BenBailey.net

I didn’t realize this until just the other day: Google is becoming the center of my online activity. You can see why:

• About a year ago, well behind the invite rush, I signed up for Gmail. Now I have four Gmail accounts and neglect the email for my own domains.
• Google Reader became my RSS reader of choice earlier this year. I also have RSS feeds on my customized iGoogle start page.
• The only calendar I use is Google’s offering.
• I use Google Docs more and more (I’m writing this post with it). Having documents available on the go is wonderful. My word processing needs are simple, so it is a perfect solution.
• Google Analytics track the stats for this site and the photoblog.
• The RSS feeds for my sites are managed by Feedburner, recently acquired by Google.
• Google Maps is the first place I look for directions.
• And of course Google is my search engine of choice.

Surprisingly enough, I don’t mind having one company handle so much of my online activity. I think it stems from just being burned out from signing up for dozens of sites that do different things. The one-stop shop aspects of the Googleverse are hard to resist. So far Google hasn’t done much to worry me in terms of privacy, etc. One has to wonder if the goodwill they have built up will last. In ten years will Google be a popular target like Microsoft is today? MS used to be popular back in the day, so anything is possible.

The real question is whether I’m missing out on better services just because the Google items are more convenient. That said, there are a few things I don’t rely on Google for. I don’t use Blogger for my sites (go WordPress) and I use Flickr, not Picasa Web Albums, to share my pictures online. So at least I’m not 100% Google centered.

Ok, gotta go. I want to see what my apartment looks like from Google Earth.

Technorati Tags: Google

Just in case there is anyone reading who isn’t already overloaded with social networks, I have a few Pownce invites I’m not using. Just contact me and I’ll send one your way.

I registered for Pownce out of curiosity. The feature set looks great but I don’t see myself using it. I barely use Twitter and/or Jaiku as it is.

Playing around with flickrSLiDR a flickr slideshow tool from Paul Stamatiou.

Photos are from the 2007 Rod Run in Central Park.

Created with Paul’s flickrSLiDR.

Zooomr decided to take an interesting route to launching their Mark III upgrade this week. Instead of just a blog post notifying everyone the site would be down for a while, they setup on ustream.tv and started broadcasting the process live. Thomas Hawk and Kristopher Tate have been swapping places answering questions and chatting with everyone watching since Monday.

As far as I know, this is the first time a company has provided such an ongoing behind the scenes look into the upgrade process. One of the benefits of being a two person company I guess. Even though I’m not a Zooomr customer, I do think the transparency and openness is admirable. I am wondering though if they thought it was going to take this long to launch. They are looking pretty tired.

I recently joined Jaiku because I was looking for a way to automatically publish updates from my various online projects. If I posted a photo to Flickr or the photoblog, I wanted a way to update this site without having to create a separate post. Jaiku lets me pull the RSS from any site I want and place it here. You also get a nice page with all of your Jaiku updates and feeds rolled together. So I added the feeds for my Flickr account, photoblog and photogeekery.com. If you click on the links on the sidebar under “What I’m Up To” they will take to to the relevant site. So Jaiku is a simple and free way to pull together everything that makes up your online presence. It’s like twitter, but more useful.

Jaiku isn’t without its bugs though. After I signed up I wasn’t able to add any feeds to my account. That little issue didn’t resolve itself until the next day.

According to a recent report, only a small percentage of users upload content to Web 2.0 sites such as Flickr and YouTube. The report states that only 0.16 percent of YouTube traffic uploads video. Even more shocking to me is that only 0.2 percent of Flickr visitors upload photos. It is hard to imagine that the massive number of images available on Flickr comes from less than 1 percent of its visitors.

Oddly enough, 4.59 percent of traffic to Wikipedia took part in adding or changing content.

You can read the full article at Ars Technica. Found via Buzz Out Loud Podcast.