Google Docs has been around for awhile already. I wrote about how you can use it for writing documents and doing spreadsheets. The cool thing is that they are kept on the web, so you can work on them from anywhere, and also share them with anyone and the latest version is always the one you see. No need to email documents to people anymore…just send them the link to the published version on Google Docs.

Anyways, this week Google finally released Google Presentation, which is their answer to Microsoft PowerPoint. It now gives you even MORE reason to move all your document creation and development online. Most of their Google Doc apps allow you to save them in Microsoft format if you wish, so it’s easy to share will people in your Microsoft-based office.

And if you are interested in how it works compared to PowerPoint, Mashable has already written up a comparison blog about it. Check it out.

So there you go…exciting news if you get into this stuff.

If you do, they’ve just added a sweet search function to help you find information from all your feeds. Read about it and enjoy.

Part 4: Miscellaneous Gadgets and Tools

Bookmarks

There are a lot of bookmark places out there, but I use Delicious. It’s actually Del.ico.us to be correct. But basically this is a website that you can store all your bookmarks online so you can access them from anywhere. You tag your bookmarks to help categorize them, much like you do in Google Mail or Google Reader. I’ve used this a few times when I wanted to find the site I use to view radar images of storms, and I forgot the name of it. I logged onto Delicious and found it pretty quickly, although I need to organize them better.

It also imports your old bookmarks from your browser and will even integrate with Firefox to allow you to tag places while you surf and even have a sidebar with your Delicious bookmarks in it. You can share your bookmarks and also view ones that others have shared. It’s pretty nifty.

Backups

There are a few backup places online, but I’m using Mozy right now. It gives you 3 gigs of online storage for free and when you install it and run the program, it creates a little mapped drive in your Windows Explorer which acts like anything you have on your computer, like a hard drive, thumb drive, CD, etc. You can click on it and explore the stuff you have backed up online.

You can then access that from anywhere, but the main benefit is that it’s not on any local computer or in your house, so if anything does happen, like a flood or fire, your important data is safely online.

Documents

This recommendation is a bit shaky as best, as least for the Word Processor side of things. Google Docs is pretty amazing in that you can store, create and share spreadsheets and documents online. You can write documents, stories, resumes and access them from anywhere. Your spreadsheets are the same way.

I have a financial spreadsheet I uploaded to Google Docs and now I can access it anywhere, to make sure I’ve paid bills, etc. I’ve also created some spreadsheets for fantasy football, which you can publish online for the world to see and it was very, very handy.

Their document answer to Word isn’t the greatest yet. Your margins aren’t set like in Word, so they end up as wide as your screen, which doesn’t work for my school requirements on papers.

Still, the ability of both of these to be accessed wherever you go is pretty amazing and free.

Calendar

Google also has a Calendar tool that allows you to keep your entire schedule on their site which I haven’t tried yet.

Well, I think I am forgetting some vital part of moving your life to the web and if I remember anything, there will be more posts on the matter. And if new things are created, I will pass those along as well!

I hope this has all been beneficial to you guys and that some of you have found it useful.

My Conversion to Web 2.0
Moving to the Web: Part 1
Moving to the Web: Part 2

Part 3: Reading Blogs

This topic will probably seem a bit funny at first, because you already ARE reading a blog (and an awesome one at that) so what could I possibly tell you that would help you out?

Well, let’s say you read more than just my blog on a daily basis. You also read Nicky’s blog, and Arizona Sports Fans Network. And of course, you like to know what’s going on in Arizona news on AZCentral.com, or the sports world on ESPN.com, or the national news on CNN.com. What do you normally do? You go to each site, try to find information you want and read what you find. It takes a bit of time to cover all the sites you love to visit. When you are out of town, on a strange computer, you may not remember things you like to check.

How much better would it be if you went to a single webpage that listed all of your site’s news and blog items in one handy-dandy list like an inbox for email?!?! And you can access it anywhere like your Google Mail!

It would be SO much better, that’s the correct answer And yes, it already exists. They are called Blog Readers.

There are quite a few blog readers out there, but the big ones are Bloglines and Google Reader. Of course I am going to talk about Google’s reader, because now that you have your Google Mail account all setup, you may as well use all of their tools under one login.

So this is how it works:

1. Sign up for Google Reader.

2. Check it out, look at it. It probably wont make a ton of sense at first, but it will shortly. You should see a sidebar on the left with links and stuff. Towards the middle should be one called “Add Subscription”. We’ll come back to this later.

3. The main thing is, the site you like to read needs to be using RSS feeds to syndicate their news and stories. What is that? It’s basically a website putting all their news/blog information into this neat little file format called XML which is easily viewed by everyone. The cool thing is, any webpage that has a icon on it like this has an available feed:

Another thing is, when you use Firefox or Internet Explorer, that little icon appears in your address bar (For Firefox that is, somewhere else for IE) to TELL YOU that there is an RSS feed (or feeds) on this page. Check out the screenshots below.

Firefox:

Internet Exploder 7:

In Firefox, clicking on that little icon brings up that site’s feed page, which also has a sweet little link to “Add to Google”. Amazing huh? Firefox will actually let you SAVE that preference so you only have to choose once. The really pathetic thing is that IE7 only gives you the option of adding to Microsoft’s blog reader crap. I hate that…Open Source rocks.

(You should be using Firefox if you can’t tell )

Either way, you can just copy the URL out of the address bar and that is the link to their feed. For CNN’s top stories, the URL looked like this:

http://rss.cnn.com/rss/cnn_topstories.rss

4. Back to that Subscription link in Google Reader. If you just copied the URL above, you can click that Subscription link and then paste the URL into the box that pops up and hit enter. It tells you it’s adding the Subscription and then shows it to you on the right side of the page. It will list all the articles it has in history, usually like 25-50.

5. The cool thing is, you can organize all your feeds into groups/folders. When you first added the one above, you can click on “Add to a Folder” above the articles and either create a new one or add it to an existing one. Nice and organized! You can do this kind of thing at anytime of course.

6. Super awesome secret tip: While you are on your Google Reader page, click on Settings > Goodies and scroll down to “Subscribe as you Surf”. Follow the directions there. Basically, you create a bookmark that you click when you are on a page with an RSS feed and it takes the feed and sends it to Google Reader automatically, so you can totally skip step #4! But you needed to learn both ways to understand how it works

(By the way, “Settings” has all kinds of other things in there you can do to manage things, so check it out)

7. Finally, the last few things are cosmetic. You can choose to read your feeds in Expanded view or List view. I like List view better, since you can click on an article like an email and view it if you want, or skip a bunch that don’t look interesting. Expanded view shows you excerpts and takes up a lot of screen real estate.

You can also have it show only feeds with Updated items in it or ALL feeds (this is in the left sidebar)…I use Updated for the most part, but All sometimes comes in handy when I’m looking for some old story.

A final thing is the Star command, which is cool. Did you like a story and want to read it later? Star that sucker and then you can always go to your “Starred Items” and read all those articles when you have the time. Pretty nifty, I’ve used it a lot.

So here is a screenshot of my Google Reader (which isn’t even showing HALF of the crappy feeds I have ):

I covered all kinds of things here and this turned out way longer than I was thinking. If you need help or have questions, go ahead and get out of here. I don’t have time.

Kidding, ask away…I want to help.

By the way, when you are done, be sure to add “A Mike’s Life” into your reader…just come to this page and click on your new bookmark you made in Step 6…you’ll be my friend for ever.

My Conversion to Web 2.0
Moving to the Web: Part 1

And now on to the good stuff…

Part 2: Online chatting and email

Instant Messaging is beyond popular. It’s really a staple of most peoples’ online lives. Not my wife’s, but that’s the fault of her employer for blocking those programs. The problem with instant messaging comes when you leave your computer and want to access your buddy list from work, or a library or wherever. Not all companies let you install IM programs, and your local library certainly wont allow it. The other issue is having multiple IM clients that you use and want to consolidate into one program for easy access.

Obviously the main point of this series I’m doing is to move you to the web for everything. So this first step is to switch to an all-inclusive, web-version of an IM client. This allows you to chat anywhere you find a computer (granting they aren’t blocking things).

The recommended site to sign up for this is Meebo.com. It’s such an impressive and easy site to join. You sign up, put in your information for each chat service you use and you are done! It works with AOL, MSN, ICQ, Google Talk, Yahoo and maybe a few others. The webpage after you login acts like a virtual desktop, where you can move buddy windows around like a normal window. Not only that, it holds a bit of history on your chat sessions, so you can see what you said before logging off last time. Pretty handy. You leave it open in one of your browser tabs from my first tutorial and it’s perfect!

The next step in your conversion is email. Some of you may use online email already, and if so, that’s great. That’s pretty much the point of this step. My main goal will be to pimp Google Mail since it’s an all-in-one solution.

Let’s say you use Outlook, or Outlook Express or some kind of desktop client for checking and storing mail. The immediate downside is, of course, you can’t see it when you are on another computer in another state while on vacation. Maybe you don’t want to drag that laptop along with you but want to check mail, organize it, etc.

Google Mail allows you to have a @Gmail account (Google’s own email address for you – sort of like Hotmail, or Yahoo). But the biggest plus is that it gives you the ability to add your personal, POP3 accounts to it’s service. This means you can check all your mail accounts right here in Google. I believe it will even check your Hotmail and Yahoo accounts as well. It also gives you THREE GIGABYTES of disk space to store your mail, which is incredible. You can have mail on there forever.

It was a huge step for me to go from relying on Outlook to using Google Mail. But the switch has been so great. I was able to check mail from a training class last week and I’m now able to see it from work much easier than before.

A nice feature is being able to tag incoming mails. This is basically like creating “subfolders” in an email client. You can tag something “Family”, or “Finances” and when you click on that tag on the menu bar, you’ll see all mails in that tag. It’s a sweet way to organize everything. You can create filters that tags mails upon their arrival. Another thing it does is to organize email threads into one email group that you can view by using tabs.

The final plus is speed. I was using Outlook 2007 which is a resource hogging nightmare. Even Outlook 2003 was brutal, and slow at times. Google Mail is a simple, quick and easy tool. I’ve never had an email client so quick. And it’s free, so why haven’t you switched yet?

So that’s it for Part 2. A lot to take in, but two simple, easy solutions. Give it a try and let me know how it goes. You can always go back to using your other clients.

Sign up for: Google or Meebo

So, let’s get started.

Part 1: Get yourself a better browser

Before any of the Web 2.0 stuff can really work efficiently for you, a better browser is in order. Of course, the point of all this is make us less dependent on our local applications, but still, if you are going to be at home 99% of the time, time to upgrade that thing!

The first thing you can do is find out what version of Internet Explorer you have. Likely all of you have it, so this is an easy first step. Open it up, go to Help > About Internet Explorer and find out the version you have. If you have Version 7, then you’re good. If not, and it’s Version 6 or lower, then you need to upgrade.

You can upgrade simply by running Windows Update from Start > All Programs > Windows Update.

The reason you want to move to Version 7 is that you get TABBED BROWSING, which basically means you have one browser window open, with multiple other browser windows located under tabs, sort of like Sheet Tabs in Excel. Tabs help you have less things showing up in your taskbar and they really clean things up.

Now that I’ve talked about Internet Explorer, I want to tell you that you should trash it and get Firefox instead

Firefox is a free, open-source browser by Mozilla. It has everything you want: Bookmarks, tabbed browsing and best of all: SPEED. It’s much faster than Internet Explorer and more stable. I have used it for the last two years at least, if not longer. You can think of it like a Mac versus Microsoft. Or an iPod versus a Zen. It’s prettier, better and more stable, but not as popular since everyone already has IE and a PC. But, it is just as good, free and worth testing out.

So go download it and give it a shot.

That’s it for Part 1…once you make sure you have tabbed browsing, then we can move onto Part 2: Email and chatting!

The idea behind Web 2.0 in layman’s terms is basically doing everything online, without the need of a desktop operating system. It’s the way the internet is headed.

Most of you know, as an example, that Microsoft XP is an operating system. You open your Outlook on it, you open up iTunes, you use Word and Excel to write and control finances, you use it to launch AOL Instant Messenger and chat with friends and all kinds of things. You store files, you backup data on other hard drives or thumb drives and you search using Windows, or whatever.

Think about your laptop being stolen or lost. You’d lose a heck of a lot more than your computer. Files, data, history, email, your entire life could be on that thing. If I lost my laptop, all my data on our finances is there. My Outlook email is stored there. How would I ever get it back? There are a ton of other examples of the horrors this would cause all of us.

Now, imagine not needing that thing. Imagine if you were on one laptop, doing all your work, emailing, whatever, and suddenly it died. What if someone could hand you a second laptop, with nothing on it but a simple operating system that connected you to the internet, and you could continue your work in a matter of minutes?

Well, that’s the reality we live in right now. It’s here and growing exponentially. Right now I’m in a training class, in some classroom in Tempe, but with this simple internet connection, I am chatting with friends, emailing and reading all the blogs I subscribe to. I’m also writing this blog. If I had done more, I could also be working on my book and messing with my finance spreadsheet if I felt like it.

Best of all…it’s free.

So how do you do it? Ah ha! I knew you’d ask. Well, in the coming days, I’m going to write some blogs about the best things I’ve found out there, links to these places and what it will do for you.

And you’ll probably be seeing the name “Google” a lot in those.

Should be fun.