twopointouch

What follows was written for an offline magazine I work for called ICT for Education. It will be very much too basic for anyone who reads this blog on a regular basis (off you go). However, it may be useful for someone who stumbles along here looking for basic Web 2.0 applications they can get for free.

The Internet Toolkit

Super-charge Your Internet Use with Seven New Services

The Internet is, as everybody knows, brilliant. Pretty much whatever you are looking for is there for the asking thanks to the power of Google. But making the most of the World Wide Web can take a little time and effort. For one thing, it changes every second and new, better resources appear every day. Keeping up with these can sometimes seem like a full time job.

Plenty of these new sites and services are very good at taking up a lot of your spare time – discovered YouTube (www.youtube.com) or StumbleUpon (www.stumbleupon.com) yet? You’ll curse us for having told you! In this feature, though, we’ve picked out seven new services and recommendations and a few more that can actually save you time and make life easier.

You may have heard or read reports of something called Web 2.0 or even the Google Operating System. It doesn’t exist just yet, and Google says it’s got no intentions in that direction, but it’s indicative of the way in which the Internet is changing. Reliance on Windows, MacOS or Linux and the programs that you’ve installed on your computer is starting to recede.

All of the services we have recommended here are free and do not – to date – mean that you will receive lots of spam email.

The High-Power Homepage

Step One

Something like 80% of internet users never change their start page, in which case it is probably MSN (www.msn.co.uk) or Apple (www.apple.com). There’s nothing much wrong with these pages, but it’s possible to get a lot more from the internet page that you view more often than any other. We recommend an immediate switch to either Excite MIX (mix.excite.co.uk) or Netvibes (www.netvibes.com). Why? Because they can be almost infinitely personalised. Changing your home page means going into the Internet Options menu (Internet Explorer) or the Edit Preferences menu (Firefox).

Step Two

Assuming you sign up for Netvibes, you end up with an almost empty page that you’re invited to name for yourself. Then click on the ‘Add Content’ button in the top left. The things that you can add fall into two categories. There are ‘widgets’ – mini programs that perform a specific purpose, like a clock or a notepad. And there are also ‘Feeds’ which allow you to tap into the content of other websites and display the latest stories right on your home page.

Step Three

Begin by adding some widgets. Some of these are displayed on the menu. Simply click on the one you want and then on the words ‘Add To My Page’. Once they are on your page you can drag these about into a position that suits you best. At this point, use the ‘sign in’ link to store your preferences. The site adds a small file called a cookie to your computer so that it will remember you next time and bring up the widgets, feeds and layout that you have selected.

Step Four

Adding feeds means that you need to know the feed address. Look for the word ‘feed’ or an orange and white icon on your favourite news and information sites and copy the address that they point to. To do this, right click on the link and choose ‘Copy Shortcut’ (Internet Explorer) or ‘Copy Link Location’ (Firefox). Return to Netvibes and choose the ‘Add Feed’ command from the Add Content menu, then paste in the address of the feed you have chosen. For example, to get the BBC Education News feed, the address would be ‘http://newsrss.bbc.co.uk/rss/newsonline_uk_edition/education/rss.xml’.

Step Five

Before long, your new home page is likely to start looking pretty full. If you subscribe to a lot of websites and blogs, you’ll find that you only have room for five or six before you have to start scrolling down. A better solution is simply to start a new tab by clicking on the New Tab command. With multiple tabs, you can organise your page into different sections like National News, Education News, Shopping, Lists and Funny Stuff.

Personal Organiser

Step Six

Netvibes widgets give you some tools for organising your life, but there are a number of very powerful alternatives. One service you should certainly consider is Google Calendar. This is located at calendar.google.com. Why use an online calendar? Because you can access it from any computer, meaning you never have to say ‘I’m not sure, I’ll have to check and get back to you’. One quick tip once you have signed up: use the Q key to open the Quick-Add dialogue. This allows you to enter things like ‘Party at La Bodega tonight 8pm’ and they will be automatically interpreted and added. And yes, you can add your Google Calendar as a widget on your Netvibes home page.

Step Seven

The second element of a top-notch personal organiser is a really powerful To-Do list. On the web, there are plenty of alternatives, but we think that the best is Orchestrate (www.orchestratehq.com). The reasons that it’s great are that it offers a very attractive and simple interface. But this is without it being so simple that a piece of paper in your pocket would be equally useful. It also allows you to create up to six different lists. This means you can create new lists according to context (Home, Shopping, School, Phonecalls) or according to their urgency (Today, This Week, Soon).

Step Eight

The third ingredient you’re going to need is an address book. For this we would suggest one of two alternatives. The first is Plaxo (www.plaxo.com). This is available as a paid service and a free one. We have found the free service perfectly acceptable. Advantages: synchronises with Outlook and other PDAs to keep all your information synchronised. However, it does have habit of sending out lots of unwanted emails. The other alternative is to keep using Google, sign-up for a Google Mail account (mail.google.com) and put all your addresses in there. Advantages: GMail is a top-notch email client anyway and it will link with your Google calendar.

Pictures

Step Nine

Assuming you use a digital camera, then the Internet is the logical place to keep them. The internet service you choose probably has better back-up than you do; you can re-use the pictures on other websites very easily; and you can share links to the pictures with friends and family. There are lots of alternatives here, but the one we use is flickr (www.flickr.com). Flickr doesn’t just offer photo storage, but also lots of other great ways to share them such as slideshows, blog integration, tagging and more. There is also an inexpensive print service if you need to go down the dead-tree route.

Step Ten

Flickr isn’t just useful for looking after your own photos, it’s also very useful for finding photos to use for other purposes. Because people use tags and descriptions for their snaps, they are more easily searchable than other photo tools. Go to the Advanced Search page from the normal search page and check the box to search for photos with a Creative Commons licence. This allows you to use the pictures for projects of your own, providing you acknowledge the original photographer.

Applications

Step 11

When it comes to mainstream applications, word processors and spreadsheets, the web is also able to offer a useful alternative. In fact, in many respects online applications are actually more useful than the ones sitting on a desktop PC. You can access your documents from any computer, for example, and publish them as a web page or a blog post. You can also invite people to collaborate on the same document, avoiding the pain of email shuffle. For documents and spreadsheets, we recommend the Google service of the same name (docs.google.com).

Step 12

For those who want more applications, we would recommend Zoho (www.zoho.com). In addition to a word processor and a spreadsheet, there is also a presentation tool, a project management tool and an online diary. You can pay a subscription fee for the whole thing wrapped together, but otherwise the individual tools are free. Zoho also offers plug-ins for Microsoft Word and Excel to allow users to edit their online documents through the offline interface and synchronise the end results.