So yeah I have finally made the switch to Google Chrome. What made the big difference was the growing number of extensions.
I will still use Firefox but mostly for SEO and development stuff. There are too many SEO tools based on Firefox that I don’t see yet on Chrome.
The tools that prevented me so far from switching were a decent password manager which is now available with LastPass, Evernote Clipper and AdBlock+ as I use them a lot in Firefox.
Other extensions I’ve installed are the Docs PDF/PowerPoint Viewer and the Google Reader one click subscription button (I know RSS is oldschool but I still use it for some stuff). For SEO I have Chrome SEO which is quite rudimentary and for web development purposes I have Webpage Screenshot.
I’ll get rid of my good old trusted delicious bookmarks in favour of synced google chrome bookmarks… Good enough i guess. The only downside really is that they won’t show up in my Friend Feed Stream on the right.
Google Chrome is now also Greasemonkey ready as I read lately on Matt Cutts Blog.
Well I am gonna miss you Firefox, you’ve done well all those years…
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In other News: I’ve invested a lot of time lately in PageRank Sculpting.
In the past it was a great technique to channel PR to where you want it in your site.
Then Google changed the game by starting to read javascript and treating the rel=nofollow tag differently.
SeoMoz then said (back in July 2009) that the new PageRank sculpting is link consolidation and then in December 2009 they conducted a test to figure out wether rel=”nofollow” is still relevant or not.
Their first result was a yes. But then they backtracked and basically said they don’t know because the test was flawed…
The whole thing is quite funny. Obviously there are other methods to channel page rank as well, but it’s still interesting to see what the outcome of their experiment will be.
I basically agree with with Graywolf if you don’t see a traffic drop don’t change anything.
Lately i have experimented with a completely unstructured day and way of handling information. It’s inspired a lot by twitters stream, 4 hour work week and a bit also by David Allens mind like water. Just like with twitter where there is no sorting of tweets i simply let information flow on its own as much as possible.
On top of that stream i have my bigger life goals that i am always focused on anyways. This way the information that finds its way into my focus is always somehow aligned automatically.
So the title is not completely correct. In a lot cases it’s actually not stopping information management but having the information sorted automatically or the sorting effort is reduced to an absolute minimum.
Meetings
Generally I am trying to avoid those as much as possible and i don’t do in person meetings. Only Skype or phone. The ones i have i always set to the same time in the week so i can remember them without writing them down. I also put them always in those days and hours where i know i will be online with Skype running. So when the other party contacts me, the meeting starts.
To-do lists:
I don’t use a to-do list because I have my current goals constantly in mind and i derive the things i want to do from there every day. Since i am constantly working towards those goals my activities align naturally. Stuff that i forget either pops up again (mostly other people bringing it up) or it was not important or related to what my goals are.
Email
In basically stopped organizing email altogether apart from deleting and archiving. I use Gmail with some filters set up from the past that put labels on emails but i could also just work with a completely unaltered setup of Gmail. In those rare cases i go back to old email i simply use the search. I don’t respond to emails a lot. I don’t want to encourage email discussions, so i archive them directly and mostly never hearing about the topic again. The important ones i respond and archive (Gmail labs feature “send and archive”).
Another reason i don’t do o a lot of emails anymore has to-do with systems like yammer or prologue 2 that a lot of companies i work for now use. That means that there is no old school email discussion anymore but a twitter like stream of information that eliminates most emails and does not need sorting or managing.
Documents
I try and avoid creating old school (MS Word) or even google documents as much as possible. I just found that they are not open enough so i am doing mostly blog posts instead of old school documents.
If information has to be in a document i can only do google docs as i don’t have an office suite anymore on my pc. I don’t file documents in google docs anymore i just use they search to go back to an old document.
MP3s
I have no MP3s 
If i listen to anything i do it online.
Images
Mostly on facebook and through tagging from other people. In case i create images i upload them to my unsorted Flickr stream.
Files
I don’t permanently save any computer files on my hard drive anymore. Everything is in the cloud. In those rare cases where i edit something locally i mostly send it via Gmail/yammer afterwards so its stored there. If its way too big i dump it sometimes in my amazon S3 jungle drive. I don’t sort it though (no folders) because so far i didn’t need to go back even once.
Bookmarks
delicious has been called the graveyard of bookmarks. You bookmark something and never go back. So true in my case. So i just have given up on using bookmarks. I can remember the URLs i use (with the help of firefox awesome bar) for the rest i use bing (just kidding i use google).
News
Digg, Twitter, etc, very few RSS Subscriptions (only blogs that i absolutely find interesting but post very rarely)
I love jinni.com. It’s by far the best movie recommendation engine out there in my opinion. One big thing that plays into their cards is the fact that their competiton isn’t even remotely where jinni.com is in terms of quality of recommendations (apart from maybe tastekid.com) .
That doesn’t mean though that jinni.com cannot be improved. Here is a couple of things that i did not like:
- Load times are way too slow.
There is soo much research on that. Long waiting times makes people leave the site
- The recommendation link loads especially slow
The recommendation engine is the most useful part of jinni.com for me. I took all their profiling questionnaires and now i do get good results with the engine. The only trouble is it loads far too slow.
- The user interface of the recommendation engine is not good
- Get rid of the javascript pop up when mousing over a movie. It loads half a second AFTER the mouse over so that i accidentially clicked on the movie several times loosing all recommendations in the process. Then i have to go back and suffer through the slow loading time.
- In order to REMOVE a recommendation you have to do 4 clicks. FOUR CLICKS!!! Plus a lot of time it does not work (Firefox 3.5)
- I want to be able to remove a recommendation, trust that it gets recognized by the magical jinni.com engine so i don’t get recommendations of similar movies anymore and THEN immediately get a NEW movie recommendation instead. See screenshot:
- Give me a separate recommendation engine for tv shows
or allow me to filter for tv shows.
As i said i love jinni.com I will use the website no matter what. But i wish they could improve that.
I’ve been waiting for proper screen sharing for ages. I know there are tools for it out there but i hate introducing new tools to a remote team. I want it on stuff that everybody uses: Firefox and Skype.
Mac crowd has had it already for months on Skype but now its available for windows too.
Ultra fast and super handy. Update your skypes now peeps:
Skype 4.1 Beta for Windows is here – with screen sharing – Skype Blogs.
