All of my data is now in the sky
I don't generally think of myself as an early adopter - normally I'm the guy who waits for DVD players and the like to get down to around $100 at Costco before buying one - but there's one current trend that I've completely embraced over the past couple months: I've been slowly moving all my data into services somewhere out there on the Internet.
This has been accelerated lately by the prospect of switching jobs, which adds a little extra value to the idea that my data isn't tied to my current laptop, but it's way more than that: the reason I'm switching my mail to GMail and putting my photos on Flickr and my professional contacts on LinkedIn and my bookmarks on del.icio.us and my website/blog on Blogger is because these services are measurably better than their PC-bound predecessors. GMail does better searching and better spam filtering than Outlook (you need the clunky and compute-intensive combination of Outlook + random VirusScan + Google Desktop Search to get the equivalent functionality locally on a PC); Flickr has the best photo organizer (Organizr) tool; and del.icio.us allows me to sort my bookmarks across multiple dimensions instead of a single one (folders). There's been a lot of stuff written about the social aspects of tag-based tools like Flickr and del.icio.us and social networking tools like LinkedIn, which may or may not turn out to be significant, but what all these discussions seem to overlook is the simple fact that this software is just plain better at what it does - I would use it even if it were just only for me. As I pointed out in an earlier post, if this is really the beginning of a trend here, it's not real good news for Microsoft...
There's one service that I have yet to sort out, however - and that's how to organize and share the blogs that I read. When I revamped this site a few days ago, I considered adding a blogroll using Bloglines or Blogrolling but decided instead to manually create a short list of my favorite blogs instead (a straight export of my OPML file would include a lot of infrequently updated blogs and some garbage like machine-generated Technorati search feeds). I've tried Kinja and Bloglines and NewsGator Online and a bunch of standalone readers and all I can say is that there remains a lot of room for improvement in all these tools. One puzzling thing about blogs is that, aside from the purposes of keeping up with my friends and colleagues, the most interesting stuff I read on blogs are from blogs of people I've never met, don't know, and maybe aren't all that likely to be blogged/linked by people I know. (Damn near every blog from people I know had a post about Google Maps this morning. Yeah, it's cool. No, I don't need to hear about it 15 times.) So, the social network discovery method of blogs has its limitations. It's time for some clever blog aggregator software to recognize this and deal with it as cleverly as some of these other services have in their respective areas...
This has been accelerated lately by the prospect of switching jobs, which adds a little extra value to the idea that my data isn't tied to my current laptop, but it's way more than that: the reason I'm switching my mail to GMail and putting my photos on Flickr and my professional contacts on LinkedIn and my bookmarks on del.icio.us and my website/blog on Blogger is because these services are measurably better than their PC-bound predecessors. GMail does better searching and better spam filtering than Outlook (you need the clunky and compute-intensive combination of Outlook + random VirusScan + Google Desktop Search to get the equivalent functionality locally on a PC); Flickr has the best photo organizer (Organizr) tool; and del.icio.us allows me to sort my bookmarks across multiple dimensions instead of a single one (folders). There's been a lot of stuff written about the social aspects of tag-based tools like Flickr and del.icio.us and social networking tools like LinkedIn, which may or may not turn out to be significant, but what all these discussions seem to overlook is the simple fact that this software is just plain better at what it does - I would use it even if it were just only for me. As I pointed out in an earlier post, if this is really the beginning of a trend here, it's not real good news for Microsoft...
There's one service that I have yet to sort out, however - and that's how to organize and share the blogs that I read. When I revamped this site a few days ago, I considered adding a blogroll using Bloglines or Blogrolling but decided instead to manually create a short list of my favorite blogs instead (a straight export of my OPML file would include a lot of infrequently updated blogs and some garbage like machine-generated Technorati search feeds). I've tried Kinja and Bloglines and NewsGator Online and a bunch of standalone readers and all I can say is that there remains a lot of room for improvement in all these tools. One puzzling thing about blogs is that, aside from the purposes of keeping up with my friends and colleagues, the most interesting stuff I read on blogs are from blogs of people I've never met, don't know, and maybe aren't all that likely to be blogged/linked by people I know. (Damn near every blog from people I know had a post about Google Maps this morning. Yeah, it's cool. No, I don't need to hear about it 15 times.) So, the social network discovery method of blogs has its limitations. It's time for some clever blog aggregator software to recognize this and deal with it as cleverly as some of these other services have in their respective areas...