Life online

As can probably be seen from the little blurb at the top of my blog, a lot of my life is connected to the Internet. I'm old enough that a significant portion of my life was lived before the days of Internet connectivity even being available to the general public, so I know it's possible to get along quite well without some sort of global connectivity, but I can't imagine what my own life would be like right now without it.

Here's just a little sampler of the stuff I do with global connectivity on a daily basis.

Two-way communication

Including the Inbox feature on Facebook, which is essentially just email anyway, I read in the region of 100 emails a day and send out about 20 a day. In addition I also send and receive a large number of Instant Messenger type messages a day using a couple of IM platforms such as Windows Live Messenger on the Internet and MXIT on my cell phone. Just a little aside about "Windows Live Messenger", I think it's a stupid name because most people already knew the name MSN Messenger very well. Since I don't even use MS Windows it's even more silly, the application I use is called emesene, kinda sounds like MSN doesn't it?

Other forms of two-way communication I use are things like this blog, where comments can be left on my posts, or a whole host of Facebook features that can be turned into conversation tools. The whole status updates thing on Facebook can be turned into a conversation that your friends can listen in on and take part in (though it does look a little odd if you can only see the one side of the conversation).

News

There's a lot happening out there, both in the mainstream news and in technology. To try to get a handle on the sheer volume of information I use Google Reader to bring together news feeds from all around the Web. These feeds include some mainstream news sources like BBC News and News24, some technology feeds like Planet Ubuntu and TechCrunch and some personal things like a feed of new photos posted by my Flickr contacts and a feed of Google Blog Search results for Port Elizabeth.

Getting organised

My calendar is Google Calendar, this keeps track of a lot of stuff like appointments, birthdays, holidays and the like. With public calendars I also see things like the Formula 1 and Springbok Rugby schedules. Google Calendar can send four types of riminder of upcoming events, a daily agenda email, a popup reminder in your browser, an email reminder and an SMS reminder. I get the daily agenda email and usually set the email and SMS reminders to alert me to important events coming up.

For more general reminders I'm testing out Remember The Milk, though at the moment I'm not making very heavy use of it.

I keep some of my documents in Google Documents, which makes it easy to get at them and work on them from anywhere with Internet connectivity. With the sharing and collaboration features it's also fairly simple to collaborate on stuff without the confusion caused by several versions of a document or spreadsheet floating around in email.

Research

Well this one is fairly obvious. There's information on just about everything out there somewhere on the Internet, it's just a matter of finding it. Google helps, as do Yahoo!, Wikipedia and a host of other tools.