Yeraze's Domain 3.0

A few weeks ago I got an invite to BrightKite, a location-aware social networking website.  It’s alot like Twitter, but all of your posts and comments are attached to specific locations in the world.  It works via their website, but also via SMS and various mobile apps (They just recently released one for the iPhone that I use).

Now, the first thing most people point out is that it all seems very "stalkery". Well, that’s true, but the data is only as accurate as you choose to make it. All of the "checkins" (where you tell Brightkite your location) are only as frequent and accurate as you want them to be.  The mobile apps help with the accuracy, but it still requires you actually deciding to "checkin" at a location.  Also, once you’ve checked in you have settings to control how much information other people see.  Do they know exactly where you are?  Do they simply know what city you’re in?  Or do they know nothing at all?  Do you broadcast your location to everyone? Or only to friends?  All of these are configurable.

Aside from checking in, there’s the interesting idea of tagging notes to locations.  When someone checks in near your current position, or posts a note or photo that’s linked to the location, you’ll get a notification (If the visibility settings allow it).  This is a neat way to meet interesting new people, but it’s also an interesting way to share location-specific information. For example, landing at the Airport and posting a note saying "The Skylink is broken" and saving other BrightKite users some time.  Or things like posting what food is good at a restaurant, or what foods to avoid.

It’s a pretty neat webapp, but I’m not entirely sure how much I’ll use it.  It seems like something good to use for traveling, meeting friends and such, but for me it seems a bit overkill. [tag:brightkite][tag:web2.0]

A few weeks ago I posted about a web-based note-taking service called EverNote (original post).  Since then, I’ve found EverNote so useful that I’ve gone ahead and bought the year of service and find myself using it daily.  It’s become so ubiquitious in my everyway work and home routines, that I don’t know how I could operate without it.  Some examples of what I’ve done with it:

• Cataloging all of the various Training Certificates required for work as PDF’s or PNG Screenshots
• Cataloging LOTS of web-based PDF magazines
• Storing research papers used at work as PDF’s
• Keeping online bill-pay receipts.  Instead of "Print this page for your records", I either Print it to EverNote as a PDF (Built-in feature on a Mac), or grab a screenshot and save it to EverNote.
• Creating a Christmas List.  This one has been a huge success.  I created a special public album and I put in web clippings and pictures of things the kids point out they want for Christmas, and then sent the link to all the family.
• Business Cards.  No need to keep the paper cards anymore.
• Taking notes during conferences.  And this one dovetails into the next one:
• Turning notes into Trip Reports on the Airplane.  Since they have a great Desktop Client, I can type the notes up on my Macbook in-flight, and have them synced back to the cloud when I land, and then I can view them via the web-interface at work!
• Websites.  Websites that contain something interesting or important that I will use later, rather than bookmarking them I can just clip them into EverNote.

It’s so incredibly useful.  The image recognition support is great and proves useful alot, but just having access to everything in a nice easy sortable and taggable way, with access from the iPhone, my LapTop, and any web browser makes it a valuable tool.  If you haven’t tried it yet, I highly recommend it.

Any other ideas for ways to use evernote? [tag:evernote]

it seems my article on using Quartz filters to shrink PDF’s is getting a bit popular.  I just noticed I’ve got a reference in a new ZDNet article on the subject.

I was shocked!  The article is by David Morgenstern and can be found here. [tag:zdnet][tag:pdf][tag:publicity]