I’m typical of my generation – I’m in my forties. We were introduced to computing by our companies, and therefore many of us remain wedded to Microsoft products, because of their astonishing penetration into the corporate sector during our learning years. We marveled at Windows 98, we have slavishly used every generation of Outlook, because we learned with an exchange server, we’ve never thought of using anything other than the latest generation of Internet Explorer, and we believe that our data should live on our PC’s so it’s always accessible offline. The latter because we were brought up on chunky IBM laptops with dial up internet connections.
Well, fellow forty somethings, the time has come to break free! Free of Microsoft license fees, and free of the restrictions of working with their products. The world has moved on, and we need to catch up with it. When was the last time you worked offline? No, I can’t remember either! Our future lies in on line working with some amazing products, which will make us more efficient, and which are provided free of charge! In this short series I’m going to introduce you to Google’s products, show you how they can benefit you, and how to get the best out of them. The best thing of all is that they are web based, which means you can access them from your laptop, your desktop, a PC in an internet café or from the old Windows 2000 machine that’s been sitting unused in your holiday home in Tuscany “in case you need to contact the office.”
In this first post, we’re going to talk about Gmail. Google’s mail application is simply brilliant. It allows you to bring all your email accounts into one place, it works seamlessly with mobile phones (including, amazingly, Blackberries) and offers a level of personalization you can’t even dream of with Outlook. Here are some of the features:
- Integrate multiple accounts into one mail system – system will reply from the account received on
- Design and append your own “labels” to emails so you can instantly see what needs what action
- Really easy filter system, with rules you can apply. For example – “All mails from John Smith, move to trash and mark read”
- Multiple inboxes, so you can separate your different accounts if you really need to
- Spam filters that totally work, they are simply amazing!
- Brilliant search facility (well it is Google) means you never lose emails
- Replies are called “Conversations” and stack together, so you can easily follow the history
- Huge storage, so you need never worry about disc space or archiving
- Finally – it’s free!
If you’re still not convinced, go and set up a Gmail account anyway, and just play around with it for a few weeks. I’m pretty sure that in time you’ll move all your accounts to Gmail – that’s exactly what I did.
Want to read part two? Go here!
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My Spike was Smaller than Darren's!
Regular readers will know that this site had a strange traffic "spike" yesterday, which I found out about shortly before bedtime, and which I couldn't explain at the time. Google Analytics gave me the answer this morning and I'm about to reveal all, but first......
It's quite funny that this should have happened on the same day that Darren Rowse posted about a real traffic spike at Problogger - his, at 250,000 visitors was a little higher than my own, but you should read his post, which tells a fabulous story.
Blogging as a Perfect Consumer Circle
Have Bloggers Created the Perfect Consumer Circle?
As a new blogger I:
Visit old blogger's blogs - which increases their traffic, and I
Comment on their blogs - which increases my traffic, and I
Buy their E-Books - which makes them money, and they tell me to
Create my own E-Books - which makes me money, and I tell the world
"I'm making money!" - which attracts more new bloggers, who then
Visit old blogger's blogs.........
Why You Should Do It Now! - The Story of Boatman Pete
I first met Boatman Pete around four years ago, although I felt I already knew him as we had been exchanging emails for some time. His email address started with the words “Boatmanpete” so the nickname stuck. When we did meet, it was for me to help him to buy his retirement home here in Spain. His main criteria was that he wanted a small house, with a big plot of land, as he planned to build a huge swimming pool. Not to laze around in, but to sail his model boats in! He showed me some amazing photos of his boats, all of which he built from scratch, and one of which you can see in the photo below.
Why you should switch to Google - Part Two
So you’ve got Gmail – what you need next is Google Reader. It’s simply the very best RSS reader on the market, and once again it’s free! Here are the features of Google reader, and in a moment we’ll explore how to get the best out of it:
