satisfying. Drawback: embedded in Gmail or iGoogle. Not standalone.
- iGoogle -- iGoogle was conceived as a platform for lots of gadgets (quiz's, simple games, quote of the day, etc.), similar to the iPhone's success in this realm today. But it's best use, in my view anyway, is as a kind of RSS reader. I find it a lot cleaner and simpler to browse news with this tool. I have a page for tech media and another for political strategy (etc. etc.), and within these I add a gadget for each media title. iGoogle serves up headlines only, with a single click to read an embedded blurb about the full story, and another click to that full story, offsite. You can choose how many headlines are served up per title, so for some infrequent updaters I ask to see only one or two of their latest stories; for Techcrunch, I read seven at a time. You can tweak this to no end, but I think it's a great and clean way to skim news across many titles -- in a single category per screen -- without getting overloaded.
- Bubbl.us -- one of the better mind-mapping applications. I'm not sure the world needs this; you can also draw on a piece of paper and it works out quite well. But it's nice to go back and see how you plotted out a problem, or associated various issues. For what it's worth, I find it really helpful to organize certain wikipedia-type information this way. I have a mind-map called "serious writers" and another called "business thinkers." But I generally use it in the same way people use white boards. The export and print features are particularly good, even if it doesn't have a great skin overall.
- Webnote -- not quite mind-mapping, but a nice place to store ideas. Not sure if it's being maintained, but my notes are still there.
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