Several people have asked my how I stay connected with so many blogs.  Currently, I check in with 38 blogs every day.  Often more than once each day.

If I had to visit each site individually, I would never do it.  I couldn’t remember all the URLs, or what the last article was I looked at on the site.  It would be a mess.

Luckily, I found the Google Reader (yes, I like the Google Kool-Aid).  This is a web-based tool that lets me keep current with all my blogs.  It’s nice, down the left side is a list of the blogs I follow.  For the blogs with new content, they’re listed in bold and the number of new postings is shown in parenthesis.  Much like the way an email program shows folders.

Clicking on a blog loads the postings into the right side.  You can have the postings shows as just a list, or a scrolling area with the full article content.  When you’re done, you can mark the articles as read.  The blog name will then go back to a normal font until there are new articles.

Google Reader makes it easy for me to keep up on my blog reading.  This is particularly true for sites that don’t get updated very often.

Adding a blog is really easy.  Just look for the syndication or subscription link.  Usually flagged with an icon like this: .  Just copy the URL, in Reader click “Add a Subscription”, paste in the URL and click “Add”.  You’re done.

You can even organize your blogs into categories if you like.

You can “star” individual articles so you can come back to them later, for example, I will star an article that I want to share with someone else or write an article about.  Anything I want to remember for later.  You can share articles and email them to others.  Very slick product.

The other thing I like is that it’s online.  I can access the same blogs from any of my computers and the read/unread status is the same everywhere.

How do you manage your list of favorite blogs?  Speak up in comments.

Get more at http://www.google.com/reader

I don’t know about you, but I love GMail.  I have grown so accoustomed to the idea of labels instead of folders that Outlook just frustrates me.  Why can’t a message be in more than one folder?

After I got my BlackBerry, I tried the GMail app.  Granted it looks nice and let’s you view messages in a threaded manner, access labels and stars, etc.  It sucks when it comes to getting mail to my phone.  It doesn’t seem to do push, and, it doesn’t have an icon in the alert area to tell me there’s new mail.  So, I abandoned it.  Access my email using imap works great.

Now, RIM has released the Enhanced Google Mail plug-in for BlackBerry.  This is a nice compromise.  It looks just like the regular mail/messaging applications and it gives to access to stars, labels, archiving messages, and marking spam even viewing conversations.

In this first picture, you can see the menu options added for Google Mail.  Since this is part of the standard messaging application, all other apps that extend messeging still work.

New menu options

When looking at your inbox, you can see stars and conversations.

With a message open, you can also see labels.

Now, there are a couple of limitations.  The sync of labels and stars is one-way only.  From the phone to your account.  This sucks if you are an active email user…but, it’s still better than we had before.

The other challenge is for people that have a Google Apps account…like me.  I did a bunch of searching on the net and found that RIM can deal with this.  You need to call support with your carrier, get bumped up to RIM support and ask them to set your domain for “GIMAP” (gee-eye-map).  This will cause BIS to recognize your domain as a gmail domain and all is good.

Since RIM released the AppWorld for BlackBerry applications, it has only been available on handheld devices.  Wouldn’t it be nice to access it from your PC, just to make browsing a little easier.

Well, RIM listened.  They have created a full web app for perusing AppWorld.  You can view by categories, search, etc.  If you find an app you like, you can send a link to your phone to complete the purchase.

You have access to the description, reviews, screen shots, program info (version, size, etc).

http://appworld.blackberry.com/webstore/

Thanks to Gizmodo.com for the lead on this one.

DropBox Logo

For a long time, I’ve been using thumb drives to sync files between machines.  Of course, not everyone has as many computers as I do.  But, for those of you with multiple computers DropBox is great.

Unlike some web-based services DropBox makes it very easy to get your files stored on their servers.  You install a small agent,  that sits in the system tray.  It creates a folder on your system, any files you put into this folder are syncronized to online storage.  And, this is done very quickly.  There are even little markers to tell you which files are current and which still need to be synchronized.  Keep in mind that you can interact with the files in your DropBox folder even when off-line.  The files will be updated when you get connected.

In addition to having copy of each file in your account, DropBox lets you recover deleted files and previous versions of a given file.  This is handy when, for example, you accedentally save changes you didn’t intend to.

They have three account levels, Basic (2GB), Pro 50 (50GB) and Pro 100 (100GB).  They are free, $99/yr, and $199/yr with clients for Windows, Mac and Linux.  Yes, you can use your DropBox to move files between platforms.

After you have your account setup, you can create shared folders.  Basically a folder you can use to hand-off files with others in your company, family, or group.  They don’t need to have a DropBox account.

I have found DropBox to be a great addition…even with only a free account.

Learn more at DropBox.

Dragon NaturallySpeaking 9 and 10 cannot be installed on 64-bit Windows XP/Vista operating systems and will prompt the user with an error message stating the operating system is not supported.

** Update as of September 2008 ** Support for 64-bit operating systems is a common request from Dragon customers. As you may know, 64-bit operating systems represent a relatively small percentage of the operating system market, but that market segment is growing rapidly. Users of 64-bit operating systems know firsthand that many programs on the market do not support that operating environment at this point. Products like Dragon are especially complex to support in this kind of environment. We are committed to supporting Windows Vista 64 in the future, but we have not announced the date.

Note: Dragon Naturally Speaking can be installed on systems using 64-bit processors where a 32-bit OS is used.

I’ve been a mind mapper for a long time. I’ve done them by hand and with software. For a long time, the software of choice was MindManager from MindJet. It’s a truly great piece of software…it does many things and allows for truly amazing levels of integration with Microsoft products and the web. They just released version 8.0. It offers some interesting stuff, but it’s starting to remind me of the “Integrated Office” packages that were around in the early ’80s. And, frankly, it’s getting kind of expensive. The upgrade is $129, new is $349.

So, I went looking to see what else is out there. There is FreeMind, an open source product that’s perty nice…and free. There is iMindMap which has this incredible organic look to it…it’s really amazing, but it’s expensive too.

The other issue I have is that I use a bunch of different computers. It’s a hassle keeping everything available on all the machines, network storage isn’t good because I’m not always on the same network. Sometimes, I’m not on a network at all.

Then I came across MindMeister. Sound familiar? Sounds awfully like MindManager to me. Anyway, this is a web-based mind mapping tool that supports Google Gears. It has a good, fully usable, user interface and does the things I need. Below is an example map that comes with your account.  You should notice that this isn’t an image, it’s an interactive map.  You can zoom, pan, expand and contract nodes…couldn’t do this with MindManager.

This map shows basic colors and icons, you can attach notes to topics, all the basic features. From there it starts getting really cool.

So, I’ve been playing with Google’s new Chrome browser today.  So far, I like the feel of it.  I do miss a couple of the IE plug-ins (oddly, the Google Toolbar is one).

I’d like to give the Pogo browser from AT&T a try. This browser offers some interesting user interface improvements that could me browsing new and exciting.

I’m a little scared that it’s from AT&T…yet I’m oddly intrigued at the same time.

Does anyone have an invitation they can send my way? Come on…please…

http://www.pogobrowser.com

One of my coworkers told me about a little extra on a web site he frequents. It shows a world map with the location of visitors to the site.

I did a little digging and found that http://www.maploco.com/ will allow anyone to have a similar map.

So, I decided to plant one right here to see how it works.

Create your own visitor map!