Thing 13 - Online Productivity Tools

Before starting - I've been well aware that since the beginning of September, I've had roughly 15 blogs to do in 15 days in order to meet the 15th deadline. Simply, a blog a day (whether or not I'm exhausted or it's past 11 PM). Now, at last, online productivity tools. And the countdown widget . . . can I load it on the top of my page? (attempted, see above)

I found iGoogle to be the most pleasing customized home page, but not surprisingly, it seemed to already know a lot about me like my metro area, and a few interests (I was already logged in to Blogger edit mode).

At work, have our own library web site, so I'm not looking for any other home page. But I do wonder if any of these personalizations, these widgets, could be made available to users inside the company?

Additionally, this whole 23 things project has ignited a desire to do some non-work related blogging, and I can see making use of many of these tools in my home life/on MY home computer (also a desire).

In the midst of exploring these productivity tools, I decided I'd like to have some non-invasive background music, so I plugged into MPR classical. I was surprised later when I logged into a demo of Backpack that I didn't loose my music, it just played in the background.

Backpack is quite cool. I especially liked the capacity to email myself reminders. I wish my work calendar system could do this. Again, back to the firewall issues at work. I know that with each email revision, we hear that there are more Internet options they are trying to incorporate, and now I think I see some of what they might be, but again, firewall issues probably cause problems.

As for my home life, it might be nice to be able to send or update family to-do lists and planning for the weekend. And especially nice to be able to send it to someone else's iphone (not quite sure that this is available, but worth a try - feature shown on 'remember the milk').

I think for all of the apps I have looked at today, they are most applicable to my home life. I have a huge extended family event coming up in over a year (we're a small family, but spready thinly over the globe), and Basecamp looks like a good tool.

Thing 11 - Tagging and Del.icio.us

The synchronicity of this tool, Del.icio.us and an expressed need in a work meeting today is pretty amazing. I was in a meeting with people who will all be representing my library organization at a two-day conference. We are grouped in pairs, and each pair takes a three hour shift, and we'll need to be able to access several links to demonstrate tools to booth visitors. We'll be using one shared computer, and we will each log on to this computer. Since we won't be on out own computers, we won't have our bookmarks.

Caveat - I need a social networking tool which functions behind my company's firewall. And I just realized that my internal library web page has a front page which I can customize with my favorite tools - like a personal bookmark list within our library website. Is this some similar social bookmarking tool (without the ability to make my own labels)?

Enter Del.icio.us, or another bookmarking tool (I want to try citeulike, which seems like it may be more academic. And understanding how a tool can be more academic, may another tool be more political, or more humorous? Or more flirty? Or since the tool is used by so many, those differences are mediated by following the tags, and the taggers that appeal to me?)

Back to this social bookmarking tool, I am not currently on my own computer, so I don't want to add any links now, but I do want to try this soon.