Thing 33

Travel 2.0: I'm going to NYC in a few weeks, so I'm pretty psyched about this thing. The blogs and podcats are only marginally interesting to me, the review site I find some what helpful, but the're just so much bitching. It's almost hard to know if you're really gonig to get a great place. At the same time you do get a good indication by the number of positive and negative reviews, which is helpful. I dug Vcarious, seems like a fun idea, but again teh overwhelming number of posts makes getting a really useful review of something from some one with tastes analgous to my own is tough. But I guess that's true of pretty much every review site for pretty much every thing. I checked out a few of the mash ups. I like the mash up way of just having the info right there on teh map. It feel more halpful and in prevents the overwhelm sea of reviews.

Thing 32

Google Maps, Mash-ups: I've used goggle maps fairly extensively. It's pretty cool. I made maps and done driving directions. I've used yahoo maps, mapquest, and the like and I think they are very cool. It makes getting to places so much easier. I'm headed to NYC in a few weeks and google maps is going to be a great way to get places I wanna go.

Mash ups are pretty kick ass. I like the bringing together of information for oodles of sources.

So far this is my favorite mash-up: http://beermapping.com/brewery-maps/

Thing 31

More Twitter: I'm digging Twitter. I'm still a n00b but I'm getting there. I think right now my Twitter page says: "Hey I'm new at this, here's what's on my mind." I don't have a fancy theme, or anything like that. It might because I look at my tweets mostly through iGoogle, so I'm not so concerned about my actual twitter page. Mostly I use twitter to tweet my beers at Mystery Beer Night. I must say I use facebook as my twitter for the most part. I have a few friends I'm following and few friends are following me. I guess my twitter page says "I'm a drunk". Which is fine and not entirely untrue.

I'd say twitter fits into my social network stratedgy by allow me to follow my friends in another way. Mostly I use online tools like twitter and facebook to keep up with my friends. I don't do much business through Facebook or twitter, but I'm not so obnoxious that if work contacts found me that wouldn't be totally turned off by my remarks. I'm just being me.

So for me twitter is just another interesting way to see what Russ is doing.

Thing 30

More RSS and Delicious. I must say I'm really not that down with RSS. I try and I try, but I just can't get into it. I've tried bloglines and Google reader and I want to like them, but for some reason, I can't. Prehaps it's because I don't get a chance to look at many websites regularly anymore. The moments I got to do that have been stolen away by Facebook. I think I said much the same in my 23 Things post. Other folks I know love RSS though. I guess it's just one of those things. I'm going to give it another go though, just to say I did.

As far as other Delicious features go I guess searching other folks bookmarks would be my favorite feature. The inbox stuff didn't seem that cool to me, but I did add a tag cloud to my blog, for what it's worth. I dig Delicious, I really do, but as a spot where I can access my bookmarks. I guess I driven to discovery by need. As soon as I need something else from Delicious I'll discover it. I guess I like tag bundles too.

So, I don't view my RSS regularly, I don't really have any suggestion for using RSS stuff or Delicious beyond explore. With everything I done with 23 Things or More Things, I can say if something piqued my fancy, I'd spend some time with it, I'd really see what it could do. And if something didn't, well there's always the next thing.

Thing 29

Google News. I fully admit I'm not as up on the News as I should be. I avoid it. Mostly, it just makes me angry and I don't want to be angry all the time. I wouldn't say I stick my head in the sand and ignore the world, but I don't like the feeling that I'm being force feed certain things that are obviously blown up of proportion. Perhaps Google News will allow me to filter out the junk I don't care to here about. I like the personalized news stuff. Google stuff feels so over-lappy. I feel I can do most of the stuff from Google News in iGoogle. I guess it's all about what flavor you like your google.

GMail. I've used gmail for quit a while. It's my friends only e-mail. I probably like it the best of all the web based email stuff. I still keep my yahoo account but that's the address I give out to anybody. I don't get much spam on my gmail and it is really nice to not have to worry about deleting anything. There are some pretty cool features in the Labs. I added some bits and bobs. Unfortunately it doesn't look like I'll be able to Sync my work calendar to gmail, but you what? I don't need to have my work calendar everywhere. I changed my theme, which is a feature I'm a little bored with. Everything seems to have the same tired themes. If you can't give me a truly kick ass theme, if all I'm really doing in changing the colors, just forget about it.

Thing 28

iGoogle. I went with iGoogle. Mostly because I already use loads of google stuff like google docs, gmail and so forth. It's kind of cool. I'm going to have to try to fully utilize it, which might take me a bit.

It was really easy to set up. I found a Doctor Who theme I liked and a bunch of gadgets, like a twitter one and a Facebook one and I added all of those. I also added a clock and something that tells me movie times in my area, so that's pretty kick ass.

I really dig the movie gadget. It's actually quite helpful. Hopefully I'll used it this weekend to avoid showing up at the wrong theater like I did 2 weeks ago.