google

Why Google Buzz Should Be Your Blog

Now, you might think that’s a crazy idea, but I think Buzz is about 80% of the way there. Last week, in my Google’s Creepy Profiles post, I made a suggestion (that someone at Google has hopefully already thought of) that it wouldn’t take much to turn a Profile into a full-fledged biography/lifestreaming site. Just add some user-configurable tabs, that can contain HTML or RSS-fed content, and add some capability to customize the style of the profile. Since I wrote that, I’ve been using Buzz quite a bit and I’ve really been appreciating the potential it has to deepen conversations around web-published materials.

Google’s Creepy Profiles

Google unveiled a bold new product last week; one of critical and compelling import to anyone who believes that their online reputation is important. I’m not talking about Google Buzz. I’m talking about Google Profiles. This isn’t a new service — Google introduced the profile pages a few years ago. But the release of Google Buzz has illuminated how important they are in Google’s plans, and how important they can be for us. And if this profile is now a key pin in my personal branding strategy, I demand better tools to manage it than Google has provided.

About that Nexus One

Two weeks ago, I bit an expensive bullet and bought a new Nexus One phone, directly from Google. I’m a T-Mobile customer, and, as long-time readers know, an early adopter of the T-Mobile G1, the first publicly-available Android phone. I went for the unlocked version of the Nexus One (at $529 before taxes) rather than the $279 upgrade. My analysis of what the cost would have been, under the arcane T-Mobile condition that I can’t get a Nexus One and maintain my family plan at that price, was that it would have cost hundreds more over the two year contract term.

Here’s the short review: Fast, fast, fast, fast and shiny!

Things You Might Not Know About…

…or you might. I find that, in a 25 year IT career that has always included a percentage of tech support, human nature is to use the features of an application that we know about, and only go looking for new features when a clearly defined need for one arises. In that scenario, some great functionality might be hiding in plain sight. Here are a few of my favorite “not very well-hidden” secrets.

Word or Wiki?

An award-winning friend of mine at NTEN referred me to this article, by Jeremy Reimer, suggesting that Word, the ubiquitous Microsoft text manipulation application, has gone the way of the dinosaur. The “boil it down” quote:

“Word was designed in a different era, for a very specific purpose. We don’t work that way anymore.”

Google Reader Reaches Out

As the internet has progressed from a shared source of information to a primary communications tool, a natural offshoot of the migration has been where the two things meet: people referring internet information. If you’re active at all on Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, Friendfeed, or any of the numerous online communities, big or small, then you are regularly seeing links to useful articles and blog posts; cute YouTube videos, and entertaining photos. Much of this information is passed along from online friend to online friend, but where does the first referral originate from? Usually, it’s somebody’s RSS reader.

More RSS Tools: Using Google Reader for Research and Sharing

Google Reader gets a good mention in my RSS article, Using RSS Tools to Feed your Information Needs, but deserves an even deeper dive. This is a follow-up to that article, along with my recent posts on Integrating content with websites, and Managing Content with Pipes. We’ve established that an RSS Reader helps you manage internet information far more efficiently than a web browser can; and we’ve talked in the last few posts about publishing feeds to your web site. This post focuses on using tools like Google Reader to share research .

Using RSS Tools to Feed Your Information Needs

This article was originally published at Idealware in March of 2009. The Internet gives you access to a virtual smorgasbord of information. From the consequential to the trivial, the astonishing to the mundane, it’s all within your reach. This means you can keep up with the headlines, policies, trends, and tools that interest your nonprofit, and keep informed about what people are saying about your organization online. But the sheer volume of information can pose challenges, too: namely, how do you separate the useful data from all the rest? One way is to use RSS, which brings the information you want to you.  Many of… Read More »Using RSS Tools to Feed Your Information Needs