It is only a recent phenomenon. And I do blame Dave from the Globalgeekpodcast for it, but i've turned into a web 2.0 slut these days. I catch myself in the middle of the day, surfing to my NETVIBES homepage and looking at my RSS feeds, reading over my mail accounts and trying to decide what color I would like to use for my Gmail calendar. Later that day I download a cool desktop picture from wallpapr or resize it using resizr . And as I sync up all my bookmarks between my browsers with Googlesync I am beginning to see that no longer my cd-bag, but my bookmark collection is becoming my biggest bag of tricks.
I think its a natural evolution. By doing the Global Geek Podcast for about 2 months now I have been exposed to a great deal of web 2.0 sites and services. Some of the ones I review, stick around and before I know it I start using them. And then there is of course Dave's never ending fascination with Firefox Extensions. Until not to long ago I thought them to be silly, and none standard. Some of these little add-ons for your firefox seemed trivial at best. At the most some flimsy thing you play around with for ten minutes, then forget all about it, only to have it eat away hard disk space for the rest of the day. To me a browser was just what it was. A browser. Ok , with Internet Explorer its also a save haven for all the stuff that wants to fuck-up your pc (basically your windows-XP-html eating suicide kit) but nothing more.
And yet , things evolve. The browser is becoming my tool of choice more and more. Wether it is to write this blogentry, resize pictures, or even draw flowcharts online. Its all through trusty firefox. And it gets worse ever weekend. When Dave drags up yet another bunch of excellent "sites and services" to use on the WWW. Every week I add more and more bookmarks (and i'm very picky about what I bookmark) yet my "web 2.0 toolkit" is gaining weight like Oprah on a Donut Diet.
What HAS taken me by surprise is the way I have adopted Google Documents (let's just call it Google Writely) as a place to store online documents. Not that I write up essays, but just quick peaces of information, configuration settings I should not forget, and mostly a lot of stuff I create or need on the road and am just to darn sloppy to hold on to. (EVEN on my laptop). I'm horrible with paper, and I'm bad with .doc files. So storing them on line is a great way to keep track.
What it all ends up on is that i'm becomming a web 2.0 slut and that the broadband connection running into my house is my heart-lung machine once again.
More information : What is Web 2.0