Technology I'm digging right now

There are two things I'm playing with that I'm really digging. The first is a product called Evernote (www.evernote.com). From the website: "Evernote allows you to easily capture information in any environment using whatever device or platform you find most convenient, and makes this information accessible andsearchable at any time, from anywhere. ". A big thanks to Dave for convincing me to check this free product out. Right now I'm using the desktop version on my Macs and PCs and it's doing a really good job of keeping all my notes synced between computers. I'm not quite as impressed with the web version. While it is fabulous, the need to save changes before leaving the site has caused me to lose notes several times. I need the product to either save every so often automatically, or alert me with bright flashing lights and buzzers or something. However, that's a really small issue to take with an otherwise spectacular product! I'm quickly becoming addicted to finding my notes where ever I go. I've not played with the search much, but it appears to be pretty good. I seem to remember it saying it recognizes text in images, but that doesn't seem to be working for me - very possibly because of user error.

The other thing I'm getting hung up on is NetVibes (www.netvibes.com). This is much like many of the other "home page" things you find, such as iGoogle. You use widgets to place things like Twitter, Facebook, news, websites, etc. all on your page. You can have multiple tabs, and multiple pages. Not revolutionary but very nicely done. An added bonus is the ability to share pages with others. I can see creating a programming related page of links, news, random widgets and allowing access to my students.

As a final note, I'd like to address the Web 3.0 vs. 2010 Web debate that I hope will be heating up even more. I'm a big fan of useless catch phrases and Web 2.0 tops my list. As an educator, constantly fighting to have some point of reference that I can hold up for people that don't understand how far behind they are, having a year is a simple one. When I ask people that don't know much about technology why they don't use Windows 95, they say "because that's old". Were I to ask them if using Web 1.0 was okay, they'd probably say "Sure!". Year numbers provide a frame of reference to those that aren't as clued in; and that's a good thing. Feel free to bash my opinion and offer your own. I'm still willing to reconsider, but I'm going with 2010 Web until someone talks me out of it. TheEduGeek.