The Ultimate Mind Blower

I sit here writing (or rather dictating to my still quite annoying Dragon software) with a mixture of excitement and relief, and oddly, a bit of sadness. My digital communications course has come to an end, now I am just trying to eek out a few more blog posts to solidly get a B on the assignment. I walked out of class on Monday telling my professor that my last blog posts were going to blow his mind, then left thinking... "oh crap, I was only joking, what am I going to write about to wrap this thing up?"

So I decided to give you a list of a lot of cool things (online tools, websites, apps) that I learned from my classmates during our weekly knowledge share. I wanted to review many of these for blog posts, but didn't quite get to it. I can't vouch for whether these are worthwhile, because I've not tried them myself, but my classmates are pretty knowledgeable and trustworthy. There is a little something here for everyone, enjoy!

For the do-gooder:

If you still like to print paper, but feel guilty about it, GreenPrint allows you to print only the parts you want from any kind of document.

FirstGiving allows you to select a particular charity and fundraise on behalf of someone, without having to be linked to a particular event.

For the social media buff:

Tired of logging and different sites and see what your friends are up to? Meebo.com allows you to sign into all of your accounts at once and have the streams appear in one dashboard view.

For those Twitter lovers, Twiangulate compiles Twitter lists and lets the user triangulate the data which helps them to find and revise the list of people that they follow.

For the creative types:

Issuu is a digital platform for individuals, businesses, and publishers to create content with traditional print design features (i.e. turns pages like a magazine) but with greater interactivity.

Customink allows users to create their own designs on all sorts of merchandise: t-shirts, mugs, hats etc.

For the effective project manager:

LessProjects is a free application for managing collaborative projects.

Remember the Milk, is a free, Web-based to-do list manager (with a poor name) that allows for offline use so you don't always need to be connected to the Internet.

For the data nerds:

Many Eyes is a cool online data visualization tool that allows users to create interactive visualizations of their data (sounds kind of like Wordle, but more extensive).

Lynda.com is an extensive library of tutorials for software such as Flashbuilder, Excel, Photoshop, Dreamweaver, Avid Media Composer, Encore, Illustrator, etc.

Striking a Balance

When talking to my computer science-studying, game-loving buddy, Jeremy Pope, I wanted to pick his brain on what websites, apps, and tools that he can’t live without. I got a few cool new ideas from him, but what also came through loud and clear in our conversation is how important it is to set boundaries.

I liked Jeremy’s perspective “The point of technology is to enable us to spend more time doing the things we love. When it goes beyond that it becomes a distraction.”

Being that Jeremy works and studies computers and technology, he has made a conscious effort to set boundaries and pull back, for instance when away from work, he purposely only checks his email a few times per day. He also makes the most of his time on a computer, aiming to be productive for a finite amount of time versus getting lost in the vortex.

On mobile: I asked Jeremy to sell me on a smart phone, and he kind of did (although I don’t have any immediate plans of going out and buying one I definitely see the value). Simply stated, with the iPhone he doesn’t worry about anything because anything he needs to do, he can do on the spot. Jeremy gave me many convincing examples of the iPhone’s utility, especially when traveling, but also spoke about the need to develop self-restraint. (For a review of cool iPhone apps, check out the app trail). Jeremy’s response to my complaint of how people are constantly glued to their phones is that it is just a symptom of the relative newness and novelty of the device and will hopefully fade over time.

On what he can’t live without: Definitely not the iPhone! Jeremy also loves his Google Toolbar for accessing his bookmarks (I wish I tried this before my Delicious.com experiment, it may be more up my alley). He touted the benefits of using Mint.com for money management (I will investigate Mint in a future blog post since I could definitely use help in the budgeting department). He also gave me a little demo of Google Voice (Google’s free voicemail service which miraculously allows you to make free domestic calls, unifies multiple phone lines to one common number, and sends you sms text versions of voicemails among many other benefits) which seems pretty awesome.

On social networks and geo-location social networking: Jeremy relies on Facebook for news and events updates from his friends, which is consistent with how all of my friends engage with Facebook. LinkedIn is the go-to for professionally networking. Most people, including myself, like to keep their professional and personal online worlds separate.

Jeremy toyed around with the geo-location networking application, Foursquare, more so when he was single and out on the town. He enjoyed the fact that it is super real-time, fun, and game-like; “a great example of technology helping you do what you want to do, be with your friends.” Since I don’t have a smart phone I am off the hook for trying geo-location networking apps, phew.

Although Jeremy has briefly tweeted, he now just uses Twitter for finding out about local events through following groups such as “Brooklyn Weekend events”. I may give that a try at some point, but for now I don’t have any trouble finding weekend fun, mainly through word-of-mouth, New York Magazine, and e-newsletters like Daily Candy and Going.

What goes around comes around: Jeremy and I agree that there is a bit of a pullback happening now. People want to get back to what’s real and authentic and are attempting to reconnect to local businesses and agriculture, seeking out the local, fresh, and handmade, to counterbalance the global disconnect from the organic in our fast-paced, technology-driven lives (Brooklyn Flea, anyone?).

“In a way I’m a minor part of this pullback from the digital age where I’ve been so engrossed I’m stepping back now” says Jeremy. For me, I am cautiously exploring, stepping forward, one toe in at a time to see what’s worth my while.