ColinAke.com…until I write a book.

Here are some of the Web 2.0 ish programs and websites I’ve been using to help organize my online life… It’s been requested in the Skribit widget so I’m going to write about them.  We’ll start with the Web 2.0 sites/companies that still use after a while because they add value to my life.

Twitter
Many people don’t ‘get’ Twitter, but I use it for networking. I’ve met some really cool people and learned of some really cool events over Twitter. It also amuses me and keeps me up to date on current events I’d never hear about otherwise.  And yes, I spend TONS of time on Twitter. I follow 114 people and 141 people follow me. That’s a lot of data incoming. Oh, and if you use Twitter, you should UseQwitter - it tells you when people stop following you. And TweetDeck - awesome Twitter client. And follow me.

RescueTime
I blogged about RescueTime recently and even though it doesn’t enhance either my life or my productivity I still use it to see what I’m spending time on. Useful, even if not THAT useful.

Mint.com
Mint is awesome - it keeps track of my finances in one place. Bank accounts, credit card bills, etc - it’s all there. Transaction data is pulled in in from all places and lets me manage my purchases and see how much over budget I’m going (as is normally the case). I think Mint is probably the most useful tool overall from a utility standpoint, as it’s helped me curb my spending just by keeping track of it. Give it a shot.

Skribit
Skribit is pretty cool and they have the blog content suggestion thing down. If you have a blog (and people who read it), check it out and give it a try. Until then, just recommend it to friends who fall into that category.

GrooveShark
I use GrooveShark as my primary and only web radio client. I tried Pandora, never liked it (not enough control), and haven’t gotten around trying last.fm, but GrooveShark lets you make your playlist up as you go along and also has a pretty cool autoplay option.

And then there are sites that I don’t go back to after signing up. I can only think of one because they’re that forgettable.

Gyminee.com
I’m not saying it’s not a cool idea, I just don’t work out enough or care enough to take the time to input EXACTLY what I had for lunch and how much I worked out. Just didn’t stay atop the priority list long enough.

And last, but not least, stuff I want to try.

Cloud Crap
Whether it’s data backup or some server instances, I want to learn more about the cloud and how to use it. JungleDisk looks way cool.

I’ve lost time and motivation to complete this post, but feel I should post something, so here ya go. Suggest something else for me to write about, if you want.

Colin

There are about 10 of us sitting around waiting for Barcamp Atlanta day 2 to begin - eating some biscuits and hanging out. Day 1 was packed with tons of presentations and information. I sat in on the following presentations:

• Atlanta Start Weekend 2 and how it’ll be different from last year. The main thing is there won’t be any companies formed up front, and that the group of participants can split up into as many groups as they want and work on as many projects as they want. Also heard a pitch from Paul and Skribit (which I’m using, and you should either submit or vote on content suggestions)
• Startup Branding - basic concepts of a brand and how to manage it as a startup.
• Commercial Space Development - Presentation by Michael Mealling, VP of Business Development for Masten Space Systems, a private company working on completely re-usable sub-orbital spacecraft.
• Political Panel - this was a discussion turned debate with a representative from the libertarian, republican, democrat, and independent viewpoints. Entertaining to say the least, but focused on talking about how to build an environment where diverse views can exist without shoving them down each other’s throats.
• “How to build buzz without being a scumbag spammer” - interesteding discussion on blogging / publicity, etc and getting known in a given community. Some different opinions on that one… but we kept coming back to “It depends on who your market is.”
• Liquid Nitrogen Fun - breaking a racquetball after it was frozen… cool stuff. Then came the frozen food. Frozen marshmallows, frozen cheetos, and of course ice cream created with liquid nitrogen.

Good stuff. Off to day two. I have two presentations today - 9AM on VOIP on the iPhone, and 10:30 on blogging. Should be fun stuff.

Take care,

Colin

I’m not sure what to expect as I attend Barcamp next weekend. The one rule of Barcamp is that everyone has to be prepared to present, and though I’m not 100% sure what I’m going to present on, I’m leaning towards VOIP on the iPhone.

There will be some killer presentations there that will blow mine out of the water (looking forward to hearing about recent Commercial Space Development, an overview of Yahoo! Pipes, a look at Open Innovation, and maybe even eating foods that have been dropped in liquid nitrogen). I’m not sure anyone will want to hear all about VOIP on the iPhone, but we’ll see if it’s interesting. It was either that or “How to make someone else pay for your travels during school.”  I also considered talking about open source in the military, but I don’t know if I know enough about the topic.

I’m looking forward to Barcamp - are you going to be there?  If so, what are you presenting on? What do you want to hear from me?  I’m open to suggestions!

Hope to see you there.

Colin

Time management is always difficult for me.  Always has been, likely always will be.  So, out of curiosity more than a desire to cage the animal within, I signed up for RescueTime.com a while back - you just sign up for RescueTime and then run the application - every few seconds it updates the website with what you’re working on and tracks how much time you spend doing what.

Let me say that the ridiculously large “Twitter” totals and “communication” totals show what we already know - that I’m FAR too connected online and spend a lot of time networking… but I think that’s a good thing, long-run.  Also note that most of the time my computer has a twitter feed open in the foreground while music is playing in the background, and I’m doing other stuff - so that adds to the chaos.  This is broken down by Category.

By Category

Anyways, here’s a breakdown of my time from RescueTime. It takes a little customization to get the categories right - straight out of the box it may not recognize all your programs or know how you categorize the application. In other words, a lot of people think that Twitter is a waste of time, but I find it to be one of the most useful networking tools I have at my fingertips.

Overall Time Spent

Overall, even though it takes some customization to make sure that your programs are in the right category or tagged the right way, RescueTime educates you on your own time use - I didn’t realize how much time I’d spent with TweetDeck open until I saw this graph:

By Program/Website

If you’re looking for a way to see how you spend your time on your computer, give RescueTime a shot - it’s free. Hope you enjoyed knowing what specifically I do on my computer.

Now that you’ve seen what I do, let’s ask the question: “Colin, can’t you do most of that on your iPhone?” And of course the answer is, yes, I can. I don’t do anything crazy with my computer - just the basic stuff - that’s why I like my iPhone so much.

Until next time, take care.

Colin

The iPhone has WiFi. This opens up some awesome possibilities for VOIP/SIP connections over the WiFi to help supplement the AT&T plan. I’m almost always around WiFi at work, home, and school, and when I purchased the iPhone I was hoping I could get a setup that would allow me to make some calls over either VOIP or SIP to cut down on my AT&T minutes.

I started following a few different options, most of which included jailbreaking the phone. That’s not something I’m going to do, so I just continued to wait. I began stalking a solution called iCall on Twitter and Facebook, and beat the crowd and became 1 of 100 beta testers for their application. It’s OK, but it’s not the best solution in the world (crashes every now and then, etc). Their demo shows people transferring calls from the cellular network to the iCall application, but I haven’t been able to figure that out.  Granted, I need to download the new beta version of that program in order to truly evaluate the most recent version of the iCall application.  I should also mention that once iCall is up and running and out of beta, recent plans mentioned that they’ll charge $10/month for unlimited usage.

The other possible solution is a link of several solutions. Gizmo5 is a SIP service much like Skype, and it’s pretty decent. Inbound calls are free. I can get an inbound call to Gizmo5 by routing it through my GrandCentral number or having people call my Gizmo5 number directly. However, calling out is the trick - in order to call out via Gizmo5 and it not cost money, I have to use a dialer (like GrandCentral’s web button, or several other services) that first calls the Gizmo5 number and then calls the destination number - thus both the inbound calls (other caller to my G5 number) and my outbound calls (dialer calls my G5 number) are considered “inbound” and allows me to make free calls.

A solution just showed up on Apple’s application store called Fring that is a dialer - If you want to make some calls through Gizmo5, just set up a G5 account and download Fring. Give it a try and see what you think - I don’t have it down to a science yet, but free calls sound good to me.

Until next time (I’ll update when I get my preferred setup more figured out), take care of yourselves.

Colin

I started looking at online project management software yesterday - nothing fancy, but I was comparing the stuff from 37signals (Basecamp, Backpack, etc) to GoPlan.org.  I ended up signing up for a free account with both and was a little frustrated knowing the restrictions on usage because I don’t want to pay a monthly fee for the service.  I was spending too much time trying to anticipate which projects were most important to me to manage and not enough time managing products.

So yesterday afternoon I started looking through open source alternatives. There used to be something called ActiveCollab that was free/open source, but they switched to a pay model recently and there’s no free version. Definitely not going that direction, so I started looking for a fork. Sure enough, there’s something out there called ProjectPier at ProjectPier.org that’s a split of ActiveCollab that has committed to staying open source.

I downloaded ProjectPier and installed it on my server - and I love it. Has the features I need (task management, note collaboration, milestones, etc) and will help me infinitely in managing not only my personal projects (BravesBlast, Project Mayhem, a few other ideas I’m popping around), but my school projects as well - any large group project is going to get a project so we can exchange files, thoughts, and tasks.

Check it out if you have a server and are looking for some project management software.  I think it’s some good stuff.

Take care,

Colin

Many of you know I started BravesBlast just over a year ago with Jonathan Torrell after talking about starting a Braves blog for some time.  I registered the domain name in July and we finally started blogging just over a year ago before the Braves were eliminated from the 2007 playoffs.

In the year since we’ve had ups and downs - the downs being mostly in the last few months. Either from exhaustion, boredom, or displeasure avoidance, we stopped blogging for the most part when it became evident that the Braves really actually sucked.  Before that, we were averaging 200-300 uniques a day, over twice that many page views, and tons of traffic.  That was, of course, prefaced by a long off-season during which I wrote posts as often as I could - a couple times a week.

But where to go from here? I’ve started writing over there again… mostly offseason stuff - what should we do, who goes where, who should we sign, not sign, etc.  Another blogger has approached us about buying it, but I’m not sure that’s still on the table.  We could write tons, build a bigger team, and try to become THE Braves blog, or we could accept that we’ve had some fun with it and pass it on to bloggers who will continue the BravesBlast legacy.

I’m leaning towards writing more… mostly because I really do enjoy writing and I really do think that by building a bigger team I won’t have to blog once a day, every day this year.  I do know I won’t be getting season tickets again - that was $250 down the drain because I didn’t go nearly enough to justify the purchase of season tickets.  If we go full-tilt, watch out for some ridiculous content.  It could be pretty ballin’.

Colin

Naming a project is not easy.

First, you come up with some sweet names. But all the domains are taken, so you start coming up with variations. Nothing sounds right. Ever. So you change some more, dig out some synonyms, and it still doesn’t work. Then you try some wordplay. But all the domains are taken because you finally came up with something catchy. You email the people who own the domains, and they attempt to rip you off. You decide to move on.

Then you’re back to the drawing board. You think, you think, you bash your head against a rock, and you think some more. You come up with stuff that sucks, stuff that doesn’t sound good, and stuff that’s just plan old not awesome.

And that’s where I am now. In the middle of the mundane and the mayhem, trying to sort out good from bad, and running out of steam. At this point, it’s either call it Project Mayhem forever, get together a group of friends to brainstorm names with pizza as a bribe (hint hint: let me know if you want in), or resort to NameThis, which isn’t bad in and of itself, but I’m not convinced it’s the way to go yet.

Oh, by the way, if you have a great knack for names, let me know. I’ve got a challenge for ya.

Colin

For those of you who are not “in the know” or fans of what I like to call the godfathers of modern rock and roll (AC/DC), the aforementioned band releases a new CD on October 20 (available only at… WalMart??!?) and kicks off a tour shortly thereafter.

All that to say, I’m extremely pumped and looking forward to the AC/DC concert in Atlanta on December 16.  I’m going with Nathan, Lance, and Mark, some good friends of mine.  Nathan and I recently started a to-do list for the concert, which includes:

• Pre-Order new CD
• Wear AC/DC shirt to show
• Familiarize yourself with lyrics most likely to be sung along with
• Take Earplugs
• Purchase shirt from current tour

We’ve also started finishing every correspondance we have with “And we’re going to AC/DC!” or some variation thereof.

For the unconvinced, check out AC/DC’s epic songs - and this literally is the tip of the iceberg - Back In Black, Shook Me All Night Long, Thunderstruck, TNT, For Those About To Rock and more…

Any way you put it, I’m excited to be going to the show.  Need to start hunting for that t-shirt.

Colin

I’m cutting edge here, y’all. By cutting edge, I mean I happened upon IntenseDebate a few months ago and have been beta testing the heck out of their new WordPress plugin, which has some SWEET features that are not offered by their competitors.  So you blogger peoples out there should be thrilled to see IntenseDebate acquired recently by Automattic, the outfit that runs WordPress.  There will soon be even better integration between ID and WordPress and I think the plugin I’ve been testing is the core of this purchase - it’s sweet to be in on something that millions of other bloggers aren’t.

On another note, I LOVE seeing success stories like this go down.  Michael Koenig, the ID support guy, is perhaps one of the nicest people I’ve “met” online - he’s been great in relation to ID support and has taken the time to drop me a personal email during the loss of my grandmother. I really appreciate the attention to detail, willingness to get to know their customers and listen to bloggers, and dedication to creating a better product.  IntenseDebate, with this new plugin, is THE best comment system in WordPress without a doubt.  The trick is getting people to comment on my blog now. :)

Congratulations to Jon and Michael, and the rest of the team.  I love it when people roughly my age succeed at starting and selling a business. I’m sure that the rest of you WordPress users will see IntenseDebate become more popular and an even more awesome comment system in the years to come.

Congrats, guys!

Colin