digg dugg

Over the last year or so my online life has changed drastically. I ALWAYS have Firefox open. I ALWAYS have 3 tabs open in Firefox; Gmail, Bloglines, and digg. Today, I’ll briefly write about Firefox and Gmail, but my guess is that anyone reading this knows about those.

Firefox is the browser of choice today. There are hundreds of reasons to use it, but the most basic are:

• Leaps and bounds ahead of IE as far as functionality.
• Most viruses/spyware are/is targeted at IE, so if you use something else, it helps you.
• TABS!!!
• TONS of great extensions.

Ok, now Gmail. Google is an amazing company. Google Search, Gmail, Picasa2, Google Earth, news.google, etc.. The list just goes on. Gmail is currently giving away 2.5 GB of e-mail space with your e-mail account. It is free, conversation based, and has the power of Google’s search behind it. I will never go back to an Outlook Express pop3 based e-mail account. Never. If you want a Gmail account, e-mail me and I’ll send you an invitation.

RSS has stormed the Internet. Everyone has an RSS feed now. I have 46 feeds that I read on Bloglines. I like Bloglines because I can access my feeds from any computer. If you use an RSS reader application, you don’t have them with you everywhere you browse. Bloglines makes it nice, because you simply login and from any machine you have access to all your feeds and you know what you have read and what you haven’t. I recommend it to everyone. That is almost exclusively how I “cruise” the internet now. That and digg.

Digg is like Slashdot that the readers control. Anyone can submit a story/webpage/link to digg and then when other users “digg” it, it gets a higher score. Eventually, it may end up on the front page of digg. It makes it very easy to “digg” stories. Then, you can find them again in your personal “dugg stories” area. It even has an RSS feed for each user that you can add to your webpage or add to your live bookmarks in Firefox (another reason to use Firefox). Kind of a social bookmarking site. I love digg.

If you like digg, you might check out diggnation. It is a podcast/videocast by Kevin Rose and Alex Albrecht that goes over the top digg stories each week. They bring their own fun personalities and comments to the best digg stories. I have really enjoyed them.

Here are the links to everything I talked about:

Firefox - http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/
Gmail - http://Gmail.google.com
Google Search - http://www.google.com
Picasa2 - http://www.picasa.com
Google Earth - http://earth.google.com/
Google News - http://news.google.com
About RSS - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rss
Bloglines - http://www.Bloglines.com
My Bloglines - http://www.Bloglines.com/blog/englishw
Digg - http://digg.com/
My digg - http://digg.com/users/englishw
Diggnation - http://revision3.com/diggnation
Diggnation - http://diggnation.typepad.com/
Kevin Rose - http://www.kevinrose.com/
Alex Albrecht - http://alexalbrecht.typepad.com/alex/