FredericMartin - Blognotes 2.0

10 tips to read more, better and become an expert

Keeping and developing a high level of expertise in areas such as marketing, management and digital technologies is a challenging exercise: those areas are moving fast, information channels are exploding with good and bad stuff, whom and what should you follow, where should you focus? Without any consistent approach, you´re rapidly lost in the digital age and you might lose to other people who have a better control of information. The new age is about knowledge, is about information control. I keep upgrading a structured approach which I´ve clustered into 10 steps as follows. I will detail later on each of those steps and related tools. Methodology and adequate tools are both important.

10+ reasons why you should use Twitter

I started using Twitter two years ago. I mean NOT using Twitter. It sounded like a gadget at that time, it was unclear what it would bring. Twitter has now matured to a solid discussion platform where millions of people interact worldwide on a daily basis to report on any crap or interesting things second per second. I use it now on a daily basis and have identified 15+ reasons why everybody should use it.
1. Twitter is an easy bookmarking tool but also
2. a fantastic note taking tool and
3. a socializing platform
4. It enhances productivity: to do´s, reminder etc in combinations with platforms like Remember The Milk
5. With it, you listen to the whole world in real time, millions voices from single individuals
6. It helps stay at the forefront by listening to experts and opinion leaders
7. You can collect new ideas and best practices in specific fields by following the right people
8. Social, hierarchy and racial barriers fall down, it´s an open world
9. You contribute to a collective knowledge in real time
10. Being on Twitter is a sign that you´re in.

What else?

Top Tools for better blogging in 2009

I´ve collected quite a long list of tools to blog quicker and better. I will upgrade it here progressively and would appreciate your comments on your own tools.

1. TOOLS FOR PUBLISHING TO BLOGS
LiveWriter - the best desktop client for blogging
I´ve added following plug-ins to enhance the LiveWriter experience:
Zemanta - suggests articles and links related to what you are writing
Polaroid Picture Live - to nicely integrate pictures with a Polaroid touch
Fireshot - to capture and integrate a webpage or some portions in a  post
Picasa plug-in - to integrate your Picasa pictures

2. TOOLS TO ORGANIZE INFORMATION
Delicious - to bookmark and tag webpages
Diigo - to organize articles into list and highlight best portions
ReadThis later - a Firefox sidebar to read a page later
Evernote - to organize quick notes
Zotero - Firefox extension to record & organize links, captures and notes

3. TOOLS TO FIND NEW SUBJECTS
Netvibes - RSS news portal to organize your web watch

... in progress

A nice desktop client for twitteroholics

split your Twitter into three columns and enhance the reading with advanced functionalities (mark, clear, filter, favorite, add to a group, search, reply etc): this is what Tweetdeck is proposing. An excellent interface for heavy Twitter users.

The easiest and best reminder

The picture says it all: with Remindr you have the easiest and most effective tool to be reminded of anything on a given date and time via phone, mail, Twitter or Jabber.

 

Online notebook for self management

Springpad is a nice online notebook which allows to easily manage contacts, notes, lists and calendars. the Ajax interface is very clear and offers a tremendous design. This tool will satisfy most people for a personal usage.

Micro-Blogging Project Management

Harvest Co-op is an easy micro-blogging application which helps follow a project team, track timings and keep updated on who´s doing what. Learn more here.

 

Control lights with Twitter

Twitter is used here in an unexpected way: to execute a machine-to-machine action. This video demonstrates the control of lights from a mobile phone via Twitter. The link gives more details.
Control Lights with Twitter from Justin Wickett on Vimeo.

Collective business intelligence portal

A major issue which we have at my company - might sound familiar to you as well: how to organize the floods of technical and market information,  consolidate the most relevant information and cross-fertilize across the organization. Information is fragmented. We could organize all those information into a strong collective system. Because  intelligence is key in our business. I've been working on this for quite a while and have accumulated many tools; I have combined and organized them into a unique gateway. A gateway where anybody can read, write, comment and challenge the information. My goal is to make it the best source of collective information for our business.

Spying conversations on Twitter

via AccessoWeb - With this new service called TwitterSalk,  people's conversations on Twitter can be followed without their noticing. A new kind of spying game.