Stepping up to the web 2.0 challenge

Whilst I regard myself as quite technical and internet focused, I have allowed myself to "slip behind" the curve a little recently. I think GMail was the last thing I was up to speed with, after that it all went a little soft. Certainly in recent times I forced myself into using RSS, which I now cannot live without - imagine having to revisit news pages and rescan them looking for any new articles ?!! And then moved onto "semantic tagging" over bookmarking - principally as I had too many (700+) bookmarks to not put them in folders, and I couldn't come up with a hirarchy of folders that consistantly worked for me.

So with my webmail(via Gmail), RSS (via Bloglines) and tagged bookmarks (via del.icio.us) setup, as well as a host of other new "web 2.0" services such as a todo list (via Remember the Milk) and a more general simple list service (via tada lists) I was truely setup to get more of what I wanted out the internet.

But the final piece of the puzzle that clicked into place recently was a site called netvibes. This is now my homepage, and is a customizable page with various panels sorted into columns (bit like portlets, for those who know what they are). Each panel contains one of my web 2.0 services so the overall effect is that of a dashboard or command console, where I can in one look see what unread mail I have, which RSS feeds have updated, what my upcoming week's todo list is and a host of other stuff.

If you are scratching your head here, then I might put up a laymans description of all this techno-babble soon ! If you are thinking - hold on, Outlook does all of this, what is so great about your setup - then you havn't been bitten by the web 2.0 bug. Everything is much more easily accessable, updateable and useable as rigid Outlook components, and I can mix these services together in different ways as I need, as well as change services should a better one come along. The mark of a great web2.0 application is one that will help you migrate to a competing one, but you simply don't want to :)