The following tools are broken down into a few buckets for clarity of function. Note, these choices are purely subjective, but we use most of these daily or have implemented them for various groups.

Google Suite

This is the most obvious especially for smaller organizations that don’t want to be bothered with running their own infrastructure. It works especially well if there is a strong need to collaborate. Besides being free, there is a huge amount of storage allocated, and is available on mobile devices, or even offline through Google Gears.

Gmail for email
Google Docs for documents spreadsheets and presentations
Google Calendar for time management and scheduling
Google Reader for keeping up with RSS feeds
GTalk for chats…great for working as remote teams

37 Signals Suite

These applications aren’t free if you go beyond what is basically a trial use of the applications. However, they are well conceived and pretty inexpensive.

Basecamp - Basic Project Management…I say basic, but it is likely more than you need.
Highrise - CRM
Writeboard - Text editor, collaborative whiteboard
Backpack - Intranet
Campfire - Group Chat

Content

To present words and pictures on the web, that is easily updatable, there are a few options. Among those are a few really good Open Source Content Management Systems. We like:

Drupal
Joomla

Another option to look at is a blogging engine. For instance, we use Wordpress as the basis of this website. It is designed for blogging, but we’ve bent it to suit our needs as a web content management system as well. It seems to be working well for us. There is a hosted version at www.wordpress.com and if you wish to install it on your own server (like us) go to www.wordpress.org

In this category, we’ve also been looking at another option that isn’t free, but is inexpensive. Expression Engine.

All worth a look…

(Also, see Part 1 of this article)

We’ve had questions from clients on what they should look at on the web if they want to learn more about Social Media. While surfing, we found that an apropos post by Regular Geek. Here is the Regular Geek’s required reading list for people interested in social media:

First, there are the blogs I recommended in the quick guide, Louis Gray, Alexander van Elsas, Muhammad Saleem, SarahInTampa and SheGeeks. In many cases, you may see these people or others in the list guest posting (or writing full time) at ReadWriteWeb or Mashable, which you should be reading anyway. Here is the rest of my list:

• Tamar Weinberg of Techipedia (and Mashable and several other sites)
• Reem Abeidoh
• Mark Dykeman of Broadcasting Brain, with apologies to Mark for falsely accusing him of including social marketing Sorry Mark.
• Colin Walker
• Hutch Carpenter of I’m Not Actually a Geek, but absolutely should admit his geekiness.
• Social News Watch, which covers the social news sites almost exclusively.
• JD Rucker of Soshable
• Chris Miller of The Social Networker
• Julian Baldwin
  

We have been getting a few questions about what web apps that we like and use. There are A LOT of tools out there. So, it is our duty to remind you that as always, IT ISN’T ABOUT THE TECHNOLOGY!

Our job is NOT to simply develop and implement tools or technology for our clients. Anybody can cut a few corners and do that badly. Our specialty is creating best-of-class solutions by revealing and refining YOUR business processes and helping you streamline and automate some of these refined processed using the most appropriate technology.

It just happens that some of the best tools for the job are cheap or free. OK, got that?

If you have have any questions on what you should do for your organization…CALL US!

Photos

For photos, we love Flickr. Not only is it a great host for your photos, you can embed the photos into your own site easily (see the widget to the right of this post) and there is a fantastic community of snap happy users.

RSS Feeds

To syndicate feeds, we like Feedburner. This app makes it easy for people to subscribe to your feed, and has good reporting tools.

Videos

Videos are part of the web now and will only become more important as time goes on. It is already some of the most viewed content on the web based on the stats from YouTube. While almost everyone knows about YouTube, it has some limitations. Among these are a 10 minute video limit.

A great alternative is Vimeo. This service has a 500mb upload limit a week, but should give you plenty of space for larger videos.

So, our strategy is to use YouTube for teaser pieces and Vimeo for full videos.

For streaming LIVE video, check out:

UStream - Live interactive video streaming

Qik - Stream Video from your mobile phone!

Tell us. What do YOU like?

Cold Drinks, originally uploaded by matrixmeridian.

Hey! We haven’t seen you for a while…

Besides our world famous espresso and drip coffee, our fridge is now stocked up with ice cold drinks for the summer.  Yes, this is wishful thinking, but nonetheless.

Stop in for a chat and a drink…and let us know what you’ve been up to.  We’re looking forward to it!

In The Economist this week, there is an article about how modern workers resemble nomads, and this has changing the buildings, cities and traffic.

The premise is that:

“The fact that people are no longer tied to specific places for functions such as studying or learning, says Mr Mitchell, means that there is “a huge drop in demand for traditional, private, enclosed spaces” such as offices or classrooms, and simultaneously “a huge rise in demand for semi-public spaces that can be informally appropriated to ad-hoc workspaces”. This shift, he thinks, amounts to the biggest change in architecture in this century. In the 20th century architecture was about specialised structures—offices for working, cafeterias for eating, and so forth. This was necessary because workers needed to be near things such as landline phones, fax machines and filing cabinets, and because the economics of building materials favoured repetitive and simple structures, such as grid patterns for cubicles.”

This may be otherwise know and the re-emergence of “Third Places” as Sociologist Ray Oldenburg calls it in his 1989 book, “The Great, Good Place”.

What we’re finding is that this is definitely the case. The widespread use of laptops by our consultants, ubiquitous wireless technology, the use of Instant Messaging and VoIP has changed our physical office. “The Office” has evolved from a place where everyone came to work everyday, to a multi-use space that is split between formal/casual work and private/meeting spaces. So, on some days, there is hardly anyone here. Other days, it is packed to the gills for client meetings and team reviews.

The point here is choice. While we understand the value of face time with each other and our clients, we often have a choice of working where it is the most comfortable and productive. The choice of work location is sometimes determined by the nature of the work being performed, and at other times by how the individual prefers to work.

What this has also done is let us use less space to get more work done without affecting productivity. That’s good for the environment and also keeps our overhead to a reasonable level while expanding the scope and size of our businesses.

What do you think? It works for us, does it work for you?

It’s that time of year again.  The Learning Guys are going to PodCamp Toronto 2008!

See you there…

Sean just sent out this announcement:

Sean and Holly are happy to welcome Nathaniel Paul Healy to the world. He was born on Friday, January 11 at 10pm, 8lb 9oz at McMaster Univeristy Medical Centre.

Mom and Baby are doing well, and are both expected home on Monday when big sister Juliana gets to meet her new little brother. Nathaniel has been relatively quiet and peaceful during his first few day; we’re hoping that his big sister won’t teach him all of her tricks too quickly.

Welcome to the world, Nathaniel! We’ve been waiting (and waiting) for you. Glad that you’re finally here. It’s a cool place…

We look forward to meeting you soon!

We’d like to take this opportunity to wish all our old and new friends/clients a happy holiday! May you spend it in the company of your loved ones…

Our office will be closed from Friday December 21, 2007 and will be reopening on Monday Janurary 7, 2008.

Thank you all for your support in the past year. You mean the world to us. Here’s wishing you and yours all the best for the coming year!

P.S. In case you ever doubted that we were geeks, the image is of Open Cluster NGC 2264…otherwise known as the “Christmas Tree Cluster” (it looks right-side up in a Newtonian telescope) Check it out here.

Open Social was announced yesterday to a lot of fanfare and pontification by social media geeks. However, there were few people that explained its significance to the Business audience…our clients.

The basics of Open Social is an open (vs. proprietary) application platform (also called Maka-Maka)that is very similar to the one released by Facebook a few months ago. By opening up the ability for third-parties to write applications that work within the popular social media site, Facebook has added tremendously to the popularity and stickiness of the site. There are little apps that let you give virtual gifts to other members and our favourite, a Facebook version of Scrabulous where we’re geeking out battling each other in games of online Scrabble!

While the Facebook application environment is fine, it is proprietary and the apps you write for Facebook can ONLY be used on Facebook. Open Social is being backed by an alliance headed by Google, and promises to create an open standard whereby the applications written for one social media site can be made to run on other Open Social sites with only minor adjustments.

The announcement of Open Social was broken by Techmeme here, and Google says:

Common APIs mean you have less to learn to build for multiple websites. OpenSocial is currently being developed by Google in conjunction with members of the web community. The ultimate goal is for any social website to be able to implement the APIs and host 3rd party social applications. There are many websites implementing OpenSocial, including Engage.com, Friendster, hi5, Hyves, imeem, LinkedIn, MySpace, Ning, Oracle, orkut, Plaxo, Salesforce.com, Six Apart, Tianji, Viadeo, and XING.

What does this mean to Business though? Jeremiah Owyang, explains it very clearly in an excellent post. Spend some time and read it and understand what Open Social is all about and how to capitalise on these opportunities:

Efficient development: Since there’s standardization in the code use (APIs) If you develop an application for OpenSocial, it should be easily re-used on all the social networks that are particiating. This greatly reduced development time, you no longer need a ‘myspace strategy’ or ‘bebo strategy’.

Harness existing communities: Since these applications will be plugged into existing communities, the need to ‘build an audience’ isn’t as crucial, as you can leverage the communities where they already exist. Why build if you can easily join.

Open standards help long term: It appear that the standards and development languages are commonly known and not proprietary so it reduced the chance of vendor lock in. Having a common code (API) across all networks makes movement easier, reducing development and re-configuring in the long term. One should always be cautious, as no system is perfect.

Your existing applications become social: Now, your standalone applications can now be shared with communities. If you’ve already spend resources on creating interactive marketing, large libraries, or other projects, consider how they can be re purposed on these websites, be efficient with your resources.

Future brings social to your website: The trend clearly nods towards the direction I forsee, that social networking features (friends and connections) will be brought to the static corporate website. Soon, there will be customers, prospects and employees networked on your own corporate website. We’re not there yet, but start planning on how that will look.

The reason it has taken so long is that, well, we’ve been busy working hard for our clients. These little details always seem to get pushed to the back burner. Sorry for all those that had to endure the messy office, but we’ll try and keep it up to at least a livable standard. So, don’t call Health and Safety on us!

Here’s some snaps of the new place. If you haven’t been by yet, come by for a coffee…