Last sunday Tiago took me geocaching, an entertaining adventure sport for GPS users. What’s interesting in it of course is the opportunity it offers to explore new places, be with nature and have fun. The particular cache we went out searching for was actually hidden in a cave and so we had to crawl into the place to retrieve it, way cool!
Starting the day with a post on your blog can be anti-productivity but I’ll take the risk today.
Something I wanted to talk for some time now is Remember the Milk. According to the authors its the best way to manage online to-do lists. But what I really wanted to talk is how I found it.
While browsing the PostgreSQL website I noticed the small bottom link they have to TinySofa and got curious. I then followed the link and discovered Remember the Milk and also their one Linux distro also called TinySofa. My first though was “real entrepreneurs these guys”.
This is great example of how helping open-source projects can be a good thing for company. I can only think how much web traffic they get from that small link and the money they are not spending on marketing.
As for the application itself, it’s the Web 2.0 thing you could expect.
Update: In a conversation with prla he brought up a good question. He thinks this is an excellent, excellent app., one of the best Web 2.0 examples, both in terms of interface and features. The question is, will the user be more happy with the long feature list of Remember The Milk or by the simplicity of TadaList?
After reading the book “The Search”, the obvious thing do to (at least for me) was to try out the A9 search engine, and boy, does it rock. I installed the A9 toolbar into firefox and it supports diary entry notes for each different site I go, history, bookmarks, site info directly from Alexa.com, etc.., and you can even set preferences like ‘find results only in Portuguese’, ‘open results in new window’, etc. Another incentive they arranged is that you get 1.6% discount on Amazon items, not too much but just enough for me (and possiby many others) to use the toolbar.
Now, another obvious thing is that there are monitoring every single thing I do while I’m browsing the net. The Big Brother is watching me. After a week of spying, A9 promises my search experience will become much better, finding what I usually look for easier and quicker. Like Osho say, when people have a dream, you can always become their leader by promising what they want.
One feature I would like to see on A9, and by the way in Google also (and others), is the possibility of searching inside Amazon.co.uk instead of Amazon.com. I usually buy items there. Another feature I would like to see, this time in Amazon.com/.co.uk itself, would be to import items from my .com account into the .co.uk back and forth. By sloopyness I started too wishlists a long time ago and by now I have books in both of them and well.. you get the picture. Don’t know if this happened to anyone else, but it happened to me.
This question is like a loop in my head that arises every now and then. I think and write clearly and quicker in my mother tongue that in English, but for me, entering a site in a language I don’t understand is one of the worse experiences I can get on the web today.
I found a post about it called “Should you blog in English” where the author boils down the question to three factors: time availability, social ambition and scale. I totally agree with him, its an investment. Its all about how deep in the rabit hole you want to go.
I would say: go english unless you really don’t have any other option than to write in your mother tongue.
Nowadays it seems there’s a howto for almost everything, and I’m not talking about technical stuff.
It reminds me of a song by Bad Religion, called No Direction, that goes like this:
> everyone is looking for something
> and they assume somebody else knows what it is
> no one can live with the decisions of their own
> it seems so they look to someone else
> to tell ‘em what to be
> tell ‘em what to wear
> tell ‘em what to say
> tell ‘em how to act and think and compel others compulsively
> until the world is all like them
Note to Self: I only have one life to spend so I might as well spend it being myself.