20 November 2006

My Online Life

What did we do before the internet? Who cares. Here's a little peak at some of my favorite internet goodies - the stuff I use every day.

Gmail! It's the first browser window I open each morning. Whoever invented webmail is a genius. Whoever designed Gmail is a double genius.

Bloglines! My second stop is an RSS feed to help me keep on top of a whole set of blogs. My list includes daily updates from The Creative Generalist, Dilbert, and a few of my friend's blogs (i.e. Trevor Gay's Simplicity blog).

Tom Peters! I like to read his stuff in full-screen (& leave comments), so I don't have his blog on my Bloglines list. I just go directly to the site. Same with Hugh McLeod's Gaping Void blog.

Pandora! It's an online streaming music feed, and I've created a handful of "stations," depending on the type of music I'm in the mood for. I have it on almost all day.

Rocketboom! The coolest video blog (vlog) out there. Mostly internet / tech trends, but plenty of other cool stuff. The host Joanne Colan has a delightful british accent...

At some point, I usually check some news sites, like CNN or Drudge (though I'm less impressed with both of these sources lately).

Blogger! That's where this blog is hosted.

What's on your list of daily must-reads, must-use, or must-access?

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Gmail and blogger. And the evil that is MySpace simply because I have a friend who is cruel and will only email me through that site.

Thanks for the bloglines tip . . . I've been looking for a good place to consolidate. That ought to be a BIG timesaver.

Dan said...

I've got a MySpace page as well - haven't done much with it, aside from collect a few interesting friends (and invitations from inappropriate fembots, which I've dodged...)

Anonymous said...

Dan, I get some of my best links from you. Re: Blogger: If you have photo-intensive sites like mine, it can get on your nerves. Sometimes photos wouldn't upload or I had to try three and four times in the course of a day. So I switched to Wordpress, which is also free (of charge and problems). Importing my Blogger blogs was automatic; the time-consuming part was relinking the photos. But I've never regretted it. I keep finding cool stuff and saying, "Wow! I couldn't have done that in Blogger."

Okay commercial over and back to our regularly scheduled comment.

Sites I visit regularly:
Various people's blogs, particularly Dan's of course, and French Word-a-Day, where an American expat living in Provence with her French husband and two French children, uses photos and anecdotes about her daily life to teach a new French word no longer daily because she got some book deals, but thrice weekly.

The Hunger Site, where with one click I can donate—well actually, the site sponsors donate—food to the hungry. And from The Hunger Site, I can go to the affiliated sites (Breast Cancer Site, Child Health Site, Literacy Site, Rainforest Site, and Animal Rescue Site) and effect sponsor donations there too. It's one click a day for each site, but in the week I can go from my home and my work computer. And no, I don't get spam or masses of advertising stuff as a result.

refdesk.com, a brilliant site that links to information sources and reference tools on just about anything you could want: general and specialized dictionaries, newspapers from round the world, news stories, and masses more including one of my personal faves, access to Shakespearian insults for every occasion.

Dan said...

Super additions - thanks!