But does it work?

Basecamp vs Zoho vs Google - project management grazing

Wow!  Basecamp has gone big-time!  I was using it when it was free <sniff>, and now it's a big, grown up service company (whose base price, incidentally, is $24.99 a month.  Yowza!  Nice that they can get people to pay that in our economy!)

Actually, I'm surprised that Basecamp hasn't rolled out a "new depression pricing structure. Say $5 a month for only 1/4 of the storage or something. Pretty dumb, if you ask me.  If companies everywhere are giving out free versions of their product (with, for example, limited storage or number of users) why isn't Basecamp?

I think that we see this a lot.  Smallish companies that jump into the "we're charging" model because -- yes, we understand.  People need to make money. But there are so many use cases out there where $25 a month is ridiculous, that ... oh, forget it.  Do what you want.

On the other hand, Zoho is expanding their tools and looks nicely functional. Either the to do list or the project manager. Or the planner.  I hope that Zoho is doing well, from a business point of view and can keep the tools coming.

And of course, Google gives it away. :-)  (Nice slogan, btw, although I'm betting it doesn't catch on.)

What tools to use this time?

This time, I'm looking for tools that will let me get to my data wherever I am.  I'm using a combination of Dropbox (am keeping everything on Dropbox) and gotomypc.com.  Seems to work pretty well, except gotomypc.com returned just a black page yesterday, meaning that I couldn't get to my invoice files from the client's.

For right now, I'm using Framemaker for the book itself (love the shortcuts; good for online reviews, and we can always move it to Word later).

I'm tracking the project, though, using Word files and a spreadsheet, and it's just not working for me.  I guess I'll have to go look at whatever they're called ... 24blankets.com?  to see how the current iteration of their To Do list, and any project management stuff they have is going.  Like many people, I don't want to pay for it (especially since I'm going to be using it only for a while.)  I'll track what I find on this blog and will tell you what I choose.

I'm back - at least for now

I haven't been blogging in quite a while. I have a website and do a lot of tweeting (@catmikk).  However, I have a new project and couldn't remember the online tools I used to like for managing projects, so I found myself visiting my old website!

The amusing thing is that I have exactly the same problems as I, or anyone else, for that matter, ALWAYS has.  Tools.

My client is remote. I will be writing a book for them. It's a big book, and we'll be publishing it. I need to go out and talk with their active and very technical customer base. Their product is "never used the same way by any two customers" which can make descriptions quite the challenge.

At the beginning of the project, I have sketched out "buckets" for 14 chapters.

There are about 75 customer videos available.

There is a massive amount of data to comb through, much of it fairly dynamic, in different media, etc. etc.  Fun!

Blist is now Socrata.com

This is terrible, but I was cleaning out my bookmarks today and came across blist, so I clicked on it.  Then I remembered the cute little list-based app.  Chicken recipes, cleaning techniques, and so forth.  Blist came up and -- they've gone professional!  Gone is the little dorm-room logo and identity.  They've upgraded, up-named and upclassed, and now they're filled with very applicable government information lists (and of course a list of Bernie Madoff's bilkees.)

Personally, I'd like to be able to view their data architecture from the top level.  How about a template for that?  One that you could customize, so that you could use terms that you wanted or a structure you preferred.  

Hmmn.  Actually, why doesn't someone just create an information front end, period.  Wouldn't that be nice?  You could have your own custom view of life and applicable data.

Blist -- excuse me - Socrata is nice, but for those of use up to our necks in data, the "search for it if you want it" approach might just be too hard.  I look forward to seeing what they'll do next.

My Favorite Home-Based Business Idea: Bitch.com

Vintage post:

I was speculating with a mom friend of mine this morning about a great service that overqualified, stay-at-home moms could start.  My absolutely non-pc code name for it was "bitch.com" and the idea is this. You're tired, fried, and just not in your happy space.  You have a master's degree in CS and used to be program manager for a fortune 500 company.  What do to?  Why not take a part-time job at bitch.com, the UI and final testing company for products where you can let it all hang out? Imagine.  Instead of those nice little "I experienced my third crash today when I clicked on "save as." I was using Firefox and no other programs were running." notes in the bugtracker, you could really wake your coders up with some jewels like "I hate your product.  It crashed again, and my fingernails are making huge claw marks down the sides of my keyboard as I look at your stupid guy jumping on his stupid bouncy ball  (for example). 

At any rate, you could have screamingly hormonal, really pissy bugs logged, and could really give your coders a taste of the real world! What a great idea!  And you could always use the Damoclesian threat of letting the testers do a ROUND TABLE with the coders to get even better performance! Time for lunch.  I think that I might have had too much coffee this morning...

Did you know that NYTimes has a visualization lab?

Yup. What's up with that?  Looks like it ties into IBM's Many Eyes project, which sounds like the most fun job around.

wefeelfine emotion blog summary in graphics

Wefeelfine is more people having fun harvesting fun words from blogs.

information aesthetics blog

This blog has just too many cool things. Check it out.

13 Great tools for organizing the web

The "organizing the web" problems is near and dear to my heart.  Here's an article talking about 13 great tools for organizing the information that you access on the web.

Googlereader - Yeah. Googlewriter - Ugh

You know, I use a lot of the Googlereader. Ever since I found this video on the internet, which is an interview with Robert Scoble, talking about how he reads about 11 billion blogs a day and how easily he can do it with Googlereader, I "went" for it.  I promptly put about 400 blogs into Googlereader (for one particular client),and then got drawn into another job.  Yup.  People like me need "channels."  I will go into a situation, need to connect with every blog in the universe about that situation or market segment, do it, finish doing it, and move on.  I don't want to LOSE all the work that I did putting this information together, but I don't want to trip on it every time I go to the bathroom, either. 

I just started using Googlewriter.  Ugh.  What a un-useful product!  What happened?   Slow, clunky, ugly, hard to figure out, apparently has limited functionality... sigh.  I'm off now to see if Nolowriter has gotten any better!