The Steve Rubel Stream

Interviews on Blogging and Productivity

Here are two fresh interviews that might be of interest. The first covers blogging's place in a microblog world. The second captures the essence of my productivity system, how I work and the tools I use

Filed under blogs interviews Lifestreaming microblogging productivity Twitter

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Posted 4 months ago

Lifehacks: Three Tips for Managing the Stream Before it Manages You

Image via Zee on TheNextWeb.com

The following is also my column in next week's AdAge...

Three Tips for Managing the Stream Before it Manages You

Tweets, texts and feeds - oh my. It's enough to make any one go batty if it lets you. But like it or not, as I mentioned in my last column, we need a new set of skills to "keep up" and manage our streams (vs. letting it managing you). Here are my three favorites...

1) Find a Digital Curator You Trust and Stick With It

Years ago I met with one of the more influential thinkers in the social media space. I asked her how she keeps up. Her answer surprised me. She only reads the Social Media Smart Brief, a daily digest newsletter. I too find myself turning to curators like the SmartBrief as well as TechMeme, Tweetmeme and Regator. Find one that tracks the verticals and people you need to follow.

2) Don't Subscribe and Read, Archive, Search and Skim

In the personal productivity world, some eschew sorting documents and emails in folders in favor of just throwing them into an archive where they can be easily searched later. The same approach works well for managing your stream.

Use a tool like Google Reader to subscribe to lots of content, including say all your friends on Twitter. However, view it as a personal, searchable database rather than another collection bucket you have to read and clear.

3) Make Unusable Time Usable Again

Since I got my iPhone two years ago, I can't remember the last time I was bored. Time that was once wasted - waiting on line at the DMV, riding the subway, even waiting out a rain delay at a ball game - is now once again usable.

One site that I rely on more than any other is Instapaper.com. You add a special bookmark to your browser that can be used clip any article on Instapaper for later review. Then, pull up Instapaper on any mobile phone and it will present you with a lightweight versions of those articles . There's also an iPhone app that makes all articles available offline.

(Additional tips can be found here from Amber Naslund.)

100M Portable Apps Downloads Can't Be Wrong

Congrats to the team at PortableApps, which announced they just surpassed 100 million app downloads. That's huge - 1/10th of Firefox's 1B milestone, which has far broader appeal.

In the last few weeks as I've become more mobile, OS and computer agnostic, I have become a raving fan of Portable Apps. These are little software programs that run right off a USB drive. My primary flash drive of choice these days is a Lacie Iamakey, which I stuff with browsers and neat little utilities like Lightscreen (for screen grabs), Xmind for mindmapping and Evernote for, well, everything. I keep all the data snug and encrypted with TrueCrypt. There's a big directory of USB apps here (Oh and Iamakey now comes disguised as a giant coin too!)

There's something insanely cool about having everything you need with you on your key chain, as long as you can find a PC somewhere - which is easier than you might think. USB apps have lightened my load dramatically. I can almost always find a workstation wherever I roam, which is usually a client or Edelman offices. Office, which is everywhere, handles the rest. The next step is for these little drives to plug into mobile phones and hotel set-tops.

With 100 million downloads in just a few years, Moore's Law working its mojo to make these drives faster and bigger and the Google Chrome OS on the way, something tells me the future is very bright for this ecosystem of little apps.

Filed under mobility productivity

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Posted 7 months ago

WriteRoom Syncs Basic Docs Between the Cloud and the iPhone

On the Mac I have become a fan of a little app called WriteRoom. It's a very basic writing app that also has an iPhone counterpart. Last night the developer pushed an update that, among other things adds search and syncing to the cloud at WriteRoom.ws.

I tried it this morning and it worked just great. You can start a document on the iPhone, sync it to the cloud, and then continue it in your browser elsewhere. The screen shot above shows my recent Adage column on my office PC. Since it's web based, WriteRoom.ws works on Macs and PCs and, just like the Mac desktop app, it's refreshingly very basic. The web app is powered by the Google App Engine, so you log in with your Google account. It also includes version tracking and features a very retro interface!

I would like to see it have a bit more tweaks on the web side (I don't care for writing in green, but white would be nice). The site also works awesome in a distraction free mode with any browser that operates in full screen mode - like IE, Firefox or Chrome. I wonder if John Gruber thinks this could give Simplenote a run.

Filed under iPhone iPhone apps mobile productivity

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Posted 7 months ago

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Interviews on Blogging and Productivity

Lifehacks: Three Tips for Managing the Stream Before it Manages You

100M Portable Apps Downloads Can't Be Wrong

WriteRoom Syncs Basic Docs Between the Cloud and the iPhone