This week Michael Baird (OR-7), talks about a few of his favorite web 2.0 tools. Please feel free to post your favorites in the comments!
Use Flickr to store and share digital photographs. I have a few thousand on my personal Flickr account. Whenever I’m watching a movie or TV I’ll log in and tag/title photos. Some people knit, I tag. Organize your photos into sets, collections. Join groups with folks that have similar interests, have discussions about those interests. Set privacy settings on your photos so your friends can see your crazy party pictures but your mom can only see those that are public or tagged for family.
This is an online productivity suite. For those of you who may have delved into Google Docs & Spreadsheets you won’t be straying too far from home but instead get a massive remodel. Zoho includes a word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, conferencing, a notetaker, database creation, and a few more fun things I can’t remember at the moment. The notetaker is pure gold. It’s like Microsoft OneNote, but web-based. Feature packed with more options than Google and just as collaborative. I’ve used this for my last several presentations.
This might be a little basic for some of you, but I think it’s just important enough to cover anyway. A lot of sites out there have the little orange buttons to subscribe to their RSS feed. If you like the site and want to keep up with it, but not navigate to it every day to check if something new has happened, you’ll want to subscribe to their feed. Bloglines is what we call a feed aggregator. It keeps track of your RSS feeds and shows you which ones have new content available for viewing. There are a ton of these aggregators out there, some are programs you install on your computer, others are web-based like Bloglines. Instead of navigating to 60 different websites each day, I just open up Bloglines and take 20 minutes to get updated in all of the things I care about. It’s that easy.
