Andrew Shuttleworth Web HQ

The Story of the Efficient Geek Business Guy with Too Much Email - I GIVE UP

It's 1.15am. This is going to be a long post, but if you have too much email you probably want to read it.

diddlefinger - English lookup for Japanese Maps

The lack of online maps of Japan with words English has been a nagging problem for visitors here who don't read or write Japanese.

diddlefinger.com goes a long way to addressing that. You can look up Japanese addresses on Google maps even if you only have the English address.

The site is user friendly guiding users through the address search to minimize errors. There is also a zip look-up and you can paste in a Google Maps URL you have been given to see the map on the diddlefinger site. Obviously well thought out.

Google Apps, Microsoft Apps or both? - LimitNone

This is an exceptional document explaining the current state of Google vs Microsoft in the applications space and possible solutions.

Google and Microsoft: Living Together in Harmony

The company behind the white paper - LimitNone - is offering solutions to work between the two. Want to move your Outlook mail to Gmail? This is amazingly topical and they obviously know what they are talking about.

Amazon Japan Clearance Sale

Amazon Japan are having a clearance sale (affiliate link) with up to 90% off. If you have anything on your wish list might be a good time to check :-)

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More bookmarks, more content

There's no way I could blog about every interesting web site I visit. This was getting frustrating.

After using Google Bookmarks (which has no sharing features) for a few months, I finally managed to transition to del.icio.us. Not sure why it took me so long. I guess getting the del.icio.us integration with Firefox using an add-in was a big factor.

Now it's really easy to share bookmarks. You'll find the latest ones automatically listed towards the top right of this page. You can also see them here http://del.icio.us/AndrewShuttleworth or get an RSS feed of them or add me to your 'Network' if you are already a del.icio.us user. The best thing is when someone is looking for certain resources, for example budget accommodation in Japan, I can just send them the link to my bookmarks on that topic and they can easily get to everyone else's.

I still have a lot of re-tagging to do for the imported bookmarks, but I hope they prove useful.

Two features I would like to see in del.icio.us:
1) Smart handling of multiple bookmarks within the same site (similar to the way Google omits search results from similar sites.
2) I'd like the toolbar button to change when I visit a site or page I have already bookmarked.

New version of Google Groups has a great new feature

"This new version of Google Groups provides an unparalleled interactive
forum for discussion and collaboration. Our new user interface and
features allow you to easily create, manage, search, and browse groups".

The new interface is nice, but the 'collaborative page creation' is big news. Although they don't use the term, it basically means every Google group comes with a wiki. I can see this being a huge benefit to many groups. Yahoo! Groups is one area Yahoo! has managed to stay ahead of Google. I see this as a major strike back for Google. (As a big user of Yahoo! Groups though, I think the key point is how many of your target audience already have (and know they have or are willing to create) a Yahoo! or Google account. We are probably close to a to a turning point in favor of Google.

http://groups.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=46603

Plaxo going from strength to strength

Following up on an earlier post about Plaxo, they seem to be going from strength to strength. There is now a one-way sync with LinkedIn, and SyncR (a great service where you email photos of business cards, documents and whiteboards and they are OCR'd and archived for you).

The big news though is that they are working on a Google Sync! I can't wait to see how well they sync contacts. As many SNS services such as LinkedIn can import contacts from Google (and Yahoo! and Hotmail!), contact management and staying connected with people is getting easier.