Posts Tagged ‘google’

Dear Lazyweb: Software for groups and organisations

Thursday, March 12th, 2009

I’ve been involved with various organisations and charities over the past few years, and the two main problems they have all faced are:

  1. Lack of participation
  2. Dissemination of information

Whilst 1) can only truly be overcome by having the right people, both can be improved by collaboration – something which is tackled by many pieces of software.

A charitable organisation I run at the moment – an after school club at my children’s school – suffers from both these problems, and one way we are seeking to address them is by becoming a virtual or shudder egroup. Physical meetings will always be required, but things like distributing minutes, drafting and review of documents etc. are perfect candidates for solving online.

However the options on offer aren’t that great. Google Apps is the main one, but complete overkill for what we want which is a mailing list and document sharing/editing/review capabilities. Google Docs is perfect for the latter, but we don’t really want hosted e-mail, calendar, chat etc. I know you can turn them off, but the mailing list requirement still isn’t met. Even if I keep e-mail enabled, people don’t always want yet another e-mail address/account to worry about.

Personally I would just set up a wiki and mailing list and be done, but while this is perfect for a technical project e.g. software (that’s how Ubuntu got started), there are more problems:

  1. (Lack of) technical knowledge
  2. Administration

Of course there’s a learning curve to anything new. Google Docs gets rid of some of this by behaving in similar way to other applications, but it is still a new way of working. A wiki – although completely natural to me – will be completely alien to some if not all the other members. Compounding this problem is that I intend to step back from the organisation this autumn (after three years), and don’t really want to remain as sysadmin.

Having written all this, I’m now coming to the conclusion that for this particular problem sticking to the old way is the best solution, but I’m still interested if any decent (and hosted) solutions that help run groups exist, or if you help run a non-technical group (i.e. LUGs don’t count!), what do you use?

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Posted in Browsing, Personal, Ubuntu | 7 Comments »

Socially Ostracized?

Thursday, January 17th, 2008

I stumbled across nugget of wisdom earlier today:

For many web workers, there’s email, and then there’s Gmail. You can use a different email client, but prepare to be mildly teased/socially ostracized

What?!? Are they serious?

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Posted in Browsing | 1 Comment »

I’m a believer

Thursday, July 19th, 2007

I currently have 59 feeds in my OPML file. 4 of those are planet feeds with x number of feeds each, so the total is easily over 100. If I don’t catch up with my feeds every day or so, I soon get overwhelmed and end up marking a batch as read without even looking at them. To make sure I wasn’t letting them pile up I was reading them far too many times a day.

Many, many places covered how Scoble reads over 600 feeds a day, and I ignored it at first. Then more sites covered it, and I started thinking about my own feed reading habits and decided to follow Hackzine’s advice:

  • Use Google Reader (keyboard commands make browsing faster)
  • Use “all items view” to see the full river of news in chronological order
  • Filter out potentials in the first pass. Take a top level filter for topic, information density, author, and quality of post. Only articles that make the cut are looked at in more detail.
  • Superhuman abilities help

OK so I didn’t start wearing my underpants on the outside to satisfy the last one, but the rest did help. Instead of reading my feeds in their categories with the list view (and using a mouse!), viewing all items in the expanded view and relying on the keyboard makes getting through my feeds a breeze. I now set aside a block of time a day to catch up on feeds and have them done in record time.

One tip not covered by Scoble is the use of starring, or rather how I use them. Instead of following links whilst I’m reading, I star an item I want to follow up on and come back to them later (remembering to remove the star when I’m done. If the feed item is just a stub to the real thing, I’ll open it in a new tab in the background (yay Firefox!) and move on, only moving away from Google Reader when I’m done.

The other tip I picked up from Scoble is to share items, which works really well when combined with the Google Reader Shared Items Facebook app.

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Posted in Browsing | Comments Off

A change is a good as a rest

Wednesday, May 9th, 2007

Out with the old, in with the not-so-new.

I’ve been a long-term user of Bloglines. I loved being able to access my feeds from any computer, including my PDA. The PDA is no more, I got annoyed that you couldn’t read individual articles, and after stumbling across Liferea I switched. I switched because I could read individual articles, and I was now only using one computer on a regular basis.

I didn’t run into any glaring issues with Liferea, but because I make heavy use of tabs in Firefox I never became comfortable with having my feed reader outside my browser.

The news that Google Reader now supported the Wii Internet Channel piqued my curiosity and I decided to sample their wares once again.

So far I am liking it – they’ve improved the interface since I tried it last. I’ve not tried it through the Wii, nor from my mobile, but it is nice to know the functionality is there if I want it.

OK, so it is not really any different to using Bloglines but at this point I’ll refer you back to the title of this entry…

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Posted in Linux | 3 Comments »