The Short List: what Web services will they have to pry from your cold, carpally decimated hands?
Monday, February 2, 2009 at 7:16PM 
I'm giving a talk later this month to the IADC (Int'l Ass'n of Defense Counsel; a.k.a. a passel of lawyers), at which I'm to be folks' "guide to the Live Web, demonstrating how online tools connect communities of interest in the legal world and beyond." (Yeah, guilty, I believe I penned that mouthful.) I'm planning to cover prevailing communication tools, from zero- to low-latency models (twitter/friendfeed/laconica, video+real-time chat), to mid-latency (blogging, social networking/news/bookmarks), to high latency (static Web pages that may or may not incorporate or embrace more immediate methods), as well as some of the related legal and sociocultural (that one's for you of course, Ernie) considerations.
I know what's on my short list — friendfeed, twitter, laconica, the myriad of blogging alternatives, ustream/stickam-type tools, del.icio.us-type tools, flickr-type tools, Gmail-type tools, Google Docs-type tools, wikis, business management tools, and, dwindlingly, Google Reader-type tools — but I'd love to know what's on yours. I know I'm missing things people swear by but I just don't use. Please help me understand the universe of indispensable.
Reader Comments (7)
Online communities are the best places for people with common interest across all countries
http://www.utahwebservices.com/" REL="nofollow">
Denise -
I was surprised to see you place Google Reader in the "dwindlingly" category. I see RSS as the glue that holds these sites together. It is the key difference between the web 1.0 and web 2.0. You get notified of changes and new content relevant to you.
RSS has been a key tool for me for several years. (like many others I greatly prefer Google Reader)
Twitter has been increasingly relevant over the last year. It is a great source of connectivity. (Although I keep a skeptical eye on a tool that has no way to generate revenue from its growing base of users.) Currently, it is in second place behind Google Reader.
Thanks Doug,
Friendfeed and Twitter have supplanted Google Reader for me. It's more effective for me to get people's real-time reactions to what they're reading, interested in, etc., than to subscribe to a bunch of feeds that more often than not I don't get around to reading in a timely way. Friendfeed's real-time + aggregation of the stream have made my GReader use sparse to none; at this point I should delete all but the "Friends Shared Items" section and the (fewer and fewer) feeds from folks I'm interested in who publish more regularly to some other source than Twitter and/or Friendfeed.
But until that rather recent shift, yes, GReader was high (rather than low) on my short list.
The next edition of Internet i.e Web 2.0 will see much greater number of online communities
http://www.wiworks.com/" REL="nofollow">Utah Web Design
I'm not doing legal work, but this is something I'm definitely interested in how people manage their information overload.
My toolset:
Gmail in Firefox (beefed up with various things, but esp. Remember the Milk), Google Docs (incl. doing more project management in spreadsheets), Flickr, Twitter, Facebook. Also use wikis for document collaboration in the university.
Reader has become unmanageable for me as well, so am looking for alternatives. del.icio.us I use off and on, but since sharing bookmarks is less important for me, Firefox's internal bookmarks + Foxmarks synchronization seems to do the job.
As the number of tabs I have open multiplies, I'm looking for alternatives to managing and prioritizing incoming info. How do I filter high priority items that require immediate attention from the feeds I just need to skim over in a free moment to keep a finger on the pulse, so to speak?
My short list includes:
Dropbox - Great for keeping info syncd between my various computers. Dropbox works so well, I almost forget it is installed. Changed the way I work.
Mindmeister
Gmail
Google Reader
Google Docs
Flickr
Delicious
Twitter
and just recently Friendfeed.
Let me add a vote for Google Reader, but not for its RSS reader. Rather, the bookmarklet called "Note in Google Reader" which allows you to highlight text on a web page and save it, with tags and with optional comments. This is very useful now that Google Notebooks is being withdrawn.
Evernote, which accomplishes more or less the same thing outside of the Google sphere of influence.
And don't forget Usenet - now called Google Groups. Although there is a lot of crap to wade through in some groups, there is still a lot of useful stuff to be found there.
For relaxation time, nothing shines better (despite the name) than EvilLyrics.