First Five

What are the first five websites you visit every day? About Like First Five on Facebook Follow me on Twitter

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Dr. Nancy Rubin is strongly committed to educational excellence and creating a positive learning experience in the online environment. Nancy is the Director of Online Learning and Social Media for Columbia University’s School of Continuing Education. She has presented at many conferences, has been published in educational journals, and is the Associate Managing Editor for the Journal of Literacy and Technology, an online peer-reviewed international academic journal. She can be found on twitter here and on linked in here. 

Here are Nancy's first five...

"I use Hootsuite to check my Twitter feeds. I can see updates from users I follow, Tweets I have sent, people who have mentioned me, and follow hashtags of interest."

"Facebook is where I connect with family and friends. I am pretty particular about not letting my business and personal worlds collide (think George Costanza). Facebook, for me, is mostly personal."

"I subscribe to the New York Times for “All the News That’s Fit to Print”. As a native New Yorker, it has always been my go-to source for news."

"My professional network is LinkedIn. I follow thought leaders, connect with professionals and belong to groups of interest."

"I check out the statistics on my site, read comments, and motivate myself to write something. I try to write a few entries a week."

 P.S. You can click on the images to go to the site…

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Dennis Tenen is an Assistant Professor of Digital Humanities and New Media Studies at Columbia University, Department of English and Comparative Literature. He writes and teaches in the field of computational culture studies both as in the critical study of computational culture and in the sense of applying computational approaches to the study of culture. You can find him at [d3nten.com].

  Here are Dennis' first five...

Google Mail / Talk / Calendar / Tasks / Drive

"These are still the most social apps in my rotation. Chat in particular has altered the fabric of my relationships. When I type I make phonetic mistakes because chatting has moved from the written to the spoken parts of my brain."

Stack Exchange

"I believe in public scholarship and of late contribute extensively to the Skeptics forum. SE is like warcraft rep grind for research. It is addictive and helps to expose some of the locked paywall university resources to the world. In return, we can learn a lot about gamification and transparent editorial practices for academic publishing."

NSFW Corp

"Hard-hitting, acerbically witty, punk rock journalism. These guys ruined Harper's and New Yorker for me."

Trello

"We scheme to take over the world here. More boards, stacks, lists, and cards from Joel Spolsky and team. I am a sucker for index cards in general. They help organize my mental life. Supernotecard from Mindola is the desktop client of choice."

Feedly

"Philosophy blogs, lit crit, code, design, data viz, sports, and gadget fetish all in one beautiful garbage pile. Crooked Timber, Coding Horror, Flowing Data, Harlem Bespoke, The Quantified Self, bldgblog, Play this Thing, and Run of Play are all in heavy rotation. Yes, I know this is cheating."

  P.S. You can click on the images to go to the site…

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Rachael Rakes is a critic and curator based in NYC. She edits the film section for the Brooklyn Rail, is a partner in the collaborative arts space Heliopolis, and Assistant Curator of Film at the Museum of the Moving Image. 

  Here are Rachael's first five...

"Good sense of humor, fingers on many pulses, consistent updating, and a broad sense of what constitutes art and art discourse today."

"Tons of new ideas in technology and visual media, presented beautifully and  reverently."

"A crazily-curated mixture literary reviews, screeds, and critical experiments. Sharp and witty."

"If I'm not listening to Democracy Now!, I'm probably listening an aggregate playlist from a few dozen music blogs on Hype Machine. I feel like this site doesn't get enough credit for being awesome."

"I'm only half-embarrassed. I do find a lot of great jumping off points there, and find myself just a hair more warm to it than Twitter, though I have tabs open to both at all times."

P.S. You can click on the images to go to the site…

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Seb Chan is Director of Digital & Emerging Media at Smithsonian Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum in NYC where he is charged with reinventing the digital experience of the museum as it rebuilds its physical site on Museum Mile. He has had a long career as a change agent, helping cultural institutions make the most of a world being reshaped by technology, 'the network', and digital media. In a parallel life as a veteran DJ, club promoter and music writer, he founded Cyclic Defrost Magazine. He blogs at www.freshandnew.org and tweets as @sebchan.

  Here are Seb's first five...

 "Well, it doesn't seem like I'll be checking Google Reader for much longer, with its premature death having just been announced. But, until then, Google Reader provides a quick overview of my RSS feeds - the highlights of which are added to my Instapaper reading queue."

"Twitter is still one of the most reliable ways to keep in touch with my colleagues in other timezones. There's a really strong representation of interesting thinkers and makers in the digital humanities field and I keep it manageable by having a strongly asymmetric follower/following ratio."

"Possibly the most comprehensive discography site on the web there are crowdsourced listings for millions of releases, along with a trading community. WIth its origins in DJ culture, it is an incredibly valuable reference source for tracking down obscure dance music - or different regional versions of particular releases. For some reason I end up on Discogs every day - either to answer some question about a particular track, or to use it as a demonstration of the power of well structured, crowdsourced metadata - something that museums could learn a lot from."

"Not the cheapest online record store, but certainly one with great selections and hyperbolic mini-reviews. I get their new releases list every Monday and usually put some spare change towards a weekly does of edgy electronics. They are a good source of lossless downloads (as FLACs) and, unlike several other popular music services, actually care about the metadata embedded in their music files."

"Having grown up in Australia at the height of the West Indian team's domination of cricket, I have been instilled with a deep interest in cricket and like to check the scores worldwide every day. I have a running conversation with one of the Carribean security guards at the Museum about the current state of the Australian and West Indian cricket teams - so it is important that I keep up to date! Although owned now by ESPN, CricInfo has along history dating back to text-based commentary by cricket fans on IRC chat and an early version of the site even had a partnership with Mick Jagger in the late 1990s!"

  P.S. You can click on the images to go to the site…

Photograph of Seb taken by JJ Halans 

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Timothy R. Tangherlini teaches folklore, literature and cultural studies at UCLA. His current work focuses on computation and the humanities. In particular, he has focused on using GIS to discover patterns in folklorecollections, and network analysis techniques to address problems of classification. Links to this work can be found athttp://tango.bol.ucla.edu/#online

Here are Timothy's first five...

"Old habits die hard; I love to read the newspaper first thing in the morning."

"Granted this is a bit of a conservative newspaper, but I like to read the news from a Danish perspective as well."

"Sometimes their absurd stories are the most honest stories out there."

"Lots of stuff here about the tech world, enough to make me pretend I have a vague sense of what is going on."

"To find all the other things that I'm missing."

P.S. You can click on the images to go to the site…

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Nick Zangwill teaches philosophy in Durham University, and has written about aesthetics and various other topics in Philosophy.

  Here are Nick's first five...

"Arts and Letters Daily is full of stimulating material, intellectual, political, cultural, scientific, philosophical. The choices unusually show independent-mindedness and it is always interesting and I learn a great deal."

"My source of news. It attempts to be fair-minded and allows various alternative views to be aired."

"Celetrating tango with some downloadable classics."

"The good thing about this site is that there is a huge selection, pretty comprehensive, and one can choose which performance one prefers."

"Useful to phone what time it is around the world, especially if one wants to make a skype call."

  P.S. You can click on the images to go to the site…

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Mark A. Matienzo (http://matienzo.org) is Technical Architect for ArchivesSpace (http://www.archivesspace.org/)  and a Digital Archivist in Manuscripts and Archives at the Yale University Library. He also teaches as an adjunct professor at the iSchool at Drexel  University. His research and professional interests focus on the intersection between digital preservation, forensics, media archaeology, and sociotechnical analysis. In 2012, Matienzo was the first awardee of the Emerging Leader Award of the Society of American Archivists.

  Here are Mark's first five...

"I love Twitter because it's simultaneously thoughtful and absolute garbage. I love following new people and the culture of the retweet. Most of the people I follow are archivists, library hackers, digital humanities or media studies folks, and fake accounts."

"ArchivesSpace is a project to develop a next generation archives management system, and we're developing using the Scrum software development management methodology. We're using Pivotal Tracker to manage user stories, feature requests, and bugs. I check in on it every morning because the majority of our development team is based in Canberra, ACT, Australia and much of the work happens overnight on East Coast Time."

 "I need to get my fix of old synthesizer photos, cute dog pictures, net art, fashion trends, and general goofiness."

"My social network includes programmers, technologists, and similar geeky folk, and I love knowing about other people's projects and curiosities. GitHub is great because I can see changes to people's projects as well as whenever they star or favorite something."

"This is my hugest guilty pleasure - it's networked junk food. I find it totally abhorrent from the standpoint of its impact of privacy and business practice, but I can't seem to tear myself away from it."

   P.S. You can click on the images to go to the site…

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The focus of jimi adams's research is on how network configurations serve to promote or constrain the spread of things like diseases and ideas through a population. Increasingly, this work focuses on how interdisciplinary scientific fields are arranged and evolve through time. Previously, this has involved examining patterns that contribute to HIV/AIDS transmission and prevention in the US and sub-Saharan Africa.

  Here are jimi's first five...

"I definitely "do" the web more through aggregators/SNS these days than I do via actually visiting certain pages with much regularity. And i don't think it would be that interesting to rehash the common list of aggregators, etc. here (but the "always opens" are google reader & scholar, Facebook, twitter & Amazon) and I almost always have weather underground close at hand with home and some desired future destinations updating. There's also my own periodic blog (http://shrinkingisaac.wordpress.com/) and a group blog on mathematical sociology i contribute to even more sporadically (http://permut.wordpress.com/). The thing about feeds is that few of the sites within any group really update daily (with the exception of news), but most of the time some of the selections in each do. So how about a few of the main categories i keep and some "exemplars" from each."

"First is "news." In addition to the NYT and WaPo here, i think the one i enjoy more than the others is Science Daily (http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/sciencedaily/top_news). As a sociologist, with particular research interests, it's pretty easy to get buried within my niche if i don't find ways to intentionally get outside it. I find this feed really helps rewire my ways of thinking about what's interesting on a pretty regular basis. It also regularly makes me aware of interesting new research findings/approaches, even if it does feel like sucking on the end of a fire hose from time to time."

"Second, I have quite a few "academic" blogs i keep tabs on (not surprisingly, with a heavier does of sociology than most other disciplines). Of those, i think orgtheory (http://orgtheory.wordpress.com/) is probably the most reliable amongst them. While i obviously don't agree with everything that's posted there, I find their way of thinking through issues frequently helpful for my own work even when it only tangentially relates to things i do on a daily basis. In a quite different vein, I find The Society Pages' Sociological Images (http://thesocietypages.org/socimages/) particularly helpful for jogging potential teaching illustrations. It's probable the site I most commonly share things from with friends and colleagues."

"I also typically have a small batch of feeds (~10) i'm "trial running" to figure out if I want to keep regular tabs on. At the moment, the seemingly most promising amongst those is (http://badhessian.org/)."

"Finally, those are all pretty "meaty", so I invariably need some more diversionary ones as well, and have quite the collection in this batch. Perhaps the most random for me in that respect is the "mommy blog" (http://dooce.com/), which I quite honestly don't remember how I started reading. But now, i seem to find it one of the most regular laugh-delivering sites in this batch."

  P.S. You can click on the images to go to the site…

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Rick Prelinger is an archivist, writer and filmmaker, and founder of the Prelinger Archives, a collection of 60,000 advertising, educational, industrial, and amateur films acquired by the Library of Congress in 2002 after 20 years' operation.

  Here are Rick's first five...

"Self-serving, but I like to wake up to see what's newly been digitized by friend and contractor Skip Elsheimer, and look for new annotations and reviews. Fascinated to observe the accretion of new metadata around online resources and the growing stability of online moving images."

"Banal, but it's a humming party line (in the sense of oldskool shared telephone lines) for people interested in recordkeeping, archives, and memory. In my field, tweets broach ideas that range on a continuum from provisional to polished, and a busy tweetstream is better than a year of crowded conferences."

"Simply because I'm curious to see what jumps the threshold from parochial to bigtime. This isn't to say I recognize their authority, but I like to watch it being articulated."

"Kate Theimer's blog pulls together a broad spectrum of emerging thought on archives, and continues to convince me that the archive lives conceptually at the center of contemporary discourse, even if archivists don't yet realize it themselves."

  "Unavoidable." 

P.S. You can click on the images to go to the site…

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Alex Gil is Digital Scholarship Coordinator at Columbia University for the Humanities and History division where he works with faculty, student and librarians on digital projects and literacy. He is a strong advocate of public humanities and global networks. His research revolves around the secret conversations between machines and texts, publishing networks in the 20th century and pirate libraries. You can find him online here: www.elotroalex.com 

  Here are Alex's first five...

"All crusty-eyed, first thing I look at is my twitter feed. I love to see what my little corner of the world was saying while I was dreaming. If we are going to be part of large networks, I'm all for keeping it brief."

"This is one of my favorite ways outside of twitter to catch up with new projects and good reads from my colleagues and friends."

"My one stop shop for all things Caribbean, high and low brow all bundled up nicely by two great Caribbeanists, Lisa Paravisini-Gebert and Ivette Romero-Cesareo."

"Of course."

"The digital humanities' version of Stack Exchange. Once in a while I can answer a question and that puts me in the right mood while I have my morning coffee."

   P.S. You can click on the images to go to the site…

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Geert Lovink is a media theorist, net critic and activist, studied political science on the University of Amsterdam (MA) and holds a PhD at University of Melbourne. In 2003 he was a postdoc fellow at University of Queensland in Brisbane. 2004 he was appointed research professor at the Hogeschool van Amsterdam (interactive media) and associate professor (new media) at the University of Amsterdam. His position was renamed as the Institute of Network Cultures.

Geert was one of first five's early contributors. You can see his original contribution here: http://first-5.tumblr.com/post/18435466015/geertlovink

Here are Geert's first five for 2013...

  "The tumblr of the Scottish genius, musician, writer and performer Momus. I have been reading him ever since I discovered his blog in 2005."

"There are many fashion blogs but there is only one Virginia Postrel. She embodies U.S.-American conservative sophistication and ideological aesthetics that serves as an elite alternative to the right-wing populism of Fox News and the Tea Party."

"How do you find out what the liberal mainstream is thinking (because you want to avoid everything PC, because its reasonable argumentation is killing your creativity and anger against the world)? In my field that's easy: read Jeff Jarvis."

"I tend only to cover English-speaking sites, but that's often not what I am interested in. Germany is the country to follow if you are interested in clashes over cyberrights and intellectual property. And the site that is covering it, abeit from a liberal civil society perspective, is Netzpolitik."

"I just read the German phrase "Hogwarts on the Oder," a funny description of a dodgy East-German university, the latest evidence that the populist language of Geen Stijl (Tasteless) is spreading outside the Netherlands. Voted as the best and most popular blog in NL for many years, this cultural turn in web politics still keeps me busy."

P.S. You can click on the images to go to the site…

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Adeline Koh is a visiting faculty fellow under the Duke University Humanities Writ Large Program. She is also an assistant professor of literature at Richard Stockton College. Her work spans the intersections between postcolonial studies and the digital humanities, 19th/20th Century British and Anglophone Literature and Southeast Asian and African studies, and games in higher education. Koh directs Digitizing 'Chinese Englishmen,' a digital archival project on 19th century 'Asian Victorians' in Southeast Asia, and The Stockton Postcolonial Studies Project , an online magazine of postcolonial studies. She is the designer of Trading Races, an elaborate historical role playing game designed to teach race consciousness in the undergraduate classroom. She is also a core contributor to the Profhacker Column at the Chronicle of Higher Education.

Here are Adeline's first five...

"My source of news—much more interesting to me than what’s generally on the major news sites, given the people I follow. I especially enjoy following comments on Twitter during major events (e.g. the presidential debates) and have learned a ton from my colleagues who live-tweet academic conferences they attend."

"I loved the blog before I started writing for it—and still learn a lot from my fellow core writers daily. I <3 ProfHacker."

"A terrific collaborative project by Minh-ha Pham and Mimi Thi Nguyen on the racial and cultural politics of beauty and aesthetics. Essential reading."

"Attractive images and videos of the Continent that completely go against the stereotypes that we have. A must for any postcolonial scholar."

"Excellent open collaborative project on race, class, gender, sexuality, and disability within the digital humanities."

  P.S. You can click on the images to go to the site…

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Laurie Chancey is an Instructor of Sociology at Asnuntuck Community College, Enfield, CT, and a Ph.D. student in Sociology at Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, LA. Passionate about teaching and technology, Laurie maintains a web presence, "DJ Academe," to collect and organize multimedia for pedagogical purposes. http://djacademe.wordpress.com,http://djacademe.tumblr.com, http://twitter.com/djacademe

Laurie is an only child from Louisiana who was unschooled until entering college. Unschooling is a radical form of homeschooling without a formal curriculum, where learning is child-led and the parent acts as a facilitator. Laurie received a B.A. summa cum laude in Sociology with a concentration in Women's Studies from McNeese State University in 2001. In 2006, Laurie earned her M.A. from Louisiana State University with a thesis on demographic trends of voluntary childlessness. For her Ph.D. dissertation, Laurie is currently performing a cultural analysis of stigma management strategies in an online support group for the voluntarily childless.

Visit her personal website at http://lchancey.wordpress.com.

Here are Laurie's first five...

  "Frequent Five:"

"Facebook helps me stay in touch with my friends and family, which is especially important since I moved cross-country this summer."

"I'm ambivalent about The Huffington Post even though I visit it daily. I appreciate it as an aggregator, but I'm uncomfortable with the sensationalism."

"The New York Times is one of the few things on the web I actually pay for so I can stay informed and support quality journalism."

"I subscribe to 553 YouTube channels to collect multimedia for class and to stay informed of international events. My favorite channels are Voice of America, Al-Jazeera, LinkTV, National Geographic, and RSA Animate."

"Tumblr is a fantastic wild and wooly source of multimedia. I save animated GIFs and sociological images for use in class."

"Favorites:"

"Kudos to this lady-majority curation website for its stability and ease of use. I can unfollow the wedding, baby, and housecleaning boards and focus on my recipes, sociology, and queer fashion."

"I'm a huge fan of the Music Genome Project, which categorizes songs by their musical elements instead of commonly-used social metrics such as number of listens or album sales. I love being able to search for new music based on pure sound."

"Gwen & Lisa at Sociological Images provide a formidable repository of multimedia and analysis. I check their site often for inspiration for my courses."

"On Flickr, I can search for a concept, sort by "Interesting," and find striking photographs to use as backgrounds for in-class PowerPoints. Outside of class prep, I check in periodically with the Official White House feed (http://www.flickr.com/photos/whitehouse/) for a different view of the First Family than the one I find in the news."

"As a combined music and stats geek, I haunt my own Last.fm profile to observe patterns in my listening. I've listened to nothing but Die Antwoord since Christmas."

P.S. You can click on the images to go to the site…

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Julia Fryett is a curator and producer with an expertise in contemporary art, film and digital media. She previously worked in a curatorial and sales capacity at the Mugrabi Collection, then went on to founded AKTIONSART in 2009. Her speciality is designing multi-platform projects that bridge physical and virtual space. Check out some of her work here.

  Julia graduated from Duke University with a BA in Literature and Film/TV Studies. She recently completed an MA in Film Curating from London Film School and participated on TransformatLab. Her master's dissertation was XHIBITOR - a digital research project about transmedia and art exhibitions.

Here are Julia's first five...

"My first five remain in a constant rotation, but are always focused around a mix of streaming music, social media and news."

"First things first! I turn on my streaming radio of choice, Seattle's KEXP."

"Always Twitter for breaking news and to see what my friends are up to."

"Lots of great digital culture analysis here, especially related to copyright law."

"A quick glance at my RSS feed to catch any articles of note in a few of my favorite publications - TechCrunch, DigiDay, NY Times, Wired, All Things Digital, Hyperallergic."

"To find some inspiration of what to wear! A favorite is Garance Doré because she blends fabulous fashion with humor."

  P.S. You can click on the images to go to the site…

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Chad M. Gesser is an Associate Professor of Sociology at Owensboro Community and Technical College.  He teaches first and second year courses, using a lot of technology in the classroom and with students.  He also engages in a wide array of endeavors; currently dabbling with sound design/DJing.  You can find out more about Chad at http://sites.google.com/site/chadgesser/, and check some of his creative work at http://www.djprofg.com.

  Here are Chad's first five...

"Jumping into my first five in the morning usually starts with my email.  I like to stay on top of email primarily to respond to students or colleagues needing assistance.  My next stop would likely be my Twitter feed.  Here I too respond, but I also organize my Twitter feed via lists.  I’ve created one of the more extensive Sociology Twitter lists.  I review that list to see what colleagues and organizations are sharing.  This can sometimes extend interaction with colleagues, or take me on a sociological adventure by clicking links, reading content, examining visualizations of data, and/or saving content to use later on with my students in class."

"I use the music software program Ableton for my sound design, production, and DJ hobby.  I have developed a Twitter list for my related Ableton interests.  I find tips, tricks, tutorials, new tracks and plugins to use for my DJ hobby by running through this list.  I have a similar Music list that I curate.  I like to peer into the world of a variety of musicians, producers, DJs, and like minded creative people."

"From here I’m likely to jump into my Google Reader application.  I don’t have one particular website I like to review in the morning.  I have several areas of interests that take the form of “folders of RSS feeds”.  Each folder contains anywhere from 5-60 website feeds.  The folder titles that I view most frequently are Ableton, Android (I’m a big mobile user), Artsy, DJ, EDM, Education, Google, Learning, Soc and Data Blogs, and Tech News."

"Most recently I have found myself enjoying and being inspired by several websites in my Artsy folder.  A few that I currently enjoy and that provide inspiration are Beautiful/Decay (http://beautifuldecay.com/), Behance (http://www.behance.net/), Colossal (http://www.thisiscolossal.com/), and Open Culture (http://www.openculture.com/)."

"Overall my first five might vary from day to day, but as you can see there are general themes.  As a sociologist, that’s not surprising."

  P.S. You can click on the images to go to the site…

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Amanda considers herself a member of the community of practice known as the “digital humanities,” which means that she thinks about how the study of literature, history, and philosophy has been and is being and might be changed by computers and the Internet — but she doesn’t limit herself to thinking; she gets her hands dirty, thus causing some of the very change she thinks about, in an inexcusable breach of objectivity.

Amanda is currently a Research Assistant Professor and THATCamp Coordinator at the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, helping scholars worldwide organize their own version of The Humanities and Technology Camp, “an inexpensive, open meeting where humanists and technologists of all skill levels learn and build together in sessions proposed on the spot.”

Here are Amanda's first five...

"I've had the daily poem from Poetry Daily set as my home page for at least ten years now and have never been tempted to change it. It's a great way to keep up with contemporary poetry. Today's poem (1/17/13) by Geri Doran describes a trek across a cold heath, beginning "Here not waterfalls: scrubby plats of gorse and heather"."

"This is the major trade journal for higher education, and it's basically my newspaper of record. Highlights include the lucid and literate reporting of Jennifer Howard on all aspects of humanities research and publishing and the ProfHacker blog for tech tips and tricks geared to academics."

"A competitor to the Chronicle of Higher Ed whose articles are all openly available online. Highlights for me include the Intellectual Affairs column by the funny and erudite Scott McLemee, who reviews recent scholarly books."

"It's my job to maintain this web network, which runs on WordPress Multisite, so naturally I'm often there. THATCamp, if you don't know, is a popular unconference " where humanists and technologists of all skill levels learn and build together in sessions proposed on the spot." THATCamp rocks."

"I keep my To Do list (or rather several flavors of GTD-based To Do lists) in Google Docs. I've tried other ways of managing my To Do lists, but I keep coming back to Google Docs. It's at least as flexible as a piece of paper, but it's conveniently online, without all those annoying features of dedicated productivity apps."

  P.S. You can click on the images to go to the site…