New tools

I’m always on the look­out for new tools to help me orga­nize the flood of var­ied infor­ma­tion that flows through my inbox and brain in the course of a given day. Lacking a per­sonal need, some­times I will look for tools that my employer or cowork­ers can use to stream­line the things we do every day.

As a reporter, this meant find­ing ways to stream­line sub­mit­ting arti­cles for edit­ing or research­ing or man­ag­ing a sta­ble and accu­rate list of con­tacts. All of my solu­tions involved Web-based tools; none of my sug­ges­tions were taken seri­ously because, well, some­times news­pa­pers are slow-moving beasts from another era that wouldn’t see the value of a time-saver if it bit them in the mast­head. (Another rea­son could have some­thing to do with the fact that most of my time-saving ideas were unso­licited, half-formed, crack­pot notions that took advan­tage of what­ever meme hap­pened to be the buzz­word of that par­tic­u­lar month.)

At var­i­ous times, my ideas have included a wiki for con­tacts — rejected by me on account of the fact that the wiki-style learn­ing curve is a bit high for reporters with nor­mal jobs to do. I con­sid­ered whether my news­pa­per should pub­lish blogs — some­thing I still think the paper should do, some­thing I would still be will­ing to do and get paid for, some­thing that, alas, is still a long ways off.

My ideas also included the excel­lent 37signals prod­uct Highrise. Highrise is a col­lab­o­ra­tive con­tact man­ager that keeps track of notes, bio­graph­i­cal details, phone num­bers, and other data about peo­ple you or your cowork­ers have had con­tact with. Very nifty stuff, and it was just what I was look­ing for at the time.

While the Highrise ser­vice is great (and free, to some extent) the inter­face was less than I was will­ing to com­mit to; that is, I didn’t visit the Web site reg­u­larly enough to make use of it. My account is now so out of date, that I don’t even want to bother ever log­ging in again to try to update my files.

Now, I’m on to some­thing new — new to me, at least. Google Sites. I know. That’s not exactly the newest meme on the block, but so far, it seems to be offer­ing me the fea­tures I need: the abil­ity to track a lot of ran­dom data about peo­ple in a search-able and orga­nized way. It’s cloud com­put­ing, of course (every­thing is these days), so I can access it from home or wher­ever. Plus, it’s part of Google, which I use every day already.

Will my fix­a­tion with this new tool last? Hard to say. I hope so. I’d like to actu­ally get a pro­duc­tiv­ity boost out of some of the stuff I do, rather than an end­less list of failed experiments.

Related posts:

1. Tools of the trade
2. The “20 signs” thing
3. OPML files: The mix-tape of the new century?
4. On 25 ran­dom things
5. The URL rope-a-dope, or how social book­mark­ing should evolve