Common-Nature

You might be surprised to learn that the guru of getting things done, David Allen, uses twitter. However, of the various social media out there, it sounds as if Twitter is the one tool David might use the most, according to this recent podcast.

The main take away points of the podcast? That you should view Twitter as going to a cocktail party. Ask yourself why you’re going. If it’s to keep yourself networked and out there, going to a party (or using Twitter) might be one of the easiest ways to do so.

Twitter is now getting enough traction that people are finding some pretty good uses for it.

One contender is to run an informal straw poll.

One site that can help you do this is strawpollnow.com.

The system interfaces with the Twitter api so that you an create a poll and send folks to that poll via Twitter. The poll not only keeps track of the breakdown of your poll but also provides for comments as each person responds.

Here is a sample poll I built in less than a minute.

Back in Sept. of 2008, Google launched the Google Moderator. What does Google Moderator do? When Google has tech talks or company-wide meetings, it lets anyone ask a question and then people can vote up the questions that they’d like answered.

The launch in September opened that to a larger audience and, thus, larger set of questions. Anyone can submit questions to be voted on. It also appears that you can target locations (like the state of Missouri, example) for viewers.

So, I open Moderator and see that the second question listed is, “How Can We Eliminate Wasteful Spending?” I click there and find Senator Claire McCaskill. Senator McCaskill’s question has gotten voted high enough that it’s showing up (at least on this Missourian’s page) at one of the top 5 questions.

I’m still learning about Moderator myself, but it seems that it certainly has potential to help government officials and agencies learn what questions interest the public.

Ok, these aren’t just for government. They’re for anyone forced to work without a budget and limited staff.

One of these are for online collaboration with staff. The other is a great tool for quickly building slick online applications (and you don’t even have to much about how to build applications). All of them are free (although some provide more features for a fee).

Mind mapping at mind42.com

This site gives you a great tool for building mind maps. If you’re not familiar with how mind mapping is done, check out this video on YouTube.

Even if you don’t use the site, it’s interesting to view various mind maps that other users have published to get ideas on how to more effectively use mind maps.

Zoho Creator

Zoho, of course, provides a whole suite of office productivity tools that are freely available. The Creator, however, allows you to build or use prebuilt web applications that can collect and manage data for you. Again, YouTube provides a video overview of what you can do with this tool.

Like many people, I circle the flame that is GTD (Getting Things Done) as a productivity practice. I do it awhile, get lax, and come back…each time getting a little better at the practice.

This time around, I realized that GTD provides a common framework that you can apply to many areas in your life. In other words, once you’ve settled on your basic categories you use to organized things, there’s not reason why you can’t apply them to many different places where you process information.

So…this weekend I came across this interesting article at Lifehacker.com  that discusses how to eliminate the use of the desktop on your computer. Sounds crazy, I know, and yet, I’ve found that even in one day, I’m able to get to everything I need on my computer much faster.

In less than an hour, I had not only cleared my desktop, but also had all Firefox bookmarks organized into 10 handy categories in the toolbar. What made it all go so fast was that I found that I was able to organized the bookmarks and the applications in terms of various roles I play (read GTD to understand what a role is).

Follow up on Windows Live Writer: I’m not sold on the product. Perfect for publishing to my blog.

I’m writing this post as a way to test Windows live writer for blog posting. It’s part of Windows live.

I’m not typically a fan of Microsoft products because they’re frankly never the best of breed……but simply ok or barely good enough. However, I’m quite impressed with live writer thus far. If MS had more products like this….well, I guess they’d be Apple.

I didn’t install any of the other stuff or sign up for a Windows Live ID. I just skipped all that stuff and went straight to the writer.

Things I like about it.

Allows for offline work, but allows you to see a preview of how your post will look.

Easy to add photos or maps….tags as well. Photo addition is frankly great. I just drag and drop a local photo and it puts it right into the blog post…interfaces with Wordpress perfectly to upload the image.

Category settings are integrated and easy. It knows what my blog post categories are.

In short, I think I’ll be using this critter alot to post to common-nature….and you should probably check it out too.

Spent the morning in 20 degree F. weather walking several blocks with my son to hang flyers on doors here in Columbia. The reason: Scouting for food.
“Scouting for Food” is Scouting’s community stewardship project aimed at addressing the problem of hunger in the community in which we live and work.

When I was a kid, we lived in rural Missouri. You knew everyone. Meet a car on the road and don’t wave hello, and you’d be considered rude or at least as having a bad day.

My kids, however, live in a world where we’re lucky to know who lives next door. That’s why I’m happy to be involved in things like this scouting project. It may be one of the few ways to get kids involved in community support.

Govtech.com has a great article on Portland Oregon’s use of Twitter.
Portland is the first U.S. city to launch an official “Twisitor Center.” This Twitter channel connects travelers with those who can answer their questions and help plan their trips.

Yet another example of how government is using Twitter.

Show on map

I’ve been learning how to use Google’s Sketchup as a modeler for woodworking. While Sketchup (the free version) is a great tool, it was a little bit of learning curve (as do all 3D tools).

Then I came across Wood magazine’s article on Sketchup. The article did a great job of showing that, yes, Sketchup can be a great tool for woodworking. Now they even have wood materials for making your models look more realistic.
Finally, I  came across the Sketchup for Woodworkers site. This site has some awesome, information packed videos on how to use the features in Sketchup for woodworking. One video I watched covered all the major types of joints you’d want to have in a woodworking plan.

These videos should get me off to a great start.

Sigh….now if someone would just build a nice plugin in for Sketchup that would import models and/or rendered textures into Second Life.

I’ve been doing some work in Second Life for a number of years at this point. Missouri state government has also gotten into the game. Check out this news article in Converge magazine.
I figured that, while I was helping with that project, I could post some of my work here.

You’ll find the lab.of my alter ego (Marcus Variscan) in Second Life. I’m still unpacking so you won’t see much at this point.
If you have Second Life installed on your machine you can go directly to the lab. by clicking here. Second Life uses spatial links called SLurls. You can find out more about them at SLurl.com