Valentin's Blog

I used to complain that I cannot (easily) keep both my emails and my files in the same organization structure; that I needed one structure on the disk and one inside my email program (outlook). These days desktop search has - to a big extend - solved this problem.

But now, with all the SaaS and cloud enthusiasm there comes an even worse problem: now I have my published slides at Slideshare, the ones I'm working on in Google Docs, together with my spreadsheets. My notes are on evernote - except for notes that are urls -  in which case they are on Delicious.com, or mindmaps in which case they are on the servers of mindmeister.com. Finally my text documents are on Zoho (well most, some are on Google Docs) and all the rest is on my JungleDisk - well, except the pictures I want to share which are either on Facebook, Picasa or Flickr (depending on the audience).  Oh, and I haven't even talked about the wikis ...

You get the picture? By using the best-of-breed web2.0 applications (which are great!) my desktop is now totally fragmented and I need to remember where a particular document may be. If I'm working on a task or project I have no single location where I can find all my stuff related to this task/project. So there it is - the real need for a web desktop; the single location that brings together our data from many services.The single place where we can aggregate and search for all our data.

For propably half a year I haven't watched any TV - not because I don't like see moving pictures every once in a while, but because the videos you can (legally) download from the Internet are just so much better. Now I wanted to use this post to point you to the one source of videos that has been my absolute favorite: TED talks. These are simply 10 to 25 minute conference presentations - but they are so well done, the topics are so varied and the speakers so impressive that they have nothing in common with your average conference presentations and they beat the crap out of almost anything on TV.

Below I've embedded three of my favorite ones - You'll need one hour to watch them all, but you will not regret it.

The first talk is an incredibly passionate call for the exploration of the sea by Robert Ballard - a talk filled with the astonishing things we learned about the oceans in the last few decades.



The second talk "My Year of Living Biblically" is a very funny talk from a journalist and book author about his one year experiment of following every rule and commandment in the bible (he even managed to stone an adulterer).




Finally the last talk I want to share with you is from Chris Bangle - the controversial genius behind BMWs (and Minis and Rollce Royce) recent car designs (who - sadly - has announced to leave BMW). In his talk he passionately argues that cars are Art and that Design is Love. Did you know that every car you see out there is sculped?

What you see below is a screenshot of how Flickr results look like if you have the Cooliris plugin installed. I wanted to feature this here because there is no doubt in my mind that this kind of tool will soon become a mainstream way of accessing visual information (like Flickr; but also  Slideshare or YouTube).

Cooliris still has some rough edges (e.g. it seems to be a memory hog) but I absolutely recommend it to anyone interested in the future of browsing and to anyone who just wants to enjoy Flickr more.