Thing #14: Online Productivity Tools

FOUR FOR THE PRICE OF ONE

I have to say, I'm really getting tired of multiple Things masquerading under the aegis of a single numeral.

Is 23 Things You Should Know about Web 2.0 really still 43 Things that have just been consolidated so as to appear to be fewer in number?

I'd have found the 23 Things experience a lot more straightforward if each Thing had represented a single Web 2.0 tool and participants had been asked to do just one a week for however many weeks it took.

Artificially compressing the experience has only created stress for me and many of my fellow participants.

23 Things was billed--over-optimistically, in my opinion--as compact and time-efficient.  It simply isn't.

It takes quite a bit of time to absorb even a surface understanding of these brave new tools.  If we're serious about taking all this in in a meaningful way, we should allow ourselves sufficient time to process the experience.  Speed-dating really isn't my thing.

Not much time left till deadline.  I am determined to finish 23 Things.  It was, after all, one of my New Year's resolutions.

I am also very, very tired.

Perhaps this handy countdown widget will spur me on.  I intend to refer to it often, in ever rising panic as the deadline nears.

Created by OnePlusYou

iGOOGLE

I took a look at iGoogle and chose Gainesville, News, Humor, Business, Technology, and Entertainment as my selected interests.

My background theme is called Sweet Dreams (an evening sky with a crescent moon).  My Country / Region are, of course, the U.S., with my zipcode as 32667.

It really didn't take much longer than the 30 seconds claimed, and created a very nice, compartmentalized, personalized start page. 

Features included the weather forecast for Micanopy, Gmail, NYTimes top stories, Google Finance Portfolios, ETonline Breaking News, Date & Time, CNN.com, Joke of the Day, The Wall Street Journal, Movies, YouTube, UF News, Go Comics, CNET News, and TV Guide.

It seems to have lifted all my personal information directly from my Google Account without me having to do anything.

Now every time I log into Google, I should be able to reach my personalized iGoogle startpage just by clicking the iGoogle link in the upper righthand corner of the screen.

Pretty cool.

I decided to add a few gadgets just to spiff things up.  The gadgets I chose were Google Calendar, Hangman (word game), Current Moon Phase, ToDo, Free iTumes Downloads, Google Translate, Dictionary, Spanish Word a Day, Funny Cat Photos, Movies Trailer of the Day. . . .

By this time, I'd gone through 20 pages of gadgets, and there seemed to be no end in sight, so I stopped there.

GOOGLE CALENDAR

After reading the recommended article entitled "The Web's Best Calendars," I chose Google Calendar for its drag-and-drop editing and color-coded layout.

Scrybe looked interesting because of its to-do list and ability to sync changes made offline, but I decided Google Calendar would work well enough for a start.

I filled in some projects and appointments for the next few days.  It was pretty painless.

TA DA LIST

I chose Ta Da List to be my online to-do list.  Signup was quick and easy.

I then created a list of various Cat Tasks: buy more bacon-flavored ferret treats, investigate kitty exercise wheels online, etc.

Not difficult at all.

I thought it was interesting that signup for a Ta Da List account issued me a private webpage rather than a login from a centralized page.

BACKPACK

Backpack bills itself as "An Intranet in 30 Seconds," and includes a lot of interesting features like info-sharing pages, messageboards, and to-do lists.

The feature that intrigued me most, however, was the group calendar.  I'm in charge of my department's shared calendar, comprising daily work schedules, meetings, training sessions, and presentations.

The calendar we use now is a clunky Excel document on a shared server.  It's not very elegant, easy to read, or easy to use.  I'd love to find something better with which to replace it!

Having taken video tours of both how to compose a Backpack page and how to use the Backpack Calendar, I'm not sure the calendar can handle the complexity of my department's schedule--but the basic Backpack page looks intriguing.

I decided to sign up for a free account so that I could check out the features, and that's when I realized Backpack costs between $7 and $100 per month, depending on the number of users, pages, and storage space needed.

Oh, well!  I will have to give it a pass.

CHECKING OUT THE SITES

I scanned the recommended resources, all lists of online productivity tools.  Some of the same tools pop up over and over again.

Remember the Milk (to-do lists), Bloglines (RSS feed manager), My Stickies (sticky notes webpage markup), Del.icio.us (bookmarks), Meebo (IM aggregator), Google Calendar (online scheduling), iGoogle (personalized startpage), and PBwiki are the ones I noted.

That these sites are listed by multiple recommenders likely indicates that they are both well-designed and popular.  Those I don't already use, I'll keep in mind for the future.

Despite my fatigue, I am definitely finding 23 Things an eye-opening experience.  I had no idea all this stuff was available on the web--and much of it for free.