Today I took a giant leap forward in my update-ability. (If date-ability refers to your in-person hotness, update-ability speaks to your hotness in the social media pressure cooker of Twitter, Facebook, Jaiku etc.)  If I'm going to be entirely honest, my virtual hotness has been severely limited by my relatively infrequent Twitterings. Not only do I eat, change my musical selection and go to the bathroom without posting the minute-by-minute update, but I even sometimes have actually vaguely interesting thoughts that pass through my head without being captured in my conversation stream. 

No more. If I'm going to hear about your gardening weather, the number of bookmarks you now have on delicious, and what your preferences panel looks like in the new Mac OS, then you're going to hear about the cute way my kid just scratched her nose, how that Mexican is food is sitting, and where you won't believe I just found my car keys.

The key to this earth-shaking transformation in my update-ability is a little doodad called MoodBlast. It lets me simultaneously update my status on Skype, iChat, Twitter, Tumblr, Pownce and Skype. (And thanks to the Twitter app on Facebook, it'll update Facebook too.) "Now I'm inhaling." "Now I'm exhaling." "Now I'm trying to decide how deeply to inhale." (Hey, this is Friday night in Vancouver. We think about these things.)

As much as I like MoodBlast's hegemonic approach to status updating, I'm pausing briefly to think about whether increasing my update-ability is, in fact, a good thing. (Now I'm pausing briefly. Here I am, pausing. Moving on...)  Are all these updates for my benefit, or the benefit of my "followers"? (Kudos to Twitter for calling it like it is.)

Most people use status updates as what I think of as "expressive communication". Like many forms of online conversation, status updates make it easy to confuse the expressive value of communication with the effective value of communicaiton. I'm concerned about the expressive value of communication when I'm "getting something off my chest", "speaking my truth", or engaging in some form of creative expression. I'm concerned about the effective value of communication when I'm trying to get you to hear me, listen to me, or understand me.

In face-to-face conversation we're able to sit comfortably and move fluidly between effective and expressive communication. I sit down with my boss, Pamela, and get something off my chest ("I'm really having a hard time working with Jim") and I can immediately tune into the effective value of what I've said: its impact on the person I'm speaking with, and how it's being received. If Pamela's eyes glaze over and her smile freezes I know that I've got to tread carefully or I risk damaging our working relationship or my professional status. If Pamela leans forward and nods, I get the idea that she's interested in helping me solve this problem. 

When we're engaging in any form of online conversation other than video chat (and even video chat has its limitations), we lose the nonverbal cues about the effective impact of what we're saying. We experience our speech (our blogging, our video posts, our podcasts) wholly subjectively, as a form of expression. That can be incredibly liberating: the web is now full of the creative self-expression of people who might never feel brave enough to post a poem, a drawing or a song if they were really conscious of the audience to which they would then be exposed.

But liberating cuts both ways. By experiencing communication entirely as expression, we lose track of its impact. We lose much of its effective value; we lose the ability to shape, if not control, how we are received.  

When we think about the person or people who read our blog post and tweets, we reconnect to the effective value of communication -- without losing its expressive power. We can make a conscious decision about how much to indulge our expressive needs, and we can be intentional about what we want our effect -- our impact on others -- to be.

It's not a tough thing to do. In fact, Twitter gives us a little help, by showing photos of our followers: really look at those faces, and picture them as they people you're about to enlighten with, or inflict upon, your update. MoodBlast, with its deliciously minimal interface, does the reverse: it totally dissociates what I'm saying from what (someone? anyone?) is hearing.

In adopting the practice of visualizing your audience, there's more at stake than whether your status updates make you look like a self-absorbed narcissist or a thoughtful sharer. Audience awareness is a muscle: when you think about audience, about the effective value of your speech, you strengthen your connection to the people you want to reach. You sharpen the focus of your language, your message, your very reason for speaking. You can still tap into the power of expressive value of communications, but now you are realizing its effective value, too.

If you're a communications professional -- in fact, if you're anyone whose work involves communicating -- your work demands that you continually strengthen your capacity for effective speech. Picture the audience -- for your ten-second tweet, your ten-minute blog post, or your ten-months-in-the-making site relaunch -- and you ensure that the satisfactions of expressive communication are matched by the impact of effective communication.

Since upgrading to a 3G iPhone, I've gone on periodic app binges in which I download every app that looks remotely interesting and take it for a whirl. So far, the best discover I've made is a free app called Evernote -- and it's changed my computer use even more dramatically than it's affected the way I use my iPhone.

Evernote is a notetaking application that lets you take notes on your computer (Mac or Windows) and keep those notes synced with your iPhone and the Evernote web site. Any note that you take on your iPhone gets synced back to Evernote, too. You can keep multiple notebooks (e.g. one for draft blog posts, one for grocery lists, and one for each client project) and choose to keep some or all of these notebooks local (just on your computer) or online (synced by Evernote). While you can keep as many notes and notebooks as you want on your local computer, the free version of Evernote limits data uploads (i.e. syncing) to 40 MB a month. But it only costs $5 per month to get an account entitling you to 500 MB of data uploads, which Evernote says is enough to hold thousands of typed notes, five thousand snapshots, or 450 audio notes.

The Evernote interface

That's right: audio notes and snapshots. Use Evernote to capture audio notes on your iPhone and they'll automatically sync to Evernote on the web and on your computer -- no waiting for your next iPhone sync. Use Evernote to hold your iPhone snapshots and they're synced, too.

And since Evernote features optical character recognition (OCR), any text you snap with your phone (or another camera whose contents you drop into Evernote) becomes searchable. For those of us who are whiteboard-dependent, that means you can now capture your whiteboard notes and they'll be searchable! Ditto for business cards, flip charts, signs -- whatever you care to shoot. (OCR only works on notes that have been uploaded to the web, so if you want your images to be text-searchable, you'll need to put them in a notebook you keep synced online.)

The Evernote interface makes it very easy switch between notebooks, and to move notes back and forth among them. You can tag any note with as many keywords as you want, so that provides a further layer of categorization.  In other words, it's a terrifically easy, flexible and powerful way to take notes on your computer or iPhone, and keep them in sync. (NB that you can't edit pre-existing notes on your iPhone, however, including those you created on your phone; and it would be MUCH easier to take notes on the iPhone if Evernote let you rotate the phone to use the wider version of the iPhone keyboard.)

If you install the Firefox clipper extension (or the "clip to Evernote" bookmarklet in any browser), you can use Evernote to store and tag your favourite web clippings, too. Unlike del.icio.us this lets you stash the actual web page (or highlights) rather than just the URL and description. Unlike del.icio.us there's no sharing feature, however, so it's not a del.icio.us substitute if you like the social in social bookmarking. (I'm hoping some clever person will hack together a tool for saving a web clipping to Evernote and del.icio.us simultaneously, or keeping web clippings synchronized between the two.) 

One social thing you CAN do with Evernote is to share a notebook, and optionally publish it as a widget on your blog or webpage. I've created a little notebook of web clippings about how to use Evernote, and set it up as a shared notebook, which you can see here. Once you make a notebook public you can add it to a Facebook page, or to your blog, as a widget that looks like this (click on any box to open that note; you'll need pop-ups enabled):

Evernote's interface, syncing and clipping features make it a very tempting choice as a primary notetaking application. For the past three years I've been a devoted user of Voodoopad, and it's painful to think about giving it up -- not just because the migration process will be a bit arduous (see below) but because of how much I've loved VDP. It's hard to think of an application that's had a more profound impact on my work habits: where my notes used to be scattered across an assortment of paper notebooks (remember those?), Word docs, text files and scraps of paper, just about every thought, phone message, meeting record and blog post I've written in the past three years is captured in one of a dozen Voodoopad notebook. (I use one for each major client or project, plus a catch-all file.) Vooodoopad makes it a snap to keep and retrieve notes, and its creator, Gus Mueller, is the most responsive developer I've ever encountered.

But the iPhone syncing and the Evernote interface are significant advantages. Since I routinely use about a dozen different Voodoopad notebooks, I end up with a lot of open windows. In Evernote it's much easier to switch between notebooks. Also I really like being able to sort a notebook's contents by date -- something that I still can't do in Voodoopad.

On the other hand Voodoopad has one MAJOR advantage over Evernote: data import and export. Right now there's no easy way for a Mac user to get data in or out of Evernote.  The Windows client offers an option to import databases, export a note or notebook to HTML. (Both Mac and Windows users can send notes by e-mail.)  While Evernote suggests that export might become available to Mac users in the future, for now the only exit path is via Windows. That makes switching TO Evernote a big pain (I'll have to export my Voodoopads, then run Evernote on Windows in Parallels to get the data in....and why does that sound like a nightmare?) and switching to a future app just as annoying.

The wishlist item that would make Evernote REALLY rock out -- or convince me to stick with Voodoopad -- is if either program offered Google Doc- or SubEthaEdit-like collaboration. (SubEthaEdit is a 100% real-time collaborative editing program that's great for writing documents, code or note-taking with your colleagues.)

 I'd love to have collaborative notebooks on Evernote, in which I invite a designated set of colleagues to access and/or contribute to a notebook. In an ideal world this would include complex permissions options so that I could designate any synced notebook as "publish only" (make all notes in this notebook visible to the people I'm inviting), "publish or contribute" (my invitees can add their own pages to the notebook as well as viewing mine), or "publish, contribute and edit" (invitees can view pages, add pages, or edit existing pages). In my super fantasy scenario you could also turn on live collaboration for any note you're currently editing, so that you can do live collaborative notetaking the way you can with SubEthaEdit.

I'm not sure whether collaboration is in the cards for Evernote, but I'm hopeful. It's clearly a feature-rich program with lots of bells and whistles I've only begun to explore. For example, it was only in researching this post that I discovered Evernote will sort notes I create on my iPhone according to where I was when I created them. If I create a notebook of restaurant notes I'll be able to find all restaurants I've visited within 1 mi of my current location.

I'd love to hear from other folks about their experiences with Evernote, and particularly about any neat features I may not have discovered. And if you've tried both Evernote and Voodoopad, which one have you landed on?

 

I just discovered that Google Docs finally work in the Safari web browser. (Up until now, Mac users had to access their Google Docs via Safari.) I think we may have the iPhone to thank for this; all those iPhone users wanted mobile access to their documents! I wonder what else the iPhone will finally bring to the Mac platform.

If you're not using Google Docs, this is a great time to start! Google Docs let you create, edit, store and share documents and spreadsheets; the word processor feels very much like Microsoft Word, and the spreadsheet editor like Excel, so you'll be right at home. But unlike the desktop versions of those apps, Google Docs let you collaborate with your colleagues. Here are some of the ways we've used Google docs and spreadsheets in our work:

• as part of a strategic planning process: brainstorming results in rows, participants in columns, with each participant marking their favorite ideas
• manage our docket of clients and projects (one client per row, one week per column; each week we insert a new column and add notes, current status, and upcoming actions and status
• capacity planning: clients and projects in rows, weeks/months in columns, to track upcoming hours required
• document creation: one person drafts in word and uploads, others fill in their details/examples

Earlier this year we purchased a 32″, HD-ready Philips LCD TV. So when our DVD player died a few months ago, we found ourselves staring at the PC input on the back of the TV and wondering whether our next DVD player should in fact be a computer.

About eight weeks ago we bit the bullet and bought a Mac Mini as a home media server. We’ve been delighted with the results, so I thought it was time to share the details of our set up, the ways in which it’s changed our entire relationship to the information age, and our remaining wishlist.

The hardware:
Mac mini 1.66 GHZ Intel Core Due with 2 GB of SDRAM
Ministack 465 GB hard drive
Apple Bluetooth keyboard
Logitech cordless optical mouse (replacing a Macally Blueooth Mouse Jr that wouldn’t track)
Series 2 Tivo with 300 GB hard drive upgrade from Weaknees [UPDATE: Our hard drive -- and thus our Tivo -- is toast, just under a year from purchase. Weaknees only warranties for 6 months so we're looking for alternate vendors before replacing the Tivo drive.]
Motorola HD digital tuner
Yamaha stereo receiver

The software:
Mac OS X 10.4.8
Parallels (for PC virtualization)
Windows XP Home edition
Tivo2Go
Mac the Ripper (for ripping DVDs)
Bits on Wheels (for downloading BitTorrents)

Earth-shaking ways we use our new server, starting with the most fundamentally life transforming:

1. DVD archiving: We have quite a collection of kids DVDs. Make that scratched DVDs. As any parent of toddlers can attest, the value of that Dora the Explorer collection is seriously challenged by a toddler’s interest in laying dirty hands on each and every disc. Now we use Mac the Ripper to copy our daughter’s favorite DVDs to our massive external hard drive, and keep the originals safe on a high shelf. Our daughter can watch whatever DVD she wants whenever she wants, and all we have to do is play it back on the computer (by using the Mac’s built-in DVD player and selecting “Open DVD media”…then navigating to the DVD we want on the hard drive, selecting its Video_TS file, clicking “choose”, and then choosing “Play” from the DVD Player menu.)
2. TV downloads: For a long time it seemed we’d been excluded from the joys of BitTorrent by our ISP’s throttling BitTorrent packets. Maybe we’ve become more patient, or maybe our ISP has relaxed: BitTorent has finally become viable. And with the computer hooked up directly to the TV, we can easily watch any shows that we’ve forgotten to Tivo. Most crucial use case: downloading HD BitTorrents of Battlestar Galactica, which is not yet shown in HD in Canada.
3. DVD timeshifting: Notwithstanding Blockbuster’s “no late fees” policy, we’re able to incur a decent number of restocking fees before we get around to returning the movies that we’d hoped to watch weeks ago (another hazard of life with toddlers: no movie time!) Now we rip a DVD as soon as we rent it, and watch it when we have a chance (before we delete it — just for the benefit of our MPAA buddies).
4. Audio landscaping: I’ve always wanted to be one of those people with mood music playing whenever my friends are over. Now we’ve consolidated all our MP3s and iTunes playlists on one server, and can easily choose to listen to any of our playlists, which play back through the stereo.
5. Video landscaping: Instead of having our photos scattered across multiple hard drives, we keep our camera’s USB cable hooked up to the Mini. All new photos get loaded onto the Mini, but we keep sharing turned on (within iPhoto preferences) and iPhoto running so that we can still access the main iPhoto library from each of our laptops. We use System Preferences/Desktop & Screen Saver to set an iPhoto album as our screen saver, and set a “hot corner” so that we can activate the screen saver by moving our mouse to a corner of the screen. Once we’ve chosen a playlist for our audio landscape, we activate the hot corner and enjoy an on-screen slideshow of our favorite photos.
6. Long-term Tivo programming storage: As Mac users, we were locked out of the joys of Tivo2Go, Tivo’s option for dumping Tivo-recorded programs to a PC. Thanks to the combo of Parallels and Windows XP Home we are now part of the Tivo2Go universe! We haven’t actually watched any of the programs we’ve dumped — this will require us to figure out how to move stuff off the virtual PC and onto the main folder for our Mac so that we can play back the programs. Or we could download the premium version of Tivo2Go to get decryption capacity on the PC side.

What’s next:

A series 3, HD-compatible Tivo with another massive Weaknees hard drive. Sure, we could download all those HD shows with Bittorrent — but we like the ease and control of having a Tivo.

Flying Meat is the software company behind VooDooPad, my latest favorite application ever. VooDooPad is one of those transformational technologies that do one small but crucial thing so incredibly way that they change the whole way you work.

In this case, what VooDooPad does is to give you one place to put all your notes — all those random files that are currently scatterred across your computer as Word files, stickies, Outlook/Entourage notes, text files, draft emails, draft blog posts, etc. That’s if you’re like me — the old me, I mean, pre-VDP.

Now all my notes are in one place: a single VooDooPad document that lets me create a new page for every random thought, to-do list, set of questions, document in progress, telephone call, chunk of code I need to hold onto, idea for an article, etc etc. I have categories for all my projects so I can assign each page to the right category or categories, and find it again easily. Wiki-style hyperlinks mean my pages can link to related pages, and that I can find those related pages using the “backlinks” feature. Awesome search means anything that doesn’t jump out at me from backlinks or categories is still easy to find.

But as much as I love VooDooPad, I think I may love Flying Meat even more. As far as I can tell, Flying Meat consists of August “Gus” Mueller, a software developer who could teach public participation types a thing or two about community engagement. Here’s what I’ve learned from Gus:

Ask for input. VooDooPad has a “report a bug/feature request” option built into its help menu, and on its website. That means that whenever you think to look for more information, you’ll be prompted to give feedback at the same time.

Let the public set the agenda. VooDooPad’s bug reporting interface doesn’t force you into a box that corresponds to their work process instead of yours. It’s just a message box that lets you type in an email, and (optionally) note whether it’s a bug or suggestion.

Responsiveness encourages communication. When I filed my first feature request, I got an e-mail from Gus just a few hours later. That personal and informative response made me feel like my input was heard and valued, and has encouraged t has encouraged me to provide further input, and created what I hope is a virtuous circle (or from Gus’s perspective, spam.)

Information fuels commitment. When Gus responded to my e-mail, he didn’t just thank me for my ideas — he actually provided some more information about the software to help it work better for me. By providing me with some value (in the form of a use tip) in return for my input, Gus has motivated me to continue participating in his user community by providing further feedback.

Transparency counts. As incisive and useful as my input may be, Gus hasn’t just taken it all with a thank you and you’ll see it in the next upgrade. By sharing his reservations about some of my suggestions he’s increased his credibility, and my interest in further communication.

Names count. Would I have sent an e-mail to PersonalNoteWiki or McWiki or YourNotesInc? Who knows. But there’s something about a company called “Flying Meat” that screams open doors and open minds. And of course, flying meat.

As part of my ongoing quest to find a Mac counterpart to the Personal Brain (thanks to Jerry Michalski for ruining my life with his software demo) — and as part of my re-evaluation of all my productivity apps in the wake of my Treo purchase — I have been playing with a bunch of new tools. The one that has most quickly insinuated itself into my workflow is VoodooPad, a very simple little tool that solves that eternal problem: what to do with all those little random notes, thoughts and jots that aren’t to-dos, calendar items, or full-fledged documents?

VoodooPad is basically just a wiki for your personal computer, but its very straightforward interface makes it ideal for keeping all your notes in one place, and creating links and categories (a.k.a. tags) that help you organize and retrieve your work. I now keep VoodooPad running all the time and use it for any note or work-in-progress, ranging from project tracking to incipient blog posts to early document drafts to to-do lists. Because VoodooPad offers wiki-style automatic link creation (but doesn’t require that your links be in CamelCase form), it’s very easy to create a new page for every new topic or idea, no matter how small, while preserving its relationship to other ideas/topics/pages; I also use categories as a way of tagging and retrieving all related pages. I’ve created categories for each project I’m working on, and since VoodooPad lets you assign multiple categories to the same page, I’ve assigned pages with code snippets both to the category for my current web project (where the code originated) and to a category called Drupal (since I might want to re-use code in a future project).

One of the intriguing things about VoodooPad is its open API; I’ve been wondering whether it might be possible to create a plug-in that would generate visual maps for link relationships within a Voodoopad document. If so, that would come pretty close to full Brain functionality.

But until that moment arrives, I still find myself searching for something even more Brain-like, which is why I was interested to see David Heinemeier Hansson — part of the 37 Signals team — describe his vision for their much-lauded Backpack tool:

It’s the product I tried to create through a mesh of outlines, email inboxes, post-it notes, The Brain, and a gazillion other systems under the sun.

This has me poking around Backpack again, as I have periodically since it launched. But I’ve yet to start using it, partly because I’m nervous about having big chunks of my life accessible only if I’ve got an Internet connection (yeah, that’s most of the time, but it’s not all the time) and partly because I’m not really clear on how it’s going to make me taller, smarter, or more beloved by small children and animals.

I was intrigued to find Christopher Wimmer’s post on engadgeted.net » a few suggestions on how to improve backpack, in which he talked about his own curiosity about how he’d integrate Backpack and VoodooPad. I’m hoping he may soon offer some insights about Backpack versus (or alongside) VoodooPad, now that he’s become an enthusiastic Backpack user. Does Christopher (or anyone else) have tips on how to make Backpack play nicely on VoodooPad, advice on which things I should use Backpack for and which things I should use VoodooPad for, or a compelling argument about why I should give up one in favour of the other?

The extremely fabulous Leda Dederich asked me about how I’d handle tasks and notes after my switch from Entourage to Apple apps.

I was worried about losing “Tasks” too. Turns out they’re built into iCal! So no worries there.

Re: Notes, it’s a little more complicated. Anil Bawa says he decided to use Apple’s Stickies — like virtual postit notes — but I have a feeling I can do better. I’m thinking about using TiddlyWiki, a mini-wiki that has many devoted users and which I figure could be used on the Treo too, and with a little work, kept in sync. What I’m really going is something like the PersonalBrain software that Jerry Michalski told me about; it’s kind of like a wiki-mindmapping hybrid. But (argh!) it’s Windows only. Lucid Fried Eggs purports to be an open source effort to give a Brain to the rest of us, but I’m not sure it’s under active development anymore.

What I really want is something like a wiki — something that has a database backend and a mindmap-style GUI front end, with unlimited tags/keywords that can attach to every item so that you can navigate keyword-to-keyword, and with (of course!) outbound RSS feeds for each tag as well as for the whole enchilada. So, kind of a little more than Entourage’s built-in notes feature. It just seems stupid to use Word to take notes, when these flat-text files just keep my thoughts locked away and make them hard to find.

The other tool that Boris Mann points me to is OD4Contact. Since Boris’ offhand post re: buying an unlocked Treo is what tipped me over the Treo-purchase abyss, I’m inclined to follow-up on any tool that he tells me actually will make my life easier. I’m downloading it now — report to follow.

Well my Treo-ification is now well underway, which is to say that I’ve been immersed in the ever-exciting challenges of how to reorganize my life to be more Treo-friendly. (Oops — I meant to say, figure out how to use the Treo to live my previous life more efficiently.)

Here’s some of what I’ve figured out so far:

GPRS without a net:
Actually, you can’t just take an unlocked phone out of the box and go wild. Gotta figure out your carrier settings, which isn’t 100% easy. Here are the current settings for Fido.

PIMing:
Up until now I’ve been an Entourage user. (That’s what you Windows users call “Outlook”.) I have a recurring event in Entourage that reminds me to reconsider using Entourage every three months. Today, when the bell went off, I wondered whether the Treo might make the ultimate case for switching from Entourage to Apple’s own iCal/Address Book/Mail combination. (Note to developers: giving your software generic names like “Mail” and “Address book” makes it very very hard for nice people like me to find out about your software using the Google method.)

My mind was more or less made up for me by the fact that Entourage appears not to synch with the Treo 650, period. Cruised enough user groups to conclude that my problems were the norm and not the exception. But was it worth giving up the joys of all-in-one mail/task/calendar/contact integration?

Today’s documentation award goes to Anil Bawa for his blog post on
Switching away from Entourage which tells you everything you need to know about how and why to switch. Why: inter-application integration among the various Apple apps is actually more flexible than integration across Entourage features. How: just drag and drop your Entourage contacts into the Address Book; and in iCal and Mail, use the built-in import features and select the “import from Entourage” options.

Not only did Anil convince me that the switch would be quick, easy and useful, but his blog post was also the first place I found anyone saying that YES you can get date from Entourage to the Apple apps. With all the scripts and software out there, promoting their ability to effect this transformation, I had just about concluded that it would require special software before discovering Anil’s post. So thanks, Anil.

Of course I’m hoping that the Apple apps (including built-in handheld synchronization via iSynch) won’t be my complete long-term solution. The nice people over at Airset tell me that they’ll have iCal to Airset sync soon, at which point Airset may become my automatic way of keeping Treo and Mac in sync.

E-mail and messaging
Mark Surman told me that I had to switch from POP to IMAP if my Treo was going to work for me, so I spent last night clearing through a terrifying accumulation of e-mail before making the switch. (Greets to the 39 people who got overdue e-mails from me between 9:30 and 11:00 pm last night.) Now I’m ready to give up POP — which pulls mail onto my computer — and switch to IMAP — which leaves my email on the server, so it can be read by my laptop or my Treo.

But since I am but a lone woman in the high seas of the Internet, I have no IMAP service in place. After a little poking around, I settled on Runbox — again, a Mark recommendation — who offer hosted IMAP service for $29.95/year. That includes hosting my own domain, so my alex_at_alexandrasamuel_dot_com address still works; it’s just now an IMAP account over at Runbox. Note to world (and Runbox): if you’re redirecting your own domain’s email to work via Runbox, it takes a few minutes for e-mail hosting to switch over; possibly longer. Meanwhile your e-mails will bounce. Maybe Runbox could change its bounce message to alert people to the possibility that the email address they’re trying might in fact work again in a few minutes. Meanwhile, I advise making the switch during off-hours.

As for the challenge of reading e-mail on my Treo, I’ve decided to go with Chattermail over Snappermail or Versamail, thanks in large part to a helpful article at Boston College. They came down on the side of Snappermail but that was because Chattermail was still in beta at the time.

I will install Chattermail tomorrow — once I’ve got this whole Entourage switch wrapped up — at which point I’ll also try to get up and running on Mumbu as my IM client. MyTreo had a great article on different IM options that pointed me in that direction.

I’m hoping to resist any further software problem-solving for the next couple of days. But you can keep track of the Treo resources I’m uncovering by watching my Treo links on del.icio.us.

If you love politics and you love Apple, have I found the job for you: Manager of Congressional Relations for Apple. That’s right, Apple is looking for a [wo]man in DC to schmooze and hobnob on behalf of the Maciverse. Let’s hope they get somebody great!

Like anyone whose work not only uses the Internet, but actually concerns the Internet itself, I am really dependent on bookmark management to keep track of my work and resources. As a Mac user I’ve recently returned to using URL Manager Pro, a client-side tool that does a very nice job of organizing bookmarks in a flexible, accessible, annotateable form. While that addresses my own bookmark management needs, it doesn’t provide a way of sharing my bookmarks with colleagues and collaborators.

For that job, I’m exploring a new tool: del.icio.us, which bills itself as a social bookmarks manager. Andy Budd has a nice explanation of its virtues.

Part of the appeal of the social bookmarking idea is that it’s not just a productivity app; it actually has some value added for those of us working in the field of online collaboration and cooperation. Social bookmarking is still relatively new, so I’ve yet to hear of anyone using it as a civic engagement or collaboration tool. But it won’t be long.