Today I spent a lot of time on the web and I stumbled upon a lot of things:
First, there is the “Get Things Done” line I followed. Starting from the book by David Allen I quickly came to Sylvia’s GTD Homepage and then to the GTD with Gmail Whitepaper. I was previously looking for a tool to manage my to-do lists online. This seems to be a good way.
Next, I checked out a few things to organise myself better using Outlook – the preferred tool at work. First, there is David’s little booklet. Then there is this post on Tickling email in Outlook. I still need to work through this during the weekend.
Coming back to GMail: To improve the usability of GMail even further, I installed scripts described in “Adding Persistent Searches to GMail” and “A Greasemonkey Christmas”.
And there was an article in the c’t magazine about Writer2LaTeX. So I installed OpenOffice and Writer2LaTeX. Now I still have to test the system.
Finally, I found out about the Google Reader – a tool to read RSS feeds – via persistent.info. I entered those feeds I read regularly. I noticed that it takes a moment to update the list – longer than the live bookmarks in Firefox.
Another couple of blogs that seem interesting: Lifehacker and 43Folders.
And some fun: Woogle – Words in pictures. Try, for example, “cool stuff in computer science” 
First, a Happy New Year (2006) to all of you out there.
While an illness forces me to lay in bed I have some time to dig around for various things I am interested in. One of these things are systems of “Social Bookmarking”. Personally I have been using Spurl for a while and I tested del.icio.us briefly.
However, my professional interest rose while reading “Social Bookmarking in the Enterprise“. The article describes the experience at IBM to introduce a social bookmarking system within the company as non-intrusive knowledge management tool.
The post “Social bookmarks review” presents a document briefly comparing currently 19 social bookmarking systems. Furthermore, the article “Social Bookmarking Tools (I) – A General Review” presents a nice overview of some social bookmarking tools. In a second article they introduce Connetea in more detail.
“Connotea is a free online reference management service. It allows you to save links to all your favourite articles, references, websites and other online resources with one click. Connotea is also a social bookmarking tool, so you can view other people’s collections to discover new, interesting content. ” Connetea has in particular the academic community in mind and provides some special enhancements to support bookmarking academic articles.
The main advantage of Connetea is the availability of the source code under the GPL. This allows you to install Connetea on your own site, modify the code and release it to the public and to write plug-ins for whatever you need. Also, “Connotea Code is written in Perl, and uses MySQL as the data store. ” This should make it fairly easy to familiarise yourself with the code and the data is not held hostage in a proprietary format.
All in all, it seems my search for a social bookmarking system for my company comes to an end. Together with a colleague I hope to install the system, tweak it and then start using it.
