Creating order out of digital chaos

Are your digital photos badly in need of organization? Are they collecting in ominously large numbers on various hard drives, disks, and online sites, randomly sized and named? When you think of how important some of them are to you, and how you could lose them all in one theft or flood or fire - does it make you feel so bad that you're in denial about the whole thing?

Well, what if I told you that for about $2/month, and a little of your own time, you could have them all in amazingly great order, stored safely on reliable servers, and have tools available to you to share them easily with others, order prints - or just keep them private?

Sorry for the corny introduction, but I'm really pleased that I finally tried out Flickr.com, and it's so useful that I'm feeling like everybody should know about it.

For those of us who are trying to lighten our material possessions and live the virtualista lifestyle, Picasa is a godsend.

Okay, the basics. You can sign up for a free account which is pretty good, but won't serve the purposes I describe above. A free account allows you to upload 100 MB of photos per calendar month. This is a bandwidth limit, and not an amount of server space. When a new calendar month begins, your limit is reset, and you can upload another 100MB. They'll keep all of your photos, but the catch is, you only have access to the most recent 200 of them. (In comparison, a free Picasa account allows you 1,024MB storage, period.)

Just as their business model is designed to do, I tried out a Flickr account, realized how awesome it is, and pretty quickly upgraded to a paid version.

A Pro account is $24.95 per year. That may sound like an annoying bill to have to pay, but think about it -it's only once a year, and works out to only $2.08 per month. When you realize what you get for it, and how it is completely capable of solving your troublesome digital photo problems, it may seem well worth it, as it does to me.

A Pro account gives you:

• Unlimited photo uploads (20MB per photo)
• Unlimited storage
• Unlimited bandwidth
• Unlimited photosets
• Archiving of high-resolution original images

But it's not just that you can dump all of your photos into an account. Flickr also makes organizing all of those pictures doable. I was going to say "easy", but the truth is, you have to make the effort and spend the time to organize them - but the tools they offer (a "photostream", "sets", "collections", etc.) are top-notch and are working really well for me.

But wait - there's more! (And I'm really not getting paid a cent for this!) If you want to email photos, or post them on your blog or web site, you can easily link to each one. Your original high-resolution photo (if that's what you have) is stored, and you can instantly access each photos in any one of several smaller sizes, and grab a URL which you can send or embed anywhere.

And then there's the slide shows - I really like this feature. In one click, you can create a slide show from just about any selection of photos, and embed or link to it, so that your email friend, blog readers, etc. can easily view it in that form. Here's an example:



You can also order and purchase actual prints from any photos, if you're into that! (I actually plan to - something I've been procrastinating on for years because it was just too hard to get organized to do it.)

The Pro account also allows you to upload videos. I haven't used this feature yet, but it may very well be a nice alternative to YouTube.

Flickr has a whole community aspect - sharing your photos with all kinds of people - which doesn't really interest me, but if you're a social networking web site fan, you may enjoy it. There are a lot of features designed to allow you to communicate and collaborate with others there.

But, if you just want to store your photos privately, there are a whole set of options for determining who can see your photos - from only you, to anybody at all, and several levels in between.

Obviously, I'm sold. It may not be the perfect thing for you, but if you have an hour to play around with it, a free account will allow you to find out.

Zoho CRM for Customer Relationship Management

I've been working with Zoho CRM for a couple of weeks now for a client, and I'm really impressed.

Zoho CRM is Customer Relationship Management software, designed to help a business keep track of its customers and sell them more stuff. It has so many features and functions that I don't think I've tried out 1/3 of them yet, but the ones I'm using are excellent.

I've been able to create a database of my client's contacts, and include information on them in custom fields that I create. Having done that, I'm now about to "select and sort" from the database. For instance, I can run a report of all contacts who took a workshop in March or April 2008, and print a report of them showing their names, email addresses, phone numbers, and the names and ages of their children. From that list, I can send a bulk email, or print labels for a snail-mailing.

I'm still waiting to see if the technical support is going to be adequate. So far, it has been a lot less than what I need and hope for. My emails have waited several days for an answer, which is too long. The one phone call I tried was very disappointing; the person on the other end seemed in an enormous rush, and once he had directed me to the menu item which was the first 1% of my question, he made it clear that it was time to get off the phone. I'm hoping that these were anomalies, or that I just haven't yet found the best method of getting support.

Zoho has dozens of other online applications, and they are apparently still in the process of developing them, and integrating them with one another. So things will probably get better. It does seem very promising.

Zoho: Online Word Processor, Spreadsheets, Presentations, Customer Relations Management, and more

As readers of this blog know, I'm an avid student of ways to work which allow me to be unattached from my own office, and even from my own computer. Online applications and services are a primary strategy in this quest. I use many of Google's online applications: GMail, Google Docs, Google Calendar, Google Maps, Picasa, Google Reader, Blogger, and probably others I'm forgetting. Just yesterday I found out about a somewhat similar suite of online applications/services: Zoho.

According to their FAQ, Zoho is "...a suite of online applications (services) that you sign up for and access from our Website. The applications are free for individuals and some have a subscription fee for organizations. Our vision is to provide our customers (individuals, students, educators, non-profits, small and medium sized businesses) with the most comprehensive set of applications available anywhere (breadth); and for those applications to have enough features (depth) to make your user experience worthwhile."

There's word processor, a spreadsheet program, a note-taking tool, a presentation application, a CRM (customer relationship management) application, a wiki program, a planner, an email application, project management, invoicing, web conferencing, database creation and reporting applications, a recruitment management tool, and even a few more. The scope of applications is quite impressive.

And who is behind all of this? Again quoting their FAQ, Zoho is "...a division of AdventNet Inc. A US-based company that has been creating and selling cutting edge software solutions since 1996. The company has tens of thousands of customers worldwide, is privately held and profitable."

They aren't all free, but many are. I've signed up for a free account but haven't tried any yet; I'll try and post again when I have more of a review. But from what I've seen, Zoho has a good possibility of becoming part of my steadily increasing set of important online business tools.

Using an online calendar system - you might want to consider it!

I am going to tell you about something which has helped hugely in organizing my business and my life in general. Before I do, I'll warn you: if you are concerned about using Google's free applications, you don't need to bother reading further. I understand those concerns, and I intend to do more research on them. But for now, personally, I'm not worried.

I knew of the existence of Google Calendar, but didn't feel the need for a new kind of calendar, especially a digital one. However, as I've mentioned here before, I'm on a mission to create an office which depends neither on paper nor on my hard drive, by using online applications wherever possible, so when Google Calendar was recommended in the interesting book Lifehacker: 88 Tech Tricks to Turbocharge Your Day by Gina Trapani, I decided to check it out.

For years I've kept myself organized using various paper calendars, and I've never missed any important event for lack of keeping track of my obligations. I actually really like keeping track of stuff on paper, and until my recent push, have avoided digitizing things that could be kept on nice, old-fashioned, tactile, simple, paper.

So what's so great about an online calendar, and about Google Calendar in particular? Why have I switched completely and am now enthusiastically sharing my recommendation? I can probably best answer that with a list of reasons.

1. I use my calendar for a lot more than I used to. Because it's so convenient and efficient to use, I now keep track of a number of obligations and events on it that I used to keep track of in my head, or in numerous and various other places. I really have centralized all of my obligations that are tied to calendar dates. More about how this works below.
2. Google Calendar allows me to set up events so that they automatically repeat. This is perfect for things like (1) yearly large debits to my checking account that I don't want to be surprised by, such as web hosting payments; (2) monthly bills for companies that don't offer anything except for U.S. Mail billing, which I might miss when travelling; (3) weekly events like my Cuban Salsa dance classes; (4) birthdays of family and close friends, which now appear every year.
3. Google Calendar's system of reminders by email is extremely useful to me. Now, I'm aware that for many people, reminders sent by email are not desirable or effective, simply because their inboxes are a mess already, and the resulting information bottleneck doesn't allow for email to be used in this way. This is not the case with me. I have an excellent spam filter system, and I take care of my incoming email so that it is not at all a problem. So, receiving reminders at specific intervals for events on my calendar that I might forget is extremely useful. I only receive reminders I specifically request, and I delete all of these emails as soon as I'm sure I won't forget the event, so they are nothing but helpful.
4. My calendar is available anywhere where I have a computer and an Internet connection. This has not proved to a problem even when I spent 5 weeks in a small remote town in Mexico - there were Internet cafes on literally every block - and I don't plan on being further from civilization than that any time soon.

A good example literally just occurred. I just checked my email, and there's a message from the company who provides my fax service, saying that they need a new debit card number. I went to their site to provide that, and saw that they're going to charge my card again next February 19. Now, there is no way in the world I'm going to remember that date. So I took 60 seconds to access my Google Calendar, add a note on that data and set it to repeat yearly. I don't need a reminder of it, so I didn't set any reminders, but it will show on my calendar that week and I'll know what that funny charge is that my bank shows for a few days before the payee is displayed.

I'm very pleased with the way this is working for me. If you had told me a year ago that I would be using an online calendar on a daily basis, I would have been amazed, because my attitude was truly Hutterite on this question. But the truth is, the more I'm able to free myself from my notebooks and pads of paper and file cabinets, the more time I get to spend away from my office, say, on the beach in that remote town in Mexico. As a psychologist once told me, people can change, but we have to be very motivated!