I prefer Gmail because it's quicker and less bloated. But Outlook will definitely be with us for some time, and while it is, Taglocity offers a product that closes the gap a little.

I'm running Taglocity 3.0 professional edition (free trial; soon to revert to standard edition), after using the 2.0 for about eight months.

In a nutshell, Taglocity radically enhances an existing Outlook feature called "Categories." (Categories = tags). For some time, Outlook has allowed you to categorize emails, but it was clunky.

Here's how I set up and use Taglocity, after installing it:

1. Assuming you currently store your Outlook email in folders, open a folder and select all emails. Now, use the Taglocity Pane (atop your main Outlook page) to assign a tag to all items in this folder. You can just use the name of the folder, but I believe in following these conventions:
   
   
   a) don't pluralize ("report" not "reports") or capitalize, except
   
   b) capitalize acronyms ("PR", not "pr"), and
   
   c) add a hypen after tags that would otherwise form words or parts of words; e.g., "PR-" and "Toronto-". This will pay off later if you run a search for "professional". [Granted, it will fail if your email includes something like, "Toronto-based accountant"].
   
   
   
2. Go through all your folders and repeat this
3. Open your Tag Bar window (click "Tag Bar") clean up your tags. Through right-clicking you can consolidate similar tags.
4. Now, within your Tag Bar window, move the tags around into groups and then assign a colour to each group (e.g., industries are blue; administration is green; personal is yellow)
5. Still within the Tag Bar window, add a half dozen of your most popular tags to the actual Tag Bar. This bar sits atop Outlook's main page, and makes it easier to assign tags to emails.
6. Now, go back and see where you can assign more than one existing tag to an email. E.g., you have an email about a flight on Air Canada and another about consulting services to Air Canada. Tag both "air-canada" but tag one "flight" and another "consulting" or something.
7. When you've done all this, put all of your email in an "archive" folder and delete your other folders. One caveat, for repetitive projects, I prefer to use folders to tags. E.g., I write a monthly newsletter and I store material for it throughout each month; I will tag this material with the name of the newsletter, but I also store it in a folder called "May 2009" or whatever.

Yes, all of this takes some time. You may not follow all these steps for the email you received in the past. But the process demonstrates how to use Taglocity for email as you receive it. When an email arrives, once it's dealt with as a work task, you can click twice and deal with it as clutter.

Finding anything is simply about narrowing down the options -- triangulating. If, in six months, you need details about that Air Canada flight, you can use Outlook's search box to run a keyword search "category:air-canada, category:flight". Even if this produces 100 emails, you can easily scroll to the rough period of the flight. And you can combine the search with "from:dave"-type commands.

If the size of your company permits it, you can benefit from a network effect by making all of your tags public; i.e., the tags you assign to an email will travel with the email when an email is forwarded or replied to. If you invest the time to create a taxonomy for your firm, email conversations will only have to be tagged once, rather than by each recipient.

Sounds complicated, but in fact the top benefits I've experienced from using this are:

1. if you equate a tag to a folder, you can put one email in two or more "folders" at the same time, so it's easier to find regardless of how your brain is working when you need the email. E.g., you might spend a year storing email first by industry (or client) and then by service performed, and then decide you want to store by service performed first and then by industry/client within those folders. With tags, you just do both.
2. it's ridiculously quick to tag and drag emails to a single folder than to drag up and down Outlook and through nested folders.
3. though command-line searches are not popular, in fact we have all become used to them through Google; they're quite quick when you get used to them. have you ever watched someone painfully spend two or three minutes trying to find a simple email? if you can narrow the problem down by two or three tags (and perhaps a rough date), it shouldn't take more than ten or fifteen seconds to find a needle in a 10,000 email haystack.

In time, people will no doubt have personal taxonomies. You'll add 100 tags to Gmail and you'll use them for all work documents, personal documents, calendar items, emails, photos and videos, and basically any discrete piece of content you store.

I was reading a book about Google last night; though their success seems inevitable now, there was a point where Yahoo was monetizing their page much more than Google and I could imagine a reasonable person wondering if Google had the right strategy?

Of course, the right strategy was to subordinate monetization to the "product"; offering the fastest and best search results is Google's essential element.

Dictionary.com has a lot of ads and a lot of street cred. Perhaps for this reason I kept it as my standard dictionary for years after discovering the superior OneLook. But today I switched. 

OneLook is a writer's dictionary. It's clean and uses a simple command box with instructions right beneath the box. Its best feature, however, is the reverse dictionary: you type a few words and it usually produces hundreds of words or phrases in a sort of semantic triangulation.

Just 'cause I'm at it, I also use these writing tools:

• www.rhymezone.com
  
• Jack Lynch Guide to Grammar and Style
• Unofficial Canadian Dictionary
• Catalysts of creativity: googlism, Google Sets and the full text of Ulysses (not sure why, but 10 minutes of reading this always refreshes my mind)
• The best web-based mind-mapping tool I can find: http://bubbl.us/
• How to edit copy.

It's not quite a fridgebook, but life is incremental.

Asus Kitchen PC.

(Does anyone else remember Commodore 64's being pushed for the capacity to organize recipes?)

Link.

For a brief period, just knowing what google was, and how to do a keyword search, made you a magic ambassador of factology.

But the value in web2.0 sites spills over into the commons; ie. these sites tend to organize the internet in ways other than keywords.

Del.icio.us is a tool for storing one's bookmarks in the "cloud". I've written before that its best use is actually clipping and sharing news stories -- a sort of live repository of external content related to what you care about (ie. you and five friends agree to store all articles on the business strategy of Furbees in there).

But Del.icio.us also works as a research tool. The site's designers chose to use a logical, word-based hierarchy for their URLs (there's a better name for that?!). Ie. if your name is david11, your del.icio.us account is del.icio.us/david11. 

What made Delicious (getting tired of the periods) unique when it emerged was its use of tagging. So, instead of just saving a news story or website to Delicious, you assign a few keywords (or tags) to it as well, allowing you to find this URL easily in time.

So, the spillover effect of most of the internet being tagged is that you can search for content by its tag, and with the logical URL system they use, that's as easy as:

http://del.icio.us/tag/a-word-that-describes-whatever-the-heck-you're-looking-for.

Even better, you can do a keyword search within this tag.

My last post was on Ryanair's business strategy. If you Google that, the results are annoying. Plan B is del.icio.us/tag/ryanair ... and then a keyword search for strategy (there are 11 answers, all of which are interesting).

Furthermore, I not only have 11 answers, but 11 people/accounts, each of which could lead to related ideas ... things I haven't yet thought of. Sort of like, if I like Fiest and RHCP, an algorithm predicts that I may like your cousins weird band from Wisconsin (most likely, I would hate it).

Google, you know algorithms ... get on this Delicious train! 

But it pays off. 

Rather than storing documents in folders, tagging those documents with extreme discipline and using smart folders (and/or quick searches) makes it much easier to findlocate yer stuff.

Cool article on metatagging on OSX; Vista is similar.

I live in a town that's grown from about 20,000 people to about 65,000 people in six or so years. It's a suburb of Toronto; or, in a sense, a suburb of the Toronto suburbs.

I think, of the 45,000 people who just moved here, most came from the nearby suburbs. One thing you notice about this town is how few people shop on its traditional main street -- it's a pretty street with traditional shops, but at peak times it's dead. My theory is that, these people who came from other suburbs return to those suburbs to shop; they are used to the big box stores with big value. To the locals, it may seem odd to drive for 45 minutes to buy meat, but to suburbanites that's an average Saturday (ie. hell). You could say that main street has been disintermediated by people whose commute has conditioned them to long drives.

I think something similar occurs on the Web. I was listening to Cat Stevens on youtube (ie. the universal juke box) and wanted a listing of tracks on a cassette tape that I likely lost five years ago; I wanted to listen to the songs on YouTube in the same order as the album/cassette.

What did I do? Until recently, I would have gone to hmv.com, because that's a Canadian website at the online source for physical music media. But before I started typing,  I realized that Amazon is better than HMV. I don't really care that much that it's in the U.S.

I don't care about the more local option; all that I care about is the one big answer that I can store in my head. I can keep a few dozen URLs in there, and Amazon.com covers off a lot of products.

So, as far as the web goes, maybe things are spiky and not flat. Maybe there's only room for one Amazon, and one eBay and one Google, etc. The Network Effect supports this, too.

But the flat Earth argument would be that sophisticated searches could flatten all of the Amazon competitors and provide me with a list of prices. So Amazon becomes where I research and price determines where I buy. But maybe Joe the plumber/surfer doesn't use that type of thing.

Have you read about the Asus Eee? For well under $500 ($300 on Amazon at the moment), you can get a pretty basic, really small, Linux laptop. 

You're not meant to audit GE on it, but by relying a bit on the cloud, you can do quite a bit, for really not very much. Great for students. Good as a "household junker" laptop; I'm sure a few will find their ways to garage workshops or on whatever floor of the house currently lacks a terminal.

But, let's by frank, at 7" the thing's still a clunker. If it were a search engine, it'd be Yahoo, not Google. 

I think that, somewhere between the iPhone -- which sits in pockets on street corners, and comes out in meetings and bathrooms -- and the Asus Eee, is an untapped market that I call the FridgeBook (or fridge computer ... whatever).

FridgeBooks would be like iPhones, but with much larger screens. They'd have magnets that would let you stick 'em to your fridge. They'd be always-on and always on wifi. So as families do what families do at home -- more often than not in and around the kitchen -- they have a device so efficient and close, it can tell them:

• what to wear outside
  
• what movie to see
• family TTD
• grocery list
• family calendar
• a recipe ...
• whatever TV has/will become
  
• visual voicemail(R)(C)(A)

I've said before: the difference between getting that type of information in 3 seconds or 10 seconds is critical. Go grab your Vista or OSX laptop and try one of these searches ... walking, booting up, etc ... it's 2 minutes or more. Asus Eee may be closer to 10 seconds. I'm saying, I want 3.

This FridgeBook(D) will be a seamless part of every nuclear family, just like cooking with radiation.

For now, the iPod Touch makes a pretty good substitute. Goods: wifi, Web, touch screen. Bads: small, no frigg'n magnets.

Writing is output, and you need to load up your brain with ideas every so often or your output begins to look like bad copies of your previous output; like the dumber cc's of Michael Keaton in Multiplicity.

I'm a writer and my tool box is a set of bookmarks I drag around from computer to computer, browser to browser. I think I use rhymezone, onelook and a list of idioms the most.

But the ever innovative Google Labs -- in which 1000 PhD's are locked deep within Cheyenne Mountain for 18 months at a time to develop world-changing web tools -- has released a new tool called Google Sets.

It's simple: you think of a few concepts and let Google Sets derive common themes between the concepts. They should have called it Google Triangulation; either way, it does some of the creative thinking for you.

Pink Floyd vigorously defending the introduction of electronics into their music; Geddy Lee had a trite saying about that. In both cases the view was that electronic instruments don't replace the creative process; they're just new tools for a musician to work with.

But I think Google Sets, etc., perhaps does replace a bit of thinking. It obfuscates derivation, but doesn't filter it through the mind. Okay, so is filtered derivation creativity? I think this just got a bit too philosophical.

Google Sets: makes it darn easy to come up with stuff!

I guess they're reading this.

'Cause that's what Radian6 does; it reads tiny little blogs (and big ones), and all other manor of social media, finding what people say about its clients. I would have thought you could just do this with google, technorati and maybe a few phantom flickr and facebook accounts. Maybe they do? But they hint that they have a substantial back end.

This is a nice article as it doubles as both a look at where social media meets PR, and it profiles the unique strategy Radian6 used to launch their start-up. They gave it away for free to a small, local sub of a global PR firm, in exchange for feedback (and cred.) It worked brilliantly.

Link to Globe & Mail. 

... companies must avoid the "Kumbaya Zone" - the place where social media is ultimately a time-waster and has little business value.

Link.

I think the first mix tape I made was for myself; maybe some Pearl Jam and Led Zeppelin I'd jog to. Then I found out girls liked mix tapes and I started making them with different songs -- each carefully chosen to represent something.

Now it's not just teenagers in love who make playlists in iTunes. Really, these are not songs but lists -- lists that call individual songs from one's harddrive. And it's the individual song that people purchase (or don't purchase) today. Playlists can have hundreds of songs and there can be overlap from one playlist to another. In fact, they can even be random or "smart" -- not pre-set, but based on attributes such as how often songs are listened too, how highly they're ranked, their genre, etc.

But where does all this wizardry leave the 14-song CD sitting at the counter in Starbucks? Given the context of 99 cent songs at the iTunes store, infinite playlists and zero-loss digital copying, I think of that CD as just another playlist. 

Like Sheryl Crow just made me a mix tape.

The last time I used this service it was called del.icio.us.

Seriously, I think the functionality is pretty much the same, but it's how Skimbit uses social bookmarking that makes it interesting.

Key phrases for this site are: collaboration, decision-making, web-clipping, social bookmarking.  

Okay, say you need to decide what hotel you and four lads will stay in in Paris. So you set up a Skimbit account, create a project called Paris Hotel, and invite everyone to join the project. Then each member can go off and clip suggestions from web searches at the leisure with a handy little button on their browser. Each suggestion is ranked by the critieria you set at the outset (price, location, near a bar). After a week or two, you have loads of options and a good point from which you can decide.

That's the collaborative part -- you can do it in Google Docs and it's only a little more ugly. 

But I think the social part -- the ability to view some of the other users' decisions -- that will provide the web2.0 value; it'll play a role in organizing the web's content. 

http://skimbit.com

Ever dug into iTunes with a tune in your head, only to find you can't buy it on iTunes?

Ever used iTunes like an LP player ... one song at a time?

YouTube is basically a P2P music service, with every song I've ever wanted to hear in video format. Content owners likely allow YouTube to host music videos for the same reason they let radio play songs. But if they knew I used YouTube like a kind of infinite LP player, maybe they wouldn't.

Okay, I've read through the 50 profiles and a few look cool. That said, anything around developer's tools, gambling or video games aren't interesting to me.

Also, I think the point of this post is not to highlight an angel investment opportunity, but to show a few directions the web is going in (that's the kind of grammar up with which I will not put!).

http://www.dotspots.com/

This enriches news stories. For bloggers, etc, you annotate a block of text and that annotation is shared in some way with others. So, say there's a CNN story on something like "McCain apologizes for pig ad," a million people could annotate that "meme" and come to some wisdom-of-the-crowds solution for what it means.

Applied to all web content, it could be interesting. 

Revenue stream: not obvious.

www.techcrunch50.com/2008/conference/presenter.php?presenter=53

Yammar. It's like twitter, but for colleagues. It looks like there is a single webpage with status updates for everyone. Ie. "finishing the headline; mocking up the icons; testing the mail lists; brainstorming"; etc.

http://www.copyboxapp.com/

Mass customization of interactive content, for the non-technical writer. (ie. if it's raining today in the home city of the web-site visitor, a cute joke about that is the headline.) I think this will feel weird and forced at first, much like those animated paintings must have seemed odd when Hogwarts first got them. But, seriously, how much more rich can you make media?

On the other hand, there's a small chance you'll visit this website on an iPhone and it will advise you to flush.

http://tingz.net/whats-this-ting/

This gets a gold star. Widgets are sorta neat, but tingz are widgets built specifically for mobile computers, and which are meant to work across platforms. In my future, people will have screens with magnets stuck to their fridge. They yank them off, add a few items to the grocery list, and check out their schedule for the weekend. Ten minutes later, the husband goes into the grocery store and sees a his updated list on his iPhone. (Or robots just anticipate and fulfil our needs; it depends on the time frame).

http://beta.me-trics.com/

I don't know what this is, but it caught my eye. I think you enter a track a wide range of personal metrics (weight, HR, $ life savings, weekly run mileage, avg. commuting time) and then do something with it.

http://www.fitbit.com/

You wear a thingy that tracks all your personal health activity and then it wifi's it up to a site that analyzes and reports the exact minute of your death (I made the last bit up.)

http://www.forwordinput.com/

Swype.

This gets my second gold star. It could totally fail, like the guy who invented a keyboard that was better than QWERTY like a century after every secretary learned QWERTY. Or it could succeed like the BlackBerry's little buttons. 

It's a better way to enter text on tiny keyboards. The company is really just an algorithm that forms words based, not on tapping keys, but on swiping a pen over a flat screen image of keys. So it's still QWERTY, but much more fluid. A small change, but if you can go from 10 WPM to 50 WPM on your iPhone/BlackBerry, it's good.

What caught my eye is that the co-founder invented T9; that predictive typing app. for SMS that's on like 2.5 billion or so phones.

http://www.getdropbox.com/

Turns your desktop into a wormhole. Except instead of sending documents to a universe where Sarah Palin is POTUSA, it goes to another desktop. Like your home one when you're at work. Coolest part is that it appears to work without you having to do anything special. Just put a doc in a folder (a magic folder).

You could read a bunch of stuff about where the web is going. Or you could just go there: http://www.techcrunch50.com/2008/conference/

(is 1.0 plural; technically, no. but it sounds wrong the other way.)

Had it for 10 min.

Hooked.

This is to the Internet what "The Making of the President" was to the making of the President (after 1960).

FTA: "Hit-driven economics is a creation of an age without enough room to carry everything for everybody.... Consider the implication: If the Amazon statistics are any guide, the market for books that are not even sold in the average bookstore is larger than the market for those that are ... In other words, the potential book market may be twice as big as it appears to be, if only we can get over the economics of scarcity. ). "

Services (transactional) above wikis blogs, videos
Internal above external.
Asia & Europe above NA.

McKinsey gets into the game. Key finding: Companies use Web 2.0 technologies more frequently for internal than for external purposes

However, I may have missed the whole point of the article, given I read it in Spreeder (see below)?!

http://www.mckinseyquarterly.com/article_page.aspx?ar=2174&pagenum=1