Dortch's Digressions

Sigh...

I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry. I've been overly distracted by numerous events, from a knee injury on Christmas Eve to traveling to IBM Corp.'s Lotusphere confab/prayer meeting, at which I had a far better and more illuminating time than I expected, despite it's Orlando, Florida location. (I have been to Orlando numerous times, and have yet to have an experience that has made me want to go back. Maybe if I got to go when there wasn't a conference to attend...but then, would I go?)

Anyway, I've also been getting another blog off the ground, which has siphoned available mental bandwidth away from this one. But if you have any interest in corporate information technology (IT) and/or business process management (BPM), you should definitely check out this latest project. The Web site is "BPM in Action," and it's run by ebizQ, aggregators and producers of lots of high-quality IT-related news and analysis.

So I expect posts to this blog will pick up compared to their recent dearth, but will still be relatively infrequent, as I devote most of my blog time to "BPM in Action." However, I also expect to get better at this, and at managing my time devoted to it, so please do stay tuned, and let me know if you have topic ideas, or comments, or just want to encourage me to post here even less frequently than I have recently.

Meanwhile, I've identified another interesting online resource you or those you know may find useful. It's called eSpindle, and it's a set of online resources for assessing and helping to improve vocabulary and spelling. Even if you are not a student and don't know any, there might be someone learning English, or trying to hone their writing or public speaking skills, or to improve their memory in or near your very home or office. And besides, it's just a cool online place to hang out and poke around -- they even offer a 10-day free trial, even though annual subscriptions are priced around 22 cents per day. Check it out, tell everyone you know who might benefit from or enjoy it, and thanks for your interest and patience. Soon enough again, I promise!

Post-Holiday Gifts for Yourself: Free, New Views of the Web (and Information, and Knowledge...)

A happy and peaceful 2007 to you and yours. I thought I'd ring in the New Year by offering some tools that might help make this year a bit less chaotic and perhaps even more interesting than 2006.

I'm a big fan of things that help make the Web and information on it more easily or rapidly navigable, or that help me to see things differently. I'm also a big fan of "free." So I'm always on the lookout for free tools that promise such benefits, at work and more broadly.  In fact, tips about such tools are often the most immediately useful nuggets in some of the blogs I read. Herewith, three recent examples. Enjoy. As always, your thoughts welcome.

Alexaholic -- If you aren't yet familiar with Amazon.com's Alexa search tool (www.alexa.com), you should be. Web search plus traffic information and rankings equals frequently fascinating fare. (Or maybe I'm just easily fascinated.) Whether you are "Alexa-enabled" or are not, if you're interested in seeing traffic information about a particular Web site, and especially if you'd like to compare that site's information with that of other related sites, you should definitely check out www.alexaholic.com. I've used it to compare traffic at my company's Web site to that of competing providers, and to compare multiple competing IT vendors' Web sites as well. You might find it useful for evaluating and comparing potential business partners, employers, or sellers.

Cooliris -- If you use one of the more popular browsers (including Firefox, Internet Explorer, and Safari for the Mac, among others), you can download a plug-in from www.cooliris.com that lets you easily hover over Web links on one Web page, and preview the destination of those links before clicking on them. Yes, I know it's not that difficult to click on the link and go to the next page, but Cooliris saves me a lot of back-and-forth and frustration over page-loading delays. This is especially true when I'm trying to compare multiple information sources or vendors online, things many of us do frequently, both at and outside of work.

 

Kartoo --  www.kartoo.com provides a familiar search engine interface, but presents its results in a very non-typical way. I will say no more here about that bit -- you should just point your browser at the site and take it out for a spin. It takes a bit of getting used to, but I have already found Kartoo results very good at stimulating new consideration of connections among initiall disparate pieces and sources of online information. You might find it useful for tasks ranging from thinking about topics for upcoming research or writing projects to unearthing innovative gift suggestions for a loved one, to get the jump on Valentine's Day or the 2007 end-of-year holidays. Never too early, you know...

The great thing about the Web is its ability to help aggregate experience, information, and knowledge in new ways, which in turn can stimulate new experience, information, and knowledge. Which, oddly enough, is what I think the creators of the fundamental technologies supporting the Web actually had in mind. Who knew?