The Apple iPad. Do you need one, or just really, really want one?

I admit I’m a bit of an Apple fanboy – I’ve used Mac computers for years, I have a MacBook, a classic iPod and an iPhone. Frankly, I don’t see myself using any other MP3 players, smartphones or computers any time soon.

I also love what Apple has done for user interaction on all their devices. Over the past ten years they’ve revolutionised the way we use computers, listen to music and access digital information on the move.

So since Apple announced the iPad, like many others, I’ve been thinking about whether I need one – or just really, really want one.

I’ve come to the conclusion that I need one. But not for the reasons you might think.

For example, it’s not because I think the iPad is going to save magazines and newspapers.

I’m a big fan of printed media – I grew up loving and later working with magazines and newspapers, and I’m convinced that they will continue to provide immense value for readers as we go on through the digital age. But the idea that the iPad represents a renaissance opportunity for ‘packaged’ media is misplaced. As exciting as the Wired Magazine iPad app looks (see video below), this is not the best use of digital media.

The best use of digital media is represented by the world wide web, on desktop and mobile devices, where packaged media is ‘atomised’, where I can search for the precise information I want, where I can link freely to pages across any number of brands and websites, where I can participate as both a consumer and contributor and community member through comments, ratings and other interactive features.

The future for media doesn’t lie in trying to re-pack what’s been unpacked. It lies in rearranging information in new and exciting ways.

No, here are the 3 reasons I really need an iPad.

1. Weight

I did my back in a couple of weeks ago. It was so serious I couldn’t move out of bed for a couple of days. While I’m not certain what caused it, it can’t have helped that I was lugging a heavy backpack to and from my workplace. The backpack contained:

• My laptop
• A couple of heavy text books
• Some writing pads and pens
• Power leads for my laptop and iPhone
• A couple of magazines I kept meaning to read but never got round to

With my back continuing to give me problems, reducing my daily carrying weight is becoming less a matter of convenience and more a matter of necessity. This must have been around 7-8 pounds of gear I’d been straining my back with. The iPad could conceivably fit all of this into one small package that weighs just 1.5 pounds (0.68kg).

2. Form factor

Since the iPad launched I’ve started thinking how I actually use my laptop on the go, and whether that keyboard is really necessary. I’ve discovered that it isn’t. When I’m travelling by train, I’m usually taking my computer along with me to carry my powerpoint presentations, check my email and look at the web. I hardly every write documents on the go. Okay I’ll write the odd email, but that should be easily possible with the iPad’s on-screen keyboard.

I’ve also started noticing more and more scenes like the one below – people struggling to use their laptops while waiting for trains, buses, etc. This is clearly not comfortable, and surely not necessary.

3. The user experience

For me it’s all about the user experience, and I’m a big fan of Apple’s user interface (UI) design. Having lived with and loved the iPhone for over a year now, I’m convinced the iPad is going to feel even better, with a bigger screen and more exciting native apps

According to Apple the best iPad applications will ‘downplay application UI so that the focus is on content; present content in beautiful, often realistic ways; and take full advantage of device capabilities to enable enhanced interaction.’ Sounds great to me.

So what do you think – are those good enough reasons to need an iPad? Or am I just persuading myself because I merely want one? Please leave me your thoughts in the comments below.

I’ve been meaning to write a blog post on how I manage my information workflow for some time. Now that we find ourselves on the eve of an announcement from Apple that could change the goal posts once again (the much rumoured Apple Tablet computer), I thought now would be a good time to get this post written. Then I can compare my workflow in six months’ time and see if there are any major changes brought about changes in technology.

First some context on my requirements: I’m an independent digital consultant, working with various organisations (in the past year I’ve worked with the APA, Econsultancy, Telegraph Media, IPC Media, The National Trust, TheFilter.com and more). As part of my job, it’s vitally important that I keep up to date with relevant information as and when it happens. This is not easy, as the amount of information out there is huge and growing, while the channels through which it’s delivered are proliferating too.

Here are the tools I use right now to keep on top of the tsunami of information that confronts us in the golden age of digital, in order of importance for me.

Startup folder

I got this tip from Darren Rowse at Problogger. Basically, I have a folder in my bookmarks toolbar on Firefox (and now Chrome, which is rapidly becoming my favourite browser). Over coffee first thing in the morning, I use the ‘Open All in Tabs’ command at the bottom of the folder. I then check out each tab to give me a snapshot of what’s going on.

My Firefox startup folder.

My current list of startup tabs include the following content aggregators and social networks:

• Google Reader (see below)
• Facebook
• Twitter (see below)
• FriendFeed
• Delicious Popular Bookmarks
• Digg
• Instapaper
• Read It Later
• Linked In

RSS Feeds

Despite the claim by some digital gurus that RSS is being replaced by Twitter, I personally still find this my best source of information, as I can categorise my feeds for easy reference. Currently I have the following folders set up in Google Reader:

• Arts – this is useful for information for my blog on arts and culture The Culture Club
• Blogs – updates and tips on the WordPress platform, which I use for publishing my blogs
• Business – media and technology business feeds, such as PaidContent:UK and Biz Report
• Design – general design advice and inspiration, including Smashing Magazine and the The Dieline.com
• Digital Media – news and analysis on the digital world, including feeds from Mashable, ReadWriteWeb, The Next Web, VentureBeat, and All Things Digital
• Media News – more general news and information about the wider media world, and journalism in particular, such as Buzz Machine and Online Journalism Blog
• Misc – sites like Zen Habits, which I follow for its nuggets of wisdom, and Bristol Media Jobs, which keeps me up to speed with what’s happening locally
• Search – SEOmoz, Search Engine Land and Search Engine Watch tell me all I need to know about what’s happening in the search space
• Sport – I’m a tennis fanatic so this contains all my feeds from my favourite tennis sources, including Tennis Planet, BBC Sport Tennis and GoToTennis
• UX – a wide range of blogs and sites sharing news and information about user experience design and usability issues, including UX Magazine, User Experience Network, Usability News and Boxes and Arrows

I use  Google Reader as my feed reader as it has the following benefits (many but not all of which are also possible on other feed readers):

• You can search back through all your feeds’ history. This is extremely useful for finding stuff you’ve missed, or re-finding information you read in the past. As Steve Rubel says you can treat Google Reader as a database.
• It’s got a social element – you can see what other Google Reader users like, you can add notes, share with others and tag posts, all from within the reader itself.
• You can bookmark in Delicious straight from the reader. This is invaluable when I want to save a post for future reference (see below for more on Delicious).
• On Firefox, Google Reader supports the Read It Later plugin. When I find a post that is too long to read right away, or that I want to refer back to in the short term future, I can save it to Read It Later (see more about Read It Later below) by just clicking on the ‘chevron’ icon at the top of each post. This allows me to carry on browsing feeds in Google Reader and go back to longer posts when it’s more convenient. Note – this functionality isn’t possible in Google Chrome at the moment, which is a shame, as I’m starting to use Chrome for Mac more frequently as my primary browser.

The Read It Later icon in the top left of every post on Google Reader makes filing for later viewing simple.

Twitter

Many digital folks have talked about how they’ve ditched Google Reader and now use Twitter to follow news and information in real time. While it’s still second to Google Reader for me (see above), I do often use it to keep track of breaking developments, and to discover links to longer content.I follow nearly 500 people on Twitter, for many different reasons, so the recently added List functionality was a blessing as it means I can group Twitterers into different categories. I follow lists from others, including:

• Scobleizer/tech-news-brands
• erikvold/seo
• dcypher/bristol-designers
• nobleviola/music

I’ve also set up my own lists, including:

• ttucker23/journalists
• ttucker23/tech-news
• ttucker23/tennis

I occasionally visit Listorious to keep up with other Twitter lists that are out there.

My favourite way of accessing Twitter from my Mac laptop is through TweetDeck, because I can arrange each list into separate columns, and it now integrates Facebook and LinkedIn updates in there too.

TweetDeck makes managing lots of followers on Twitter a lot easier.

Read It Later

As mentioned above, I often find that when I’m browsing feeds or looking at articles online I haven’t got time to read the piece in full. Read It Later is a great (free) service with which you can save articles in one place for checking out when you’ve got more time. You can sign up at the website, and keep track of your articles there or through a handy Firefox plugin. It’s also got a fabulous iPhone app (see below).

I experimented with Instapaper, a very similar service, but I found that Read It Later offers more options, especially through the iPhone app. The most useful of these is that I can save an article from Read It Later straight to Delicious if I want to bookmark it for the long term.

Delicious

I use Delicious, the social bookmarking tool, to keep all articles and web pages that I want to save for future reference. Unlike Read It Later, which is just a short-term holding area so that I can catch up, delicious.com/ttucker is the home of all my bookmarks, which I can tag to ensure that they’re easy to find. I also use Delicious for finding stuff I’ve missed, by regularly catching up with the Popular page, which logs the most popular bookmarks on Delicious.

iPhone

Since getting my iPhone 3GS I’ve noticed that I’m using this device to access information at least as much, if not more, than I use my laptop. According to research, 40% of iPhone users are doing the same, and this looks likely to increase.

For instance, I log onto Google Reader through the Safari browser on iPhone about 2-3 times a day. I can check my feeds on the bus, train, and any ‘dead’ time during the day. I’d love a Google Reader app for iPhone, but the mobile version of the site works fine, so long as I’m online.

The other great app for iPhone is Read It Later. The best feature is that you can download all pages to the iPhone and read them when you’re out of 3G and wi-fi range, on the tube, etc. I also like the fact that forwarding an article to Delicious after you’ve read the article is very straightforward.

Summary

The above workflow may seem overcomplicated, but I’ve integrated all of this into my daily routine. This makes it quick and efficient to stay up to date on subjects that matter to me, whilst filtering the information that I don’t need.

As Pete Cashmore says, 2010 is going to be the year of digital distration, so finding new ways to make information valuable and useful is going to be an issue for many more people, not just information junkies like myself.

I’d love to hear about your information management workflows, so please leave your tips in the comments below and tell me how you’re coping with the firehose of data that’s coming your way on a daily basis!

It seems clear that 2009 will be looked back on by future historians as a watershed year for tech. It was the year that Twitter conquered the world, that Facebook dominated media and that Google made significant strides towards becoming the operating system of the internet.

But what’s also clear is that, to coin an old phrase, we ain’t seen nothing yet. As a new decade dawns we’ll see all this change come into focus and new changes on the horizon. As I write, the International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas is showcasing a wide array of new and not-so-new technologies that may go mainstream in 2010, from 3D TVs to Slate PCs.

It’s not yet clear whether 2010 will be the Year of Mobile, the Year of the Tablet, or something as yet unforeseen. But one thing is for sure – it’s going to be a time of extraordinary change.

I can’t wait to see what’s in store. January is a great time for looking forward, and I’m particularly excited about the first Digital Breakfast I’m organising in my new role as Training Consultant for the APA. On January 26th we’ll be discussing the digital focus in 2010. The agenda will include  presentations from high profile speakers in the online, mobile and marketing industries, with the opportunity to discuss the digital trends with some of the country’s sharpest minds. It’s open to members and non-members, so if you’re interested in joining us, check out the APA Digital Breakfast information page, or email me for more information.

Visualisation of network effects. Illustration used by permission from the VM Foundry.

The legendary historian Eric Hobsbawm wrote a four-part history of Europe which broke down the key stages of modern European history like this:

• Age of Revolution: 1789-1848
• Age of Capital: 1848-1875
• Age of Empire: 1875-1914
• Age of Extremes: 1914-1991

If Hobsbawm were to continue his series into the 21st century, I’d like to suggest that he’d have to call the current era the ‘Age of Networking’.

Clearly the rise of online and digital media has shown that the killer apps online exploit the network effect. Consider these examples:

• Google – the networks of links.
• Ebay – the networks of buyers and sellers.
• Facebook – the networks of friends, family and colleauges.
• Twitter – the network of like-minded people.

But networks aren’t just limited to popular websites. In his fascinating book on the subject, Linked: The New Science of Networks, Barabasi explores the ways that network effects are transforming our understanding of many other areas of enquiry:

The robustness of the laws governing the emergence of complex networks is the explanation for the ubiquity of the scale-free topology, describing such diverse systems as the network behind language, the links between the proteins in the cell, sexual relationships between people, the wiring diagram of a computer chip, the metabolism of the cell, the internet, Hollywood, the world wide web, the web of scientests linked by co-authorships, and the intrcicate collaborative web behind the economy, to name only a few.

This new perspective provides new insights into familiar phenomena. I will take some examples at random to illustrate the point:

• Project management – new theories of extreme project management put networking at the heart of the process. As Rob Thomsett says in his book Radical Project Management: “Build a relationship with your stakeholders and you will be doing your job. It is all about relationships.”
• Media content – user generated content, commenting, peer reviews.
• Business – empowerment, ownership, partnership.
• Knowledge management – wisdom of the crowds, Wikipedia, etc.
• Marketing – the Cluetrain Manifesto.

Living in the age of networking means applying network thinking throughout all areas of activity. Try applying network thinking to your own work and you will find new opportunities and perspectives emerging.