My new job has me traveling a bit. On one hand that means airport cuisine, countless nights camping out in hotel rooms and the constant complaining of my confused internal clock. But on the other hand it means exploration. Sure, my travel is business related…but I’ll gladly exchange lack of sleep for slipping away to check out new places after business is done.

I recently had the chance to explore Yellowstone. Well, at least as much as one can explore of that enormous park in two days. Aside from being one of the most magical places I’ve ever been, it reminded me that sometimes the best places to explore aren’t always the farthest away.

Walking through the kaleidoscope of colored hot vents in the geyser basin areas, I realized how reckless I’ve been for focusing so much on traveling to far away places that I’d failed to realize how many wonders there are right here in the states. Yellowstone is beautiful. Herds of bison litter the roadside, hot springs and mud pots collaborate to form an alien landscape and a backdrop of skies filled with the smoke of forest fires reminds you of nature’s humbling power.

Yellowstone wielded the best treasures of any place I’ve ever explored. The best part: Yellowstone was completely absent from my list of must see places. I will wander among the Nile’s pyramids, touch the Roman columns and breath the ancient Constantinople air…one day. But in the meantime, I’ll take many more detours.

Exploration is more about state of mind than about travel itineraries. During the couple of days I spent wondering what I’d find around the next bend, Yellowstone lent me something I’d lost along with my childhood: imagination.

I’ll be back to borrow that from Yellowstone again, soon.

I broke down and bought a netbook a few days ago. After doing my research, I immediately threw out all the research and decided on a Dell Mini 10v. I couldn’t find the ASUS Eee anywhere (way too impatient to order it online and wait for delivery), and compared to the HP and Acer netbooks, I found the Dell had the most comfortable keyboard and touchpad.

The first thing I did when first firing up my new netbook was install google gears. Then I setup gears with docs, gmail and calendar…which automatically created Chrome application shortcuts. Immediately, I understood where Google is heading with their announced release of Chrome “OS.”

My netbook is incredibly portable, and doesn’t sacrifice a whole lot in terms of keyboard and interface. And it’s completely built for the web. Combined with gears backing up all of my docs, gmail and calendar data locally, a netbook is a powerful tool, if used for what it’s intended for.

With gears, I can read and queue emails when not on a wireless connection, just like I would using Outlook offline. I can read and edit docs and spreadsheets offline, and they just sync with my online docs when I get to a connection. Works the same with google calendar. I’m free from the dependency on an internet connection and retain all the benefits of a web application:

• All documents and revisions are stored on one web host to be used by my multiple computers, instead of different versions being scattered on different hard drives;
• All the sharing and collaboration benefits of google documents;
• Did I mention google apps are free (for personal use anyways)?

Netbooks are cheap, portable and extremely productive when utilized correctly. I now see what the buzz is about. Granted, gears would work just as well on any computer, and I don’t know why it took me this long to finally get what gears is all about. Something tells me it has to do with Office not being pre-installed on my netbook.

With Chrome “OS” slated to come out in a year or two, and the continued expansion of gear supported web applications, the possibilities are just beginning.  Working on the same document from any device, from anywhere and easily keeping your data in sync is a promising proposition.

If you have a netbook, check out google gears. It’s really a must have.

Back in October of 2008, Forrester released a report that consumer adoption of RSS had only reached 11%. Albeit, this is partly because many consumers don’t even realize when they’re using RSS, as in feeds aggregating content to sites they frequent. Still, I was shocked.

Then as I was visiting a friend, who still read the <gasp> newspaper every morning, I realized that we interactive types sometimes live inside a cocoon of geekiness. I didn’t think anyone still braved ink-stained hands and paper cuts with archaic newsprint. Google Reader is my morning newspaper; I just assumed it was everyone else’s too.

I’ve found myself trying to explain RSS countless times since. Here’s the best way I can put it: instead of remembering every blog, news site and outpost of information you go to on a daily basis to find information, you tell them all to deliver their new articles, updates and postings directly to you. That way, all of your sources of daily information are consolidated into one simple place for you to read, digest and enjoy.

It’s like creating your own daily newspaper made up of only the sources of information you choose.

The Middle “S” is for Simple – They’re Not Lying

Don’t worry about all the technical speak surrounding feeds and RSS, just pick a reader. I recommend Google Reader. If you don’t have a Google Account, sign up for one. If you already have one, then you already have a google reader account.Now you just need to subscribe to feeds.

Go to one of your favorite news sites. Look for the standard RSS icon:

Click on it and you will be asked how you want to subscribe. Click on Google. You’ll then be asked if you want to add to google homepage, or google reader. Select “Add to Google Reader.”  You may be prompted to log in to your reader account, in which case you know what to do.

You’ve just subscribed to your first feed. Now go to all your other favorite sites and do the same. You’ll end up with a Reader interface that looks similar to mine:

From now on all you need to do is come to your reader page and read all the latest articles from all of your favorite sites, in one place. No more having to go out and check sites to see when they’ve posted new content. Here’s a couple of tips to get you started:

• All your feeds are on the left sidebar. The number of new articles for each site will appear in bold next to it’s title. You can read through articles from all your subscribed sites, or you can click on individual sites to read only the articles from it.
• Click on settings in the upper right. Once there, click on the subscriptions tab. Here you can put each subscription into a folder. This helps you organize all the different sites you’ve subscribed to. As you can see from my screenshot, I have several different folders to help me organize the subject matter of the hundreds of feeds I subscribe to.
• You can add friends within Google Reader, which is a very good way to see new content. Likewise, if you “share” one of your subscribed pieces, all of your friends can see it as well.

Other Practical Uses for RSS

Besides keeping up to date with your favorite news sites and blogs, there are other ways to use RSS too:

• Craigslist – are you searching for a particular item on craigslist? Look at the bottom of a category page, or at the bottom of your craigslist search query page. You’ll see an RSS subscribe button. Subscribe to it and every new posted item that fits your search criteria will appear in your google reader. Subscribe to the search query in several local cities, put them into a “Craigslist” folder in your reader, and you suddenly have an easy way of monitoring for when someone posts that item you’re looking for.
• For monitoring mentions of your brand: most social searches can be subscribed to by RSS. So subscribe to your brand on search.twitter.com, backtype.com, delicious.com or any other social search you want. Put all the subscriptions in a “monitoring” folder in reader, and you don’t have to keep checking the searches – they all come to you.
• To continue that point, Google Alerts and Google Blog Search can also be subscribed to via RSS. Again, aggregrating anything you want to monitor directly into your reader.

As you can see, RSS is not only easy, but it’s incredibly powerful and useful. If you’re not already using RSS feeds to pull all the information you’re looking for into your own central repository, there’s no better time to start.