Rojo Chiclet Test and other Random Things

OK this thing might or might not work. I have had a link called "site feed" for a while, and supposedly blogger is continually updating the feed automatically, but I haven't actually used an RSS reader to test it. By the way at the moment it's an atom/xml type feed. I read about atom and RSS before, but naturally I don't remember any of it now.

And, I heard about Rojo a long time ago, maybe even mentioned it in this blog, and was invited during Beta testing, which was cool, but I didn't really use it all that much, really. (But at least I got my jiffener login before it was taken by one of the hordes of jiffeners out there. YES!)

So then once I started getting into listening to podcasts, I had some issues using iTunes and Odeo and Happy Fish, so I thought maybe listing my favorite podcasts in Rojo might be the way to go.

None of the solutions is perfect for me because what I really want to do is listen to podcasts over my car stereo. So far burning MP3 CD's seems the easiest, but the big downside is that it's hard to keep everything organized and of course there is a big delay between receiving a fresh new podcast on my PC and having it finally come up on the gigantic MP3 CD in my car. I mean, MP3 CD's will hold a LOT of podcasts, man.

I also signed up for del.icio.us, which is groovy too.

So I'm dipping my toes in all these different things but haven't totally jumped in to any of them.

Well, I suppose you could say I am currently using both iTunes and Odeo just like they're meant to be, but the others I'm not really exploiting to their full extent. And, unfortunatetly, I may never have time to, cool as they are.

In a basically unrelated area of cool Internet stuff, there is also this JotSpot thing. I signed up for JotSpot Tracker, which, in addition to being in Beta which automatically makes it cool to try, also seems promising as a way to share spreadsheets without emailing them around and winding up with a zillion different versions.

Of course, people could just email a link to the spreadsheet on their server so any revisions happened on the central copy. But for some reason that is too difficult for people and they seem to like emailing documents. I can understand that, actually, because since I can't access the company network from home, if I want to work on something I need to have a copy of it to open it on my PC. Sometimes I email things, but lately I have used flash memory devices, which are the greatest thing since sliced bread. Actually better, I think, because I hardly ever use sliced bread, whereas these USB memory key things I use all the time.

Actually JotSpot as a whole is a much bigger thing than spreadsheet sharing and version control. I think I might sign up for the personal edition and try it out. The personal edition is free, but of course limited in number of users and features. OK, I just signed up. I'll update once in awhile about how, like most other things I sign up for, it is really impressive but falls by the wayside in the tumult of the day-to-day grind.

Other people are offering new ways to share things on the web too, web pages, calendars, blogs, photos, and more. A lot of this has been around in various forms but now we see more convergence going on.

For instance, there's this Yahoo 360 thing which sounds kind of intriguing. Yahoo has been in stealth mode lately, letting Google hog all the press with their Google news and gmail and mapping and IPO and classifieds and fears of global domination. So while everyone's eyes are on Google, Yahoo is busy thinking up new ways to be handy and addictive like fantasy sports, buying flickr, being one of the first customizable search engine start pages, having Yahoo groups, etc. etc. I'm sure there are more for each because they have actually both been exploding--just Google has been getting more press. Google is great and all, but Yahoooooo is much more fun to sing.

One annoying thing with Yahoo is that although they have this customized start page available, it doesn't provide an easy way to put your other Yahoo stuff right there on that page. For instance, I participate in several Yahoo Groups, but how do I get a link to them on my start page? I've dug around all over the place, thinking this would be a built-in one-click feature, or at least a common enough request it would show up in the help. Nope. Nada.

While I'm at it I guess I'll mention how annoying Google Maps can be--it would be so nice to have input boxes for street, city, zip, etc. or at least some tags so you can type in whatever part you want. Most of your mapping is probably going to be in your home city, right? So why type the home city and state for every single map you need? It should remember your city and only override it when it can't find something or if you give it a different city. How hard is that? Google maps has all kinds of capabilities you can access IF you're a programmer. Which I'm not. So why can't we put on multiple map points? And we need a check box or something to switch between "look things up in the phone book" mode and "quit looking things up, just map this address" mode.