The portable desktop

I have always wanted to carry my desktop wherever I go. But without PDAs or a stuffed wallet. PDA's looked cool during the www bubble, but hey, most of us went back to basic necessities.... I want to be able to travel light and free, but yet carry my essentials with me: a piece of shell script I wrote, some login information, some bookmark, many things... Well, there is finally a major breakthrough, after walking in the desert for so long and talking to demons: the Yahoo Widgets! I hear you already: widgets arent't new! we have everything! we have Tiger! We have it all! Uh ... no, not really. There's always an invisible ombilical cord that ties us to a machine. And when this machine is away or simply dies, we die too.

Well, I hadn't given up. Experience and patience paid off. I tried many things many times. As a mac user for instance I could synchronize my Yahoo calendar / notepad / address book with my MS Outlook, and my PDA. After weeks of synchronizations, after multiple overwrites, multiple duplications, deletions, multiple purchases of utilities which would supposedly simplify --- I gave up. Till now. Finally again, I have Yahoo Widgets. I carry my desktop with me wherever I go, wherever I have the Widgets installed. I just need to enter my login information and get the widgets updated w/ my latest information (my calendar, my notes, my address book, my to-do's). I can see and edit my information, in one only place.

Okay I was lucky. I have a Yahoo/SBC account that I have been using in years. So I am specific, still. But the point that I am trying to demonstrate is, we are all moving towards a seemless portable desktop. A fluid access to our information.

Another revelation was del.icio.us bookmarks, very recently. There's been tons of things written on it, really a lot of buzz. A blog convinced me to go over the so-simple (ugly?) user interface and try to finally use it. Once passed the first mitigated impression, you start building your bookmarks and keywords. By clicking around you discover others and their keywords and bookmarks. That's that social bookmarking! What a great and simple idea! Now, you are carrying your bookmarks around with you, you also have them categorized in a very special way that works for you. You are also discovering new places of value on the web! Right there a click away. We all use Google, but del.icio.us is different from raw - yes possibly elaborate - search. This is your own repository of information. You can crawl del.icio.us by key word and get to some very pertinent information, without any Googling.

You can also have del.icio.us work for you by setting some inbox key words and wait for it to suggest new findings based on these words...... Not finding over zillions of web cached pages, but over bookmarks that people considered of value. That's a human filter. By making your lists available to others, you also share your discoveries. Or advertise for yourself by inducing the Buzz. Read "The Several Habits of Wildly Successful del.icio.us Users" from Slacker Manager, for additional thoughts.

Another little habit that became tremendously important for me, has been to gather all my RSS feeds online, with Bloglines.... I tried alternatives before and after Bloglines, bought some newsreader for my mac: NetNewsWire, said to be the best of its kind on mac. Since I have multiple computers to use, again, I was in the maze of syncs that would not really work.

The combination of these three tools today brings my destop wherever I go. My eferences, my libraries. I am less tied to one computer anymore. All my information is online, accessible, centralized yet distributed. Whatever happens to my computer, I am in touch with my stuff, with the things that matter to me and my business. How free!