Connected Well

As the weather warms, I’ve been eying my bicycle hanging in the garage for too-many months. Google Maps is now making it easier to find a quick way from where you are to where you’d like to go following bike-friendly roads and paths.

For example, check out these biking directions from Liberty Park in Salt Lake City, Utah to Sugar House Park. Unfortunately, Utah has few bike-friendly roads (ranking 18th/50 in the USA according to the League of American Bicyclists’ Bicycle Friendly Community campaign) so you may want to check out other bike-friendly cities in the US and around the world:

• Amsterdam, Netherlands
• Portland, Oregon, USA
• Copenhagen, Denmark
• Boulder, Colorado, USA
• Davis, California, USA
• Sandnes, Norway
• Trondheim, Norway
• San Francisco, California, USA
• Berlin, Germany
• Barcelona, Spain
• Basel, Switzerland

And, here’s Google’s own video introducing the service:

Does anybody know if these bike maps show up on mobile google maps’ installs? The Google Maps for Mobile website doesn’t reflect this yet, but this makes a lot of sense, and I am sure it will be there soon enough.

Oh, and you can Tweet to win a new bike using the hashtag #bikewithgoogle (rules/regs)

It’s not what you say, but how you say it:

This is one of several famous movie quotes geeked out into infographic formats. From here and here

“It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself for a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat.”

“Citizenship in a Republic,”
Theodore Roosevelt’s Speech at the Sorbonne, Paris, April 23, 1910

[I wrote this once before and found it once again. Now you have found it, and should share it, if you think it worthy to do so]

Google’s contact management interface in Gmail has been pain. ful. ly. s.l.o.w. in the past , but it worked, and it was smart enough to know who you communicate with the most and update your chat list accordingly.  In fact, as long as you didn’t ever access contacts directly, all was well in Google-Happy-Cloud-Computing-Land.

Now, thanks to other apps that need contacts like Voice* and Wave, access to these across the GoogleVerse** has spawned the need to just pull the contact manager out into its own app, namely, Google Contacts.  And, like Mashable points out, Google Contacts is adding a much-needed “de-dupify” feature that tries to merge your contacts down to size when import/export, syncing and auto-contact management madness ends up bloating your contact file.

If only New Year’s Resolutions were so easy.

In trying the feature, I admit merging my 1600+ contact list didn’t work after repeated tries and script timeouts in firefox. I am sure it will improve.

* I don’t know why, but accessing contacts in the Google Voice interface always seems to work quicker than from gMail.
**Um, this is an off-the-cuff contraction of “Google” and “Universe”, not Google’s latest poetry or scripture-reading app.

The BBC has a good article about Google’s free/paid news announcement called first-click-free which enables news outlets to let Google index and show their news, but then limit the number of “free” articles you can read to five per day:

We’ve updated the program so that publishers can limit users to no more than five pages per day without registering or subscribing.

Check out Google to Limit Free News Access over at the BBC with an informative video that I can’t easily embed and a follow-on article called “Did Google Just Blink” by the BBC’s Rory Cellan-Jones:

Rupert Murdoch has made clear his desire to see other papers in his worldwide stable follow the Wall Street Journal’s lead in asking readers to pay for at least some of their online journalism. And he’s also expressed, in forceful terms, his view that Google – and the BBC for that matter – are an obstacle to those plans because they provide a route to so much free news.

In my opinion, Murdoch and other news outlets have only two cards to play: Either make their news so interesting, so exclusive, so relevant and niched, personalized and so amazing that people will keel over and die if they can’t read it, or realize that, if you want to appeal to the masses, the masses don’t want to pay dollars for it… at least not in the traditional sense.

There’s a new economy for news. No longer are todays papers tomorrow’s kitty-litter liner or fish-n-chips wrapper. News comes and goes in megabytes per second, and in 140 character snippets.

The good news is read, shared, commented, revised and rebuffed by its own readers and created into something new and interesting every single millisecond.

The uninteresting news simply never. gets. read.

This is not Google bowing to the publisher. This is Google playing its cards to ensure it has top content in its engine, and when the day comes that the big mass media players finally give in to reality that “pay for access” won’t cut it anymore, Google will already be so far out ahead nobody will be able to catch up.

Geek News Central and others agree with me.

Good luck mass media. See you in the funnies.

I posted the other day about Google Tasks.  Here is my running wishlist of things I would like to see added to the tool.  Please add your own suggestions in the comments!

1. Collapse groups of tasks
   Indenting tasks to group them together is AWESOME.  Clicking the master task (most-left) and having all the sub-tasks check themselves off is awesome too.  Even moving the master tasks and having the others follow along is superb.  Now, please let me collapse or hide tasks underneath the master task!
2. Share Tasks individually and as lists
   Help me liberate my tasks, please!
   I would like to share a list of tasks, and/or have the option to assign tasks to a certain person, with all parties able to view and edit and complete.

Google tasks is doing some great stuff.  It’s simple, intuitive and awesome.

Click to enlarge

When you’ve got your mind flowing and you’re cranking out tasks left and right, it’s nice to have your list right there so you can blow away completed items with the box-checking-pleasure you know you secretly love almost as much as that song you keep humming to yourself.  This is an excellent way to keep a log of what you’re doing, which can be extra valuable if you are a consultant or contractor and need to invoice your clients for work performed.

Google Tasks is easy to work right along side you without getting in your way.  It’s low-maintenance, doesn’t complain about the bad coffee in your office, and instantaneously synchronizes across all the methods you use to access it (see below). This is one of my favorite things Gmail Labs has done.

First, enable it in Gmail by clicking the “Tasks” link under “Contacts” on the left side of your Gmail window.

Enable Google Tasks in Gmail

It creates a chat-style pop-up box that fits in your lower-right corner or can be popped out to its own window for your task-defeating pleasure while you reply like the inbox-zero mad-dog you are. FTW!!!

Second, enable it in Google Calendar by looking for the “Tasks” link (Google web designers are so smart to label it that!) and two things happen:

1) Your task lists will show up on the right side of your calendar for easy maintenance and
2) Your scheduled tasks will show up on your calendar itself, allowing for easy viewing and completion right on the calendar.

Gmail blog explains more about Tasks in Calendar.

Third, find alternate ways to access your tasks:

Bookmark it on your smartphone ( go to gmail.com/tasks from your blackberry, palm, HTC, android or other web-aware phone.  Oh, and of course, snobby iPhone-ers get special treatment)

You can also add it to iGoogle as a gadget or the standalone “Tasks Canvas” page to view, edit and manage tasks in other places. I have a “chores” list that I pull up on our Opera browser for the Wii so the kids can see and check off their chores on Saturday morning.   Geeky? Yes, but it gets the carpets vacuumed.

BONUS RESOURCES

Here are some bonus links for your clickety browsing pleasure:

• Task Jedi? Check out Google’s help page for keyboard shortcuts and tips to become a real taskmaster (the good kind… not the kind prefaced with “evil”… or the Marvel Comic character). Sort. Categorize. Complete. Repeat.
• Do you like to GTD? See how to approach Nirvana with gTasks here.
• Got Chrome? Follow these tips to make a Google Tasks shortcut on your desktop. It pops up in its own window and has a shortcut icon on your computer desktop or quick-launch menu (depending on your OS). This works and it’s slick!

It’s kinda nice to see blogs being used well by companies.  It almost feels like a conversation again.

Microsoft has done a good job with the Windows7 launch of blogging a lot about what they’ve done, how they’ve been trying to approach the launch, interesting commentary on the evolution of the Windows Taskbar, and now, to refute a rumor that Windows7’s great user-interface was really stolen from the Mac.

This conversation is on-fire in twitter and elsewhere on the web and, without some kind of authoritative response, the rumor could turn into something people just believe without question (though Mac fans will do that anyway, and Windows fans will really deny it no matter what Redmond says).

Decide for yourselves which side of the story is true, or if this is some just corporate legal positioning to avoid a lawsuit from Cupertino, but in the end, I wanted to comment that this is a great way to use your company/team’s blog to openly discuss sensitive and otherwise disastrous Public Relations issues.

You can’t control the conversation, but ignoring it is clearly unhealthy.

I first recognized this song because they sampled numa numa, the song made popular by this guy (I dare you to watch without smiling). This is a song about making your life better and escaping from the things that hold you back no matter what the pain you have to go through might be.

Live your life…

It’s worth noting the artistry of the video, showing himself as a young hustler trying to make a name for himself, then having to go through the pain of getting out later, as he (himself) walks in to make a deal with the gang boss, showing the cycle repeating itself. Nice work.

And, just because… here’s Numa Numa guy:

Google’s really laying on the additions to GoogleVoice. It seems they’re really moving forward with things at a rapid pace. The latest addition is a gMail Labs add-on that will have GoogleVoice voicemails show up in your mailbox, and you can play them on the spot:

Previously, clicking “Play message” opened a new page in your browser, but starting today, you can play voicemails right in Gmail. Just turn on the Google Voice player from the Gmail Labs tab under Settings and whenever you get a voicemail notification, the player will appear right below the message itself.

Best of all, your message status will stay synced: messages played from Gmail will appear as read in your Google Voice inbox and won’t be played again when you check new messages via your phone. If you already use Google Voice, try it out and let us know what you think. If you don’t have a Google Voice account yet, sign up for an invitation and we’ll get you one ASAP.

Read the article at the gMail Blog