Last week I was writing an article on top family vacation spots in the upper Midwest. As I Googled Wisconsin Dells and the other destinations on my list, I thought to myself, “Wow, I’m glad I don’t have to go to the library, visit a travel agent or call an endless string of people for this information.” Do you know how much time that takes?

Yes, I’m totally spoiled. Aren’t we all?

My husband and I recently threw away every phone book in the house. Why not? They were just collecting dust on top of the refrigerator while we looked up phone numbers on DexOnline and used Google Maps for directions.

While we were at it, we stashed our big health reference guide. Who needs it when you have WebMd?

As a writer, I’m addicted to checking off my handwritten to-do lists(oh, the rush!), so it’s hard for me to give up my daily planner. But that doesn’t stop me from using Google Calendar.

I know there is a lot more out there that I don’t take advantage of yet. Check out these Top 10 Research Tools rated by CNET.

I also just found Noodle Tools. It helps you choose your search tool based on what you need to do (define your topic, do research in a specific discipline, get opinions, get different types of media, etc.)

Do you know of some hidden online treasures that make research easier? The faster I get what I want from the Web, the happier I’ll be.

So, after hearing the news this morning that Viacom has agreed to post it’s videos on Joost (after demanding that YouTube remove 100,000 video clips), I thought, wow, this Joost thing is going to be big, I should probably check it out.

Well, I’m not sure if you’ve tried to check out Joost (fka The Venice Project), but it turns out that Joost isn’t quite ready to turn on. They are in beta testing, and it seems that the most popular way to beta test these days is to ask for people to sign up, and then let them know that you are so overwhelmed with potential beta testers, that you may never respond to them. Which might be okay if that’s where it ended, but then they throw this out there for you… if you happen to know someone who is currently a beta tester, they can invite you / give you a token, and then, you too can be a beta tester. (This seems like a trend that was started by Google with gmail.)

So now I find myself searching blogs for somebody that’s will to invite me to be a beta tester, but all I find are other people begging for invites so that they can become beta testers. Now, I guess any publicity is good publicity, but it seems that annoying your potential advocates by forcing them to beg to get a look at your product, might not be the best approach.

Now, don’t think this post was just another attempt to be invited to become a beta tester for Joost, but if you happen to have a spare token, I’d be happy to take it off your hands.

I just returned from the Adaptive Path sponsored and coordinated MXSF 2007 conference in San Francisco. This was their first “MX” meeting, and it was well attended (it sold out!). There was a very large number of attendees from Minnesota. That was actually freaking a few people out, like we were going to take it over. I crossed paths with Mark Buccella of bswing and Bill from Room and Board (sorry Bill, forgot your last name and I didn’t get your card…). There were also like twenty people there from Adobe.

Anyway, Adaptive Path is Jesse James Garret’s firm in San Francisco, and you may remember JJG as one of the earliest advocates for “user experience” or UX, he wrote a book about it back in 2002. The M in MX is for “managing for the user experience” and the conference was aimed at a multidisciplinary audience of both agency and client individuals who are charged with creating/managing/improving user experience within their work, projects and teams. The bulk of the presenters seemed to be very product design focused, which was ok as there is decent overlap, but I personally would have liked to see more focus on both interactive and service oriented user experience strategies. Adaptive Path blogged the event and has some killer summaries. They are also going to be posting podcasts of each presenters piece. Check out the blog here, but I am going to inspire you first with some of my highlights from the conference:

Jesse James Garret

Jesse opened the conference with a really nice talk on what the whole experience thing is really about. He used the story of Kodak and the first consumer tech product (you click the button, we do the rest…) as a case study and dropped thought bombs on us like these:

- Biggest compliment that can be paid to what we create? I can’t live without it.

- Too many people are approaching problems through technology, others start with features. To be really successful, we need to solve problems by beginning with experience.

- The experience IS the product and business value + opportunity = experience strategy

Lou Carbone (our own local marketing strategy guru)

- CRM does not = relationship, it’s just data so get over it.

- Our goal, our objective should be to create value for our customers. Profit is only the reward for doing this well.

Caterina Fake (Flickr co-creator) interviewed by Peter Merholz

This was a pretty cool interview. Basically, Flickr was an accident. She and her team had been jamming on some online game called Game Neverending. They realized it was not going to scale the way they needed to, and in an act of desperation began re-purposing code and created Flickr. They were broke. They had no plan. They did no research. They had no idea, really, what they were going to end up with. None of them were even photographers, per se, but they were adept at creating social software and knew they were on to something with the idea of photo sharing. They benefited from an intense feedback loop, constant improvement and testing with real live people. Now, Flickr is owned by Yahoo, they’re all rich and have been on the cover of Newsweek. Dreams do come true for all you mom’s basement-working code geeks.

Overall, the conference was great. Really interesting mix to the audience, great conversation and networking, and the weather was nice. I had a killer dinner at Range in the Mission, too.