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The New “Inbox Dilemma” – Tabbed Browsing

Phil Dunn — Thu, 26 Aug 2010 02:09:59 +0000

A lot of people talk about email inbox distress, “inbox zero” and other related phenomena. Yes, too much email blows, and there’s no end in sight. You can filter conversations and contacts via Facebook, Twitter, IM, Gist and the like, but business people still rely heavily on email to track projects and keep in touch.

But.. I’ve got another problem that I’m sure you’re familiar with.

I call it Tabbed Browsing Hell for lack of a better name. This is the scenario where you’re so engrossed in research or just plain media consumption that you open tons of tabs. Eventually, you become burdened by them. They have psychic energy that can drain and distract you.

So what’s a boy (or girl) to do?

I found a nifty way to clear things up (at least for a while). It’s akin to stuffing papers into file folders in order to get a clean desk.

But it’s pretty slick to boot.

First, check out this nifty little service: Read Later

Read Later allows you to click a bookmark/script and save articles for later on your Instapaper.com account.

But wait, there’s more! (not steak knives or a slotted spoon)

When you want to back and read the articles you’ve gathered in Read Later, you can use another bookmark/script to force them into a clean, standardized format for consumption (you choose the font size and format). It’s called Readability. The buttons on the side allow you to easily and quickly get back to the original article (for Tweeting, sharing or Facebooking purposes, for example).

I think it’s pretty cool. And it helps me “get clear” and get back to work.

Have you tried it? What do you think? Please share your thoughts below.

P.S. The two solutions go great with RSS feed readers, too. Good way to filter articles and read later in a clean, consistent format.

Google Buzz: How will it know what I share?

Phil Dunn — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 21:09:03 +0000

Louis Gray wrote a good article on Google Buzz today. He hits on the key factors at the very end (3rd paragraph from the end). He says, “So how can Google determine relevancy with Buzz and start making sense of the social? Starting with GMail gives the company a major headstart, as they already know which contacts you trade e-mail with most often. They know how often you read e-mail from specific people, who you chat with most frequently by using the integrated GTalk feature, and they will often have data from you that provides your location, helping to tap that metric as well.”

This is definitely where the rubber meets the road. Depending upon how you use the web, your browser, social networks and the like, Google could potentially know loads of information regarding *who’s sharing what and how important are they are to you based on your emails, texts, IMs and voice calls.* This gets really scary when you consider someone like me who has almost all the Google tools integrated – including Gmail, Google Talk, Google Voice and their various extensions in Google Chrome.

Or not – I’m pretty exposed Web-wise, anyway. Of course, it could be very useful for productivity, time-saving, entertainment, buying short-cuts, etc. That’s the grand vision, for sure.

Interestingly, the only way Google doesn’t know what I’m sharing is if I post directly via Twitter, Facebook, Ping.fm, Hello.txt or some other social aggregation/post tool.

One thing I’ve noted.. Google could have gathered much more data about the content people share if they’d done a better job integrating “send link as email” within Chrome. Firefox does this really well. With Chrome you have to have an extension (apparently the 3rd pty one works best).. to pop open a gmail page and send. How much info are they missing when chrome users share using other tools because it’s not so easy with their own browser?

This will be a hot topic for some time to come.. what are your thoughts?

How to Log In to LogMeIn Free When Using Windows 7 or Windows 7 RC

Phil Dunn — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 23:16:09 +0000

Sometimes you need to connect to your desktop from a remote location in order to access files or data on your main computer. Many of you pay Citrix and do this with GoToMyPC. Others use Microsoft Remote Desktop from within Windows.

IMHO, the easiest, and cheapest, way to do it is with LogMeIn Free, however.

I installed it, and it works just like GoToMyPC.

I did hit one stumbling block, however, because I’m using Window 7 RC (release candidate) on several of my computers.

There’s a trick to logging in. You have to specify the name of the computer as well as the login when you’re logging on (and the password, as well).

Here are the instructions from LogMeIn support:

If you are using a Windows account username and password to access your Windows 7 host computer, you will need to enter the username in the format that includes the computer or domain name.

For example:

You normally log into your host computer with the username David and you are not on a domain.
Your host computer’s name is HomePC.
When connecting to the host computer, you would enter HomePC\David for the username.

If you don’t know what your host computer name is, you can easily find out by going to that computer, clicking Start/ Computer/look under “computer name.” That’s the name that is equivalent to HomePC in the example above. You can find your name by clicking start and looking under the icon in the upper right of the Start pull-down. You know your password already, because you logged in .

Hope this helps out. It took me a while to figure it out (Googling and such), but the best answer came straight from the support folks at Logmein, who were nice, personable and helpful, btw.

Enjoy!