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Sorry for the lack of posts lately – a com­bin­a­tion of a quick jaunt to Corn­wall (to con­duct a thor­ough sur­vey of beaches in the pour­ing rain), pitch­ing for some rather lovely new cli­ents (you know who you are – wel­come aboard) and an ongo­ing moun­tain of work.

In com­mon with many oth­ers, my first morn­ing back was spent delet­ing emails. It’s not like it was all spam – our spam pro­tec­tion is pretty good. It was just stuff for the most part – although stuff with a couple of ‘must read’ mails hid­den in the middle some­where. Deal­ing effect­ively with email (and stuff in gen­eral) is quickly becom­ing a must-have skill (and sadly not one I seem to possess).

There are a vari­ety of sys­tems around. The one that gen­er­ates near fan­at­ical devo­tion is the whole Get­ting Things Done (GTD) move­ment based on the book of the same name by David Allen. It has spawned a mul­ti­tude of web­sites and soft­ware tools to sup­port the sys­tem (a quick search for GTD on Google nets over 29 mil­lion pages).

Fore­most among these is 43 Folders which, together with the excel­lent Life­hacker, offers tip, tricks and tech­niques for doing stuff faster, bet­ter and with less stress.

43 Folders is writ­ten Mer­lin Mann who recently gave a talk at Google on deal­ing with email – a sys­tem called Email Zero. As with all the best things, is really simple com­mon sense. Take a look (it’s just under an hour but the sys­tem itself is dealt with in the first 25 mins or so).

Now, admit­tedly, I haven’t man­aged to get to Email Zero yet but last night I did man­age to get to Email Four which for me is some­thing close on miraculous.

BTW there’s a nice post on 43 Folders about how Mer­lin has improved his present­a­tions. Read it here.

Source: Present­a­tion Zen

Way back at the begin­ning of the year in my un-predictions, I sug­ges­ted that:

Social search (eg Wink and StumbleUpon) will become ever more appeal­ing to many people who already trust their net­works more than any old school search engine.

Well, while neither Wink nor StumbleUpon have made huge inroads, the latest announce­ment from Wikia (the people broadly kinda, sorta behind Wiki­pe­dia) could be very interesting.

Essen­tially, Wikia is look­ing to cre­ate an open source user-driven social search offer­ing (there’s some kind of vicious acronym in there some­where). They have recently acquired dis­trib­uted web crawler Grub which uses users’ PC idle time to crawl the web. And, of course, Wikia knows a thing or two about har­ness­ing user-driven con­tent. Which could all lead to some­thing pretty interesting.

BTW even as things stand right now, if you want a dif­fer­ent spin than the res­ults provided by the Yahoogles of the world, try search­ing in del.icio.us to see what oth­ers have already discovered.