Category Archives: great use of technology

13 Good Alternatives to Email

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Filed under Productivity, great use of technology

If I were to take a pole I think we’d all agree, Email is the bane to our existence. How much time do we spend dealing with email that is sucking the life out of your productivity. I know I have other things I’d rather be doing than wading through spam, vendor notifications and the like. It’s time we, on an individual and organizational level take a hard look at our communication modes and break away from the leach known as email.

Here’s a list of 13 alternative communication methods for consideration as a way to ween ourselves from email as our main electronic communication method.

  1. Wikis – While the best known one is wikipedia, wikis are popping-up on intranets and on the net daily. To get your head spinning, check out wikia.com.
  2. Blogs – Sites published in blog format are growing exponentially as they provide current, relevant information on focused topics. One can start a blog for free using Tumblr, Blogspot, WordPress, Xanga or a whole plethora of other free offerings. Blogging with interactive comments such as transpires on thoughtsparks.net provides a dynamic discourse over the topics of interest.
  3. Micro-bloggingPownce, Twitter, Jaiku are all great examples of mini or micro-blogging. Like blogging, there is the ability to discuss topics in an open forum with quick posts on topics of interest. Micro-blogging has the potential to be an email killer in many respects. There are a good number of new relationships I’ve made online that transpire largely between blog comments and micro-blogging.
  4. Instant MessengerWindows Live Messenger, Yahoo, GTalk are some of the major services available for instant communication. IM has proven to be a powerful communication method that is inexpensive and effective for quick exchanges that would have drug-out through email.
  5. RSS – Really Simple Syndication (RSS) is so powerful because it is just that, really simple. With sites such as Bloglines or Google Reader one can feed blogs, news and classifieds such as Craigslist. Companies are now feeding information back to their employees instead of notifying via email.
  6. Voice CommunicationSkype is the best known service available. With business communication more global than ever it’s easy to see why.
  7. Forums – Everything from general forums like offtopic.com to industry or interest specific like kirupa.com for Flash development, forums provide an excellent resource for a library of answers to problems.
  8. Social Communities – Social communities have been on the fringe of the business sector, but with the mass movement towards Facebook as a social network and LinkedIn as a professional network, the social community concept within major corporations or associations will not be far behind.
  9. Bookmarking – Social bookmarking allows for sharing found resources in an efficient means without unnecessary back-and-forth between users. Services like Digg, Del.icio.us, StumbleUpon, Google Share Stuff are becoming part of industry research.
  10. Online Presentations – Two valuable resource for educational and corporate instruction are Slide Share and Google Presentations (which is part of the Google document suite.)
  11. Collaboration – Online collaboration is huge as it provides a means to park files and threaded discussions in one location for project development. Two free solutions are Google Documents and BaseCamp.
  12. Send Large Files – Bring an end to loading down the inbox with huge files. DropSend and  YouSendIt are two solutions that provide a limited service for free with more robust levels for nominal fees.
  13. Photos – Photo sites are an option for posting photos with tighter share controls. While commonly known as a public forum, Flickr and Picasa enable sharing controls.

No one method mentioned above is appropriate for all forms of information exchange. Rather, this list presents a short list of options for segmenting the type of information exchange that is more robust and efficient than email transfer.

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Google Now Offers 1GB of Photo Space

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Filed under Easy to use, Free Software, Google Analytics, Reviews, Web and Tech Helps, great use of technology

ust when you aren’t looking, Google ups the anti again for free web services. They just announced that picasa web now gives users 1GB of space. This is some pretty beefy storage space if you, like me, want to off-load your photos from your overloaded HD at home. Very cool and very flexible. I’ve been using the online version of Picasa web today to upload photos for work and it’s a pretty slick app. Unlike flickr that only allows a limited number to be upload in one shot, Google allows for true bulk upload which is very convenient. Select, click, upload and go get a cup of coffee while the bits are transferred upstream.

Why Google Apps is so Cool

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Filed under Easy to use, Free Software, Google Apps, Reviews, Web and Tech Helps, great use of technology

In one evening I "developed" an intranet system for my household complete with email, calendar, file sharing, chat, customized views of information, widgets and RSS feeds. If you’ve used gmail before, it’s basically the same concept only they are extending it to allow shared info under your own domain. I also have pointed the domain thoughtsparks.net to this blog which gives me an instant homepage for the domain. Yeah, with work and side pro-bono stuff it may be a while before I actually build-out the cool new site for thoughtsparks.net but for now I’m rolling. It’s a no-cost deal but if you want more than 2 GB space and a few other bells and whistles you’ll have to pay $50 a year. Still not bad for all the capabilities in one centralized deal that is quick to configure.

Still, this is a very new feature for Google, so they have some kinks to work out namely:

  1. The configuration for the "intranet" home page is a little clunky. It’s not as smooth as the customizable tweaks in Blogger. I was able to tweak the header a bit to reduce the screen space but what a bummer for folks who don’t want to mess w/ HTML tags.
  2. The website hosting capability they do offer does not yet integrate with Blogger which is kind of a drag. Sure I could use their clunky WYSIWYG tool and probably find a way to integrate an RSS feed but if I’m going to do much development on a new site, I think I’ll use something like WordPress on my hosted account with 1and1.com. (Which by the way I really do like as a host service). You can upload your own HTML files but who wants to mess w/ a static site, major retro move.

Okay, so it’s not perfect, but for small organizations, churches, clubs, groups etc. it provides a lot of functionality for the right price. It would certainly be possible for an organization to host all of their online needs on Google Apps, but you’d have to do some monkeying around w/ feed your blogger feeds back into the site. My recommendation at this point is to host a site with database capability and manage the rest of your services through Google Apps. That is until Google offers integrates Blogger well and/or ads db functionality, which they will do in time, just watch ‘em.