What people are doing online in real time

I know that this is all over the internet already, so you've probably seen it, but it answers so many 'Why?' questions that I couldn't resist!

Blogging about Blogging

(Or 'how I organise my stuff on the internet)
Okay this might look a bit self-indulgent. Actually it is a bit self-indulgent, so you might want to stop reading now, but there is a reason for it. I like to sign up for pretty much any new sites or services I can find, and I try to have a go at using most of them. Which means that people, particularly at work, tend to ask me which ones to use for different stuff. So I thought I'd write down what I use, so I can just send them a link when they do.

News
I've sort of run out of space on both iGoogle and Google Reader - I've got 10 tabs on iGoogle split into work and non-work related stuff, so there's not many places to put new feeds other than well down a page. I only use Reader for the 30 or so that I'm really interested in, because I run the Reader feed into Viigo, which downloads them automatically to my phone so that I can read the latest stuff on the Tube when there isn't a mobile signal. Viigo also has the main news, tech and social media sites plugged into it, so I've got BBC, Guardian, Mashable, Techcrunch, ReadWriteWeb, Engadget, etc there as well. Anything worth saving can be sent to Delicious, or worth sharing can be sent to Twitter from the Viigo app.

Actually I do pretty much the same from a computer too - keep an eye on anything interesting on Twitter, and then save it to Delicious if it looks like it might be useful. As well as Tweetdeck groups to split out different types of interesting, I've also got Tweetdeck alerts, and FriendFeed desktop alerts so that if the (much smaller number of) people I'm following on FriendFeed add stuff to Delicious or Slideshare then that will trigger an alert as well. As well as the Digsby alerts for new Gmail, Hotmail or Facebook activity. I used to use Delicious for all bookmarks, but it's increasingly become work-related stuff. Like most internet stuff I do, I've sent the most recent links back to the sidebar on this blog. There are some browser bookmarks - synced between work and home through the lovely XMarks, which also means that I don't ever have to remember passwords either

Music
As explained here, I used to love Last.FM, deleted my account, and came back sheepishly a few months ago. At home I organise music through iTunes like most people, but to find new stuff AND listen to it (not easy through either iTunes or Amazon's recommendations) I use Last.FM's recommendations and Spotify's streaming. Anything played on iTunes, Spotify or Last.FM gets pumped back to my Last.FM profile to help improve the recommendations (and from there to the 'what I'm listening to' widget here).

Photos
Through not having done much photography in the last couple of years, my photos are scattered around a few sites - Picassa, Flickr, PhotoBox mainly. I've never got hooked on Flickr, I guess becuase you can't do that much without paying. Since discovering Compfight creative commons image search I'm using more Flickr images in presentations, and feel that I out to put some more stuff up there to give back to the community. But I haven't yet: mostly what I take photos of at the moment is family snaps to post straight to Facebook from my phone so my folks can see them. For online image editing Picassa works better for me than Flickr if you have it installed. Aviary is the best cloud based editor I've found. I could write PLENTY more on iPhone photo apps, but most of it would be paraphrasing Iain Tait.

Culturally digital

I tend to get asked a lot of questions at work about how to find stuff quickly, where to get free stats, how to make presentations look different (content rather than design - my slides always look different and rarely in a good way) basically all the stuff that any self respecting media geek should know. So I put some slides together to show where i find stuff and how I use it, and showed them to a bunch of planners at our place, which I thought was worth posting here. Not least to thank Ramzi Yakob for the quote about being culturally digital).

being culturally digital

View more presentations from Graeme Wood.

Twitter tools visualisation

Twitter tools are growing at similar exponential rate to the service's traffic this year, so it's always useful to have everything in one place. Mashable has been my preferred choice of reference points, but this visual from Brian Solis and Jesse Thomas is a neat framing of the best research tools around at the moment, grouped by what they are for. Great when you can't remember which of the ten you know of is best for a certain objective. And also great to play around with the new ones.