My Set Up Part 4: Calander

Everybody needs a calander right? Right.

I use google calender.

My Setup Part 3: Bookmarks

To make a bookmark is to simply make a note of any site you find useful/interesting/entertaining and want to find later. The function of making and saving bookmarks is standard for browsers. I had two problems however with the built in bookmarking feature. One was that I wanted access to my bookmarks wherever I happened to be (so a browser installed on my pc wouldn't work) and two, I was generating way too many bookmarks (in the hundreds) and had trouble finding what I was looking for.

The way that I solved these problems was to begin using http://del.icio.us/ Del.icio.us at its most basic level is a website that allows you to save your bookmarks online. I use it because I can access (and make) bookmarks anywhere. Beyond that, del.icio.us give you space to summarize and title the bookmarks however you want (while a bookmark in ie would be the title of the website, I can use whatever title strikes my fancy like 'paper to read'). Del.icio.us then gives you space to write a explanation of the site in as many words as you want. Del.icio.us allows the user (you or me) to better organize and retrieve bookmarks through making these subscriptions fully searchable and also taggable. (Tags are small words or phrases used to describe the content of something.) Some of the tags I use commonly range from 'reference' 'aggregator' 'to-do' and 'cool.' But I have definitely abused the cool tag, though that is more of a personal problem then a flaw of del.icio.us. ;p These are all the personal advantages of using del.icio.us

Del.icio.us is made better by the fact that -in addition to the personal advantages mentioned above- it also has social advantages. Del.icio.us has an dedicated search function, which searches the content the thousands of other users are marking, describing and tagging. Google and yahoo are still my search preferences, but Del.icio.us is pretty dang useful too (note: del.icio.us is owned by yahoo). Del.icio.us also has tools to help you find people who have similar tastes (and going and finding more sites through this) subscribing to other people's bookmarks. For instance, I like sci-fi and I find that mark40xv6 is good at finding and tagging sci fi resources. I can subscribe (ie be alerted to) all mark's new book marks or just his sci-fi tagged book marks. Del.icio.us tells you how common your bookmarks are, and can use your bookmarks to find other users like you.

If you and I wished to share bookmarks -and we were both del.icio.us users- we could tag things 'share' for stuff we wanted each other to see like for: john michael.

I use del.icio.us primarily for the personal/solitary advantages. It's nice to be able to access my bookmarks everywhere, and I for one would be overwhelmed trying to record all the sites of interest without the ability to organize my bookmarks through tags and search through them. The downside is, like most of the web apps, you are making more information about yourself readily available. Bad guys of any shade and stripe could learn a lot about a person just by going through their bookmarks... where one lives, what ones interests are ect. This is potentially averted by making ones bookmarks private.

When everything is said and done, Del.icio.us has become essential for me. It is a service I use everyday. If you want to start using del.icio.us I would reccomend getting the extension for firefox or ie.

My Set Up Part 2: RSS

RSS feeds help me get through a lot more content online in much less time. If you are unclear about the whole rss concept, to summarize websites (blogs mostly) can choose to have their content formatted into a machine readable rss or feed format (almost every blog, podcast, video cast ect do nowadays). How much content is made available this way can range from entire articles to just headlines with links leading to their site.

There are many utilities (the new ie 7 has one built in I think) that are rss readers. What this means to you is that when content (blog posts) are posted online it will automatically get pulled for you as soon as it is available. Here are some of the feeds I subscribe to

http://feeds.gawker.com/lifehacker/full Lifehacker is dedicated to trying to get you to get more utility out of your computer and life. If you try entering that url into your browser it may or may not be readable because the information is cut up and formatted to make sense to a machine.

What is useful about RSS is that you can delve through a lot more content, updated automatically, and decide if you want to go deeper. For instance, you would still have to go to the site to leave comments ect but Rss feeds can cure your of the 'I gotta see if a site has updated' itch and help you get through your favorite websites in a hurry.

However, by giving you so much content from one central location it can get... overwhelming. As with the rest of the internet, it is important to know when to say 'no' and not feel bad for not reading everything you are interested in. There is no way you can.

Interestingly enough, we're now seeing what will undoubtadly be dubbed 'rss 2.0.' Yahoo Pipes is a great example of this. Pipes on its most basic level is just a RSSI use reader from yahoo, but now what you can do is pair rss feeds with searches/other rss feeds/or other filters/parameters. For instance, there is one 'pipe' (they are user generated like more and more of the web) takes the feed for newyork times headlines and grabs photos related to the stories. Another takes a list of top music (say, apple itune's top sellers) and pulls the music videos off of youtube. Not terribly impresive, but more complicated pipes could be insanely useful tools for gathering and formatting information off the cuff.

I use Google Reader as my RSS reader. It is fast, easy to use with some more advanced options once you get more comfortable. Also, because it is online I can access my feeds from anywhere, regardless of webfilters (like the ones at school) because nobody blocks google.