The Universal Calendar

One of the things that is a bit of a hassle is that you really would like one calendar to cover a number of your bases. You want to make sure that your calendar has your availability for work, and you can access it at home, or on your blackberry, or wherever.

And thankfully, I've finally got what I think might be a solution. With Google's mobile solution, you can sync your calendar with your BlackBerry. This is a good place to start.

One of the more complicated sides, then, is getting it synchronized with your iCal if you are a Mac user. I'm not synchronizing my BlackBerry with my Mac in a plugged in fashion -- but by using a tool like BusySync, I can sync it up with the Google calendar -- which will then sync with the BlackBerry.

Bingo, calendar unification has been achieved.

I'm still trying out BusySync -- it's not free, but if it works, I'll definitely go ahead and get it.

A Thought About Google Ads on My Blog

I put a little bit of advertising on my blog -- I don't (and haven't) expect to make any more money except to offset some of my costs for having a domain. And the internet is something where you never know when you hit the internet lottery for one thing or another, and it seems to be smart to have a way to capture that if you do. And I figure it is also one direct way to get experience with the Google ad system, as I never know when having that experience might be useful for its own reasons.

But one of the interesting things has been that now that we are in a political season, and because of that I'm doing a bit more discussion about political issues, I'm getting political ads both from candidates and organizations I might like, and also candidates and organizations that I don't. And I'm ok with that.

I'm very fond of how the internet can impact the political system -- it is a chance for us all to have our own little letters to the editor, and political candidates have a chance to put out as much information in an unfiltered way as possible. And I think making it easier for smaller donors to help participate in fund raising is really good.

Google and Salesforce

I'm intrigued by the possibility of Google Gears. It has the potential of making a lot of applications that currently rely on an always on internet connection.

There's already an offline client for Salesforce.com, everyone's favorite web-based on-demand CRM. And there are definite stories out there that Google and Salesforce are discussing *something*, and I think it's going to be more interesting than just connecting Gmail into Salesforce.

What if Salesforce worked (in some fashion) with Google Gears to make a better offline experience? Unlike Salesforce's current off-line client, this could be very much the same sort of experience online and offline -- much like the experience of using Google Reader will now be the same both online and offline. And if Google Reader can handle large amounts of feeds -- this might well be possible on the Salesforce side as well.

I'm not sure if this is something practical given Salesforce's architecture, and I haven't done any in depth research into Google Gears -- but I wonder if this might be it.

I'm not sure if this is going to happen -- but I think Google Gears could potentially be very interesting to follow for web-based software.

Feed Reading Spoilers

I love Google Reader, but one problem is that some websites post spoilers in invisiotext -- so they're visible when highlighted on their home website.

Of course, if your feed reader strips out the formatting, those spoilers show up plain and clear. I haven't seen anything that I wasn't already aware of yet, but still....

My general spoiler policy is to have the spoiler as the first comment in any post -- that won't get picked up by any feed, but will be easy enough to pick up. I don't tend to post a lot of spoilers, but sometimes it happens....

Google Reader Trends

I was interested in seeing that Google has added some trends to google reader.

The most interesting piece for me was to see what feeds I added to my shared list the most.

The top ten over the last 30 days are:

1. Lifehacker
2. Robert Scoble's Shared List
3. Outpost Gallifrey
4. Boing Boing
5. Sci Fi Wire
6. Digital Spy
7. Nate's Shared List
8. Tech Crunch
9. BBC Entertainment News
10. Digg

What I found was the most interesting is that two of the items on my list are other people's shared lists. And they're the only two shared lists that I have on my subscriptions.

And as a reward to Lifehacker, I just received their book summarizing some of their best tips and tricks.

What I would add to Google Reader

I was thinking about Google Reader a bit after reading about how google reader could turn into the next digg.

I live on Google Reader. I think the sharing can be pretty powerful, and has enormous potential. But there are a few things that'd make sense -- especially if you combine it with tagging. It'd be nice to be able to have it so you could subscribe to a subset of links based on a tag. Most of us have diverse interests and we don't always overlap 100%. You might be interested in the technological items that I share but not the Doctor Who items, for example. It is relatively straight forward to build your own search engine so you can search your regular news sources.

I like the idea that the sharing can turn us all into filters. There's so much more information than any of us can handle -- and the challenge is how can we gather, summarize, and process all of this data all the time.

The Coolness of Google Reader

I am enjoying Google Reader more all of the time. One of my favorite features is that it lets you create a shared list of items -- that anyone could also subscribe to. I've got my shared list -- and I'm always interested in seeing other shared lists, so let me know if you have one.

Of course, what my long-term wish-list for this feature would be that it would automatically capture my folders -- and then you could theoretically subscribe to someone's shared links *from a particular tag* -- for example, you might be interested in the items that are computer related, but not my entertainment related.

But still, it's very neat -- and it makes keeping an eye on lots of places throughout the web much, much easier...