A Passion For 'Puters

From Dropbox to iCloud to the new Simperium offering from the folks at Simplenote, the race is on to find the best option for synching data between the desktop computer, laptop computer, tablet and phone that you use every day. I know that without the ability to sync up data between my computer and my iPad, I’d be lost much of the time. Some of this is done through the application itself, such as my Remember The Milk application which syncs up beautifully between my browser, my iPad and my phone (as long as I pay that “premium” fee, otherwise it only syncs up weekly, I believe). Other syncing is done via one of the technologies listed above – Dropbox, iCloud or the new Simperium. To introduce the newcomer, we turn to the analysis at Read/Write/Web:

“You can think of Simperium as a post-PC circulatory system for data,” co-founder Mike Johnson says. It’s built to speak to all kinds of devices and services and be easy to implement. “The result is that developers can use Simperium like a Lego brick,” snapping together different applications and devices with data that fits, allowing “pretty much any feature where data needs to move quickly and reliably from one place to another.” (www.readwriteweb.com/archives/why-apples-icloud-doesnt-just-work.php)

A “Post-PC circulatory system for data”. That’s a lovely way to phrase it, in my opinion. It’s also quite true. The ability to have a “home” in the clouds where your stuff is kept is becoming vital these days. Many of us (and I’m certainly guilty here) have many. I use Dropbox, Evernote, Google Play and Drive, Amazon Cloud and iCloud for the big stuff and I use a bunch of smaller cloud syncing options (such as the aforementioned Remember The Milk syncing features) alongside those. I’m using mostly the free versions for all of these (Evernote and RTM being exceptions) so I have limited space. This means that I have stuff scattered all over the place.

This can be both a good point and a bad point. On one hand, if one service gets hacked, they aren’t getting my entire life – just portions of it. Google Play holds my music, but none of my documents. Dropbox is the opposite – many of my documents (but not all, because some are backed up from my iPad using iCloud and others are stored in Google Drive) are stored there, but none of my music. In this way I’ve sort of insulated myself from a complete loss of my digital treasures. On the other hand, that’s a lot of user/pass combinations to remember, not to mention remembering where certain documents can be found  – though there are services that help here – see Cue, which searches across most of those services; Dropbox, Google Drive, Evernote, etc. You could also take a pointer from a presentation I heard at the LibTech Conference in Minneapolis this year – use the standard “reminder/task” function that comes with your tablet or phone to sort out where you put what. The presenter used it to remember which note-taking program held which note, but you could also use it to remember which storage service holds which file…

However you choose to do it, getting by without some sort of cloud support is becoming more and more difficult in this post-PC era – I can’t even imagine trying to keep my Android phone, iPad tablet and Windows PCs all useful and up-to-date without my personal little cloud.

Meal planning! I always mean to do it. Occasionally, I actually do it. Never for more than 2 or so weeks in a row, though. I just get lazy, I think. A year or two ago, I got a whiteboard so that I could write down, on the board that now hangs in the kitchen, what the week’s meals would be. This worked surprisingly well – when my son knew what I was making, he was more likely to actually be home for supper. Unfortunately, it only worked when I updated it. Leaving the same week of meals on the board for a month  seemed to make it a bit less useful than might be desired.

I’m not sure if this GCal idea of mine – to create a calendar that I use specifically for planning out my weekly menu – will be any more successful than the whiteboard has been to force me to actually consider menus in advance, but I’m hoping it will. It has the advantage of being available from my smart phone or my iPad in the store while I’m picking up groceries or from the farmer’s market while I’m picking up veggies.

What kills me is the fact that it’s taken at least a year for it to occur to me that using the GCal instead of a whiteboard in the kitchen might be a smart move. I present, write and teach about Google Apps on a fairly regular basis. This, however, doesn’t mean that I consider the best way to use them myself, apparently.

I’ve been doing a bunch of that. Everywhere but here, that is… So far this year I’ve written book #2 (Outsourcing Library Technology) for ALA Editions, a chapter (Blogging for Readers) for Rowman Press, to be included in a book on Social Networking Best Practices and an article on Cloud Backups for Computers in Libraries magazine. What I have not been doing is writing here on this blog.

I’m not going to make a pledge to write more here – I might be able to, I might not, but I will make a pledge to at least consider, every time I go to FriendFeed to post something, if it might be better posted here, on my server and in my database of writing.  This blog may not always win out, but I’m hoping it does at least occasionally so that I can keep track of what I’m doing all the time. Also, I’m heading to the NAGW conference next month (presenting Project Management for Techs and Tips for Solo Web Workers) so the blog will undoubtedly be fired up for my travels then.

Either way, I’m going to not just default to Tweeting or FriendFeeding without thought. I will consider this blog more often, I promise!!

Just a quick note to say that I stopped today and considered my recent activities over the last 24 hours. They include:

• Sitting on my back deck, reading and responding to my co-presenter (who lives in MD) about our upcoming keynote (using my iPad, Google Docs and lots of sunshine)
• Setting up a series of cloud-based, automatic actions that take articles I’ve starred in Google Reader, save them to a folder in my Dropbox (via ifttt), then convert them to Kindle format and send them automatically to my Kindle reader on my iPad (via Wappwolf).
• Watching two episodes of season 2 of Downton Abbey off of a laptop (using iTunes) connected to my 49 inch TV in my living room
• Conducted text conversations with people in Maryland, Chicago and across the street in the main building of MPOW

These are just a few of the things I have done in the last 24 hours that convince me that living in the future is pretty damn neat.

The release of Google Drive means that I, personally, will now have 8 different places that I can store a file. Between the hard drives on my work computer, my home computer, my laptop, my iPad, my Android phone and the cloud drives of Dropbox and Google Drive (formally Docs) and at least one file sharing server in my workplace, that’s a lot of places to look for a file when the time comes to edit/access it.  Fortunately, I go to a lot of conferences and hear a lot of ideas both in session and between. This tip comes from a session I attended at the LibTech conference earlier this year on optimizing iPads with applications, but it will only really work for people who use a task list that is *other* than the built-in one on your iPad (or iPhone).

When the presenter places a file somewhere in the cloud or on her iPad in one of the many note-taking applications that are available for that device, she puts a pointer/reminder in her Reminders app that lists the name of the note or file and the location in which it can be found. If you aren’t creating documents and notes in a massive way, this could be an excellent way to remember just where you last opened that document (for me, I have to remember if the PDF I loaded on my iPad is in iAnnotate, GoodReads, iBooks or just dumped somewhere in Dropbox for me to open later). For folks who create and manage documents constantly, this might be a bit cumbersome, and a real organizational structure (all my class documents go into GoodReads, my work documents into iAnnotate, my ALA stuff into Google Drive, etc.) would probably be almost as good. I would end up forgetting what goes where, though, personally…

Whatever method you use to manage all of your files across all of your various hard drives and cloud drives, this is a skill that we will all need to cultivate and work on, just so we don’t drown in our data!

What is our product? What should we be commoditizing in order to make our product more valuable? (A question from Jason Griffey – below is my response)
I’m starting from the position that “Library’s” product is information in general and the containers of that information in particular (though we could have other products and other starting points for this exercise, to be sure). Books, magazine articles, reference questions – they all are parts of the product we provide. The commodity complement to that information could be a way to put it all together in a publishable form. Whether this is a class on book publishing or a multi-media station that allows patrons to record audio or video for publishing on the web or help with putting together a research paper with proper citations and formatting, these are the commodities that grow from the product we provide. We could package those commodities in multiple ways. We could offer classes in a series from finding information for your genealogical history to putting it all together in a comprehensible way to publishing it for your family to purchase from an on-demand publisher. A content creation station that lets people record audio and video with a knowledgeable librarian nearby to help them remix the content we have into something new and fresh for their use or to help them polish the final product and choose where on the Web to publish their creations. And, as many librarians have done for years, a research paper help guide that gives tips on formatting and properly citing references in a formal way.
Another commodity that we can offer is the packaging of our knowledge into “classes” a la Moodle courses and offering those as “for more information on…” modules for patrons to use in their information searching needs. We have, as a profession, a number of skills and literacies that we could share with our patrons to make their information searches more fruitful and to help them make something real and concrete with that information that they’ve found. Those skills could be packaged up into a course container and provided to patrons at the end of a reference interview or in a computer lab where the tools to make use of those skills are readily available to them. For non-computer using patrons, we could provide the information as handouts or even library-published small books that could be given to them as we finish with our interactions and they have the information they need. They could be pointers to what they can do with that information and how we can help them do it.
This is pretty much the result of a free-writing exercise this morning – I used Jason’s question above as a prompt and started writing. I know there are other ways to create commodities that we can offer to make our product(s) more valuable to our patrons and I’ll be watching his blog post to see what other folks come up with!