Web Worker Daily

Better Opportunities Than Ever in USB Thumb Drives

Posted: 02 Dec 2008 04:00 PM PST

Of all the new portable technologies I’ve adopted over the past couple of years, USB thumb drives are near the top of my list of useful, convenient accessories. I carry one in my pocket at all times, and am constantly looking for new applications to put on them. At this point in the continuing evolution of these devices, you can get so much capacity for so little money that you don’t have to feel restricted to collecting only tiny applications on them. In case you haven’t yet adopted a USB thumb drive and put good applications on it, here are some ideas.

Only a few years ago, many people carried USB thumb drives that topped out at 256MB of capacity, and those were pretty expensive. Now, you can get this 8GB SanDisk drive for under $25, and I’ve seen other 8GB drives for under $20.

What if you want more serious capacity, for backing up key files, or loading up lots of applications? Check out this citation, from 2006, of a 64GB USB flash drive going for $5,000. Times have changed dramatically since then. Corsair has a 64GB drive for under $65.

USB flash drives also now come with numerous types of extra attractions. Several of Kingston’s drives now offer SD card reader options. These are very convenient for transferring photos to and from digital cameras and the like. If a diminutive form factor is your thing, consider the Kingmax Super Stick, which, as seen above, is about the size of a stick of Trident gum.

If you do adopt a USB thumb drive, also see this post I did on PortableApps and MacLibre–two easy ways to get tons of open source applications on your drive in one quick download.

Social Media Aggregators: Distraction or Consolidation?

Posted: 02 Dec 2008 12:53 PM PST

Working with social media poses a considerable problem.

In most cases, social networks were not designed specifically with professional applications in mind. Look at MySpace and Facebook, two of the real heavy hitters. Both essentially began as places for friends and family to connect and share. As if it weren’t hard enough to focus on work, if you’re business uses social media, your work tools are designed to distract.

Enter the aggregator. One-stop shopping for all your social networks, or at least those it supports. The hope is that you can eliminate the dreaded window Cycle.

You know the one; you alt-tab, Exposé or click your way through a number of browser windows/tabs and applications, obsessively checking for updates in each. But do aggregators really save you time and attention? Here’s a look at some services, and my experiences with them.

Power.com

Relative newcomer Power.com is still taking its first baby steps, so it’s hard to say for sure how useful this service could eventually become. At the moment, it only supports four services, though they are some of the major players in social networking. Specifically, you can add your Facebook, Orkut, Hi5 and MySpace accounts. Not a perfect storm of social media, to be sure, but a nice enough kick-off lineup.

The Power.com start page is well conceived. Your messages (comments, wall posts, actual messages, etc.) are listed in chronological order in one convenient window. This is a nice feature, since even on individual sites, I don’t like having to root through three or four different screens just to find everything specifically directed at me.

Unfortunately, beyond that, I find there’s little benefit to be had from Power.com. Clicking most links opens the network’s own site, with a Power.com wrapper which is more distracting than helpful. And the presence of obtrusive ads throughout only adds to the visual congestion.

EventBox

This little gem comes by way of The Cosmic Machine. It’s a standalone program, and unfortunately it’s only available for Mac as of this writing, with no publicized plans to make a Windows version.

Eventbox supports Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, Digg, Pownce (not so important anymore, I guess), Reddit and any RSS feed. It doesn’t provide all of the features and functionality of Facebook, but it does do just enough to satisfy your fleeting moments of curiosity, giving you status and photo updates.

I like this application because it does the work of four I was using previously. It also has the benefit of offering just the basics in a clean interface, so you won’t be tempted to go off on unnecessary tangents. With the upcoming HUD interface, it’ll be even more of a wallflower.

Flock

We’ve mentioned this Mozilla-based browser designed for social networking before. Flock provides unparalleled integration for services like Facebook, Twitter, Delicious, flickr, and WordPress. Of the options listed here, this is the only to also support blogging sites, which is a definite plus.

For me, though, Flock offers too much of one and not enough of the other. I find its social networking capabilities too full featured, and liable to distract me from core business activities. Fore web working purposes, I would much rather have the customization options of Firefox add-ons, than the all-encompassing social focus of Flock.

FriendFeed

Now FriendFeed is a tool I can get behind. It’s far more targeted than the other services, in that you define the scope of the information you wish to make available, and information you wish to find. You can use it to make a one stop promotional tool for all or a select portion of your personal and professional endeavors, making it basically a self-updating social media C.V.

On the other side of the coin, you can cut through the static and focus on a single contact, making networking a far more refined affair than digging through your various social networks and trying to assemble the resulting information fragments yourself.

When you get right down to it, social media aggregators should be tools that enable greater control, not distractions that control you. In my opinion, that means being utilitarian in the feature set you offer, and leaving access and update decisions to the user’s discretion.

Do you use social media aggregators in your work? What features would you like to see in future versions/products in this category?

Fine-tune Your RSS Subscriptions

Posted: 02 Dec 2008 08:00 AM PST

According to a survey in 2005, only 12% of internet users know what RSS feeds are. Despite these low numbers, most of the netizens I know seem to be active subscribers.

While RSS feeds give us the latest news, blog posts, and site updates through a single interface, it’s not farfetched to think that they can also be a major time suck. If you notice that this is happening, that you’re spending more time on your feed reader than you want to, then perhaps it’s time to quit your feed reader altogether.

Or you know, you can just fine-tune your subscription list

Do a review. Whether it’s every month or every quarter, you should review your feed subscriptions regularly. Without a review, it’s easy to overlook “dead” blogs and sites that are no longer relevant to you. If you don’t review your subscriptions once in a while, the best time to start is now. Don’t worry, you don’t have to put it in yoru calendar or anything - just do it when you feel like it’s time.

What value does each feed give? When doing your review, it’s important to evaluate what makes each feed valuable. Does it give you a daily dose of how to further your career? Were you given ideas that allowed you to lessen your home expenses? Does it make you laugh?

Also consider how frequent you get something valuable from a subscription. Is every update valuable? Is it valuable at least once a week? Is it valuable every few months? For some subscriptions, you might be saying to yourself “Well, it hasn’t been valuable yet…but it might be later on.”

For cases like these, I refer to an ancient Sumerian saying goes “Get it only when you need it.” Okay, maybe I made that one up, but it’s a rule that applies to kitchenware, packing, and yes, even RSS feeds. If your reason for buying fondue forks is “You’ll never know when we’ll have a fondue party”, then odds are these forks will gather dust for several months until you need to use them - if ever that actually happens.

The same goes for RSS feeds. “You’ll never know when they’ll post something I can use…” is a very flimsy reason for subscribing to something - and I know this from experience. If there’s particular information you need, then that’s the time you go out and look for it, rather than hoarding useless feeds in the hopes that something useful might come up.

Remove blogs that seem to parrot each other. I used to subscribe to over 10 interior design and architecture blogs - until I realized that they just crossed-link to each other and posted the same pictures anyway. Remember that in these cases, the Unsubscribe button is your friend.

For blogs with frequent updates within the day, subscribe to the weekly or monthly feed instead. There are many blogs which post several times each day. Included in that group is one of my all-time favorites, Lifehacker. Listen, I love Lifehacker. I believe it’s an invaluable resource to me. But if I subscribed to their regular feed, which has 8 to 12 new items on most days, that’s a lot of time taken away from my work, especially if I love a post and feel the need to file it somewhere.

The good news is that they offer a variety of feed options. They offer a feed for top stories only, a monthly feed (which I subscribe to), and several tag-specific feeds as well. If some of your favorite blogs have these options, take advantage of them.

I wish some of my other favorite blogs would have tag-specific feeds as well. While there are many bloggers whose work I love reading regularly, I really don’t want to know what’s going on in their love life and what they had for dinner. Other blogs, especially those which offer real-time news, should also consider these multiple feed options if they don’t want readers to get turned off by the massive amount of content they publish, no matter how great the content is.

I know that having a feed reader has made my online reading life much simpler, since I can go through my favorite blogs in one go. But without the occasional review, I know I’ll be committing an extra couple of hours each day just going through new items that don’t give me anything back for the 10 minutes I spent reading them.

How many feed subscriptions do you have? Do you review them once in a while to delete the ones you don’t really need or want?

Image by Svilen Mushkatov from Sxc.hu