The Internet for Everyday Tasks

Better Internet Experience

List of web sites, software or Firefox addons that make your Internet experience more enjoyable. e.g. How to print only the parts of a web page you want and not all the ads.

Click Here to review the articles Randy has highlighted for this topic.

This website is an outgrowth of classes I teach concerning information discovery, storage, retrieval and backup. It documents my ideas and includes "items of interest" I've discovered in my research that I feel my class audience would appreciate (see left column for topics).

In general, I am researching ways to handle "information overload" by providing a scale-able method (i.e., one person or a business) to create, manage and recall information. The goals of my research and subsequent class subject matter are;
• Recall the web sites you have visited and the reason why you wanted to remember them
• Reduce or eliminate usage of bookmarks, file names or tags to search or recall information
• Move to a full text model of searching and retrieving information
• Search and retrieve information easily from the Internet or from your local computer files
• Reduce the amount of paper in your life with better recall access
• Backup important information from web sites, documents or files

Ideally I would like to take any kind of digital or paper-based information (e.g., Internet content, local data files, news, RSS, etc...) and determine the easiest and most universal way it can work with different devices (e.g., computer, smartphone, ereader, etc...). That is, using information in an integrated way to improve the quality of anyone's everyday life.

The focus of previous classes has been how to use computers, with the Internet being secondary. While the initial classes concentrated on the hardware and operating system software, they gradually started to contain more information on the Internet and how it could be used for new software and computer maintenance ideas.

The latest class takes an revolutionary turn. The concentration will no longer be on the computer itself or even the Internet, but rather how these things work together to enhance a person’s everyday life. Obviously, a machine is required to access information but today that doesn’t necessarily mean a computer. Increasingly it can be a smartphone (e.g. iPhone, Android, etc…), ebook reader (e.g. Kindle, Nook, etc…) or tablet (e.g. iPad, Samsung Galaxy Tab, etc...). While the keyboard is and will continue to be the primary input medium, voice interaction is becoming more accepted as accuracy becomes better. As with hardware, the Internet itself is not the class focus but rather how the content obtained works with your device of choice and input mechanism, to improve the quality of your everyday life.

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