the new keeping up with the joneses

my new theory is that keeping up with the joneses now involves technology and whom is besting whom with the latest gizmos out there to keep up with our lives! added to that are all of these social tools and interactive websites which draw us into their world of adding content, posting videos and messing with the latest apps which might be applicable to our world.

does this sound like a rant? that has a negative connotation and i don't mean for this blog post to come off that way. i, too, have been embracing the technology world. for instance, i spent a better part of yesterday curled up with my ....laptop. ten years ago i would have been spending the day on the couch with a book! not to say that reading is going by the wayside but with so much technology and smaller and more mobile tools out there, who's to say i can't curl up on the couch with my laptop reading the latest Grisham?

i recently put a book in my "to read" pile - virtually on goodreads.com. this has become a so much more convenient way to remember titles than using paper or sticky notes. one title came to me via a friend who found the title via a twitter feed. how's that for being really plugged in! it brings to mind a couple of things a) i need to become more twitter educated and 2) the realization that most of my day is spent in 140 character soundbites or attention span. i recently cleaned my desk and placed a bunch of professional reading in a pile. once you put all of this material together do you realize how far behind you are! on the other hand, it brings to mind that some reading takes time to absorb.

moving on from this train of thought let's see how easily it segues into website development...bumpy, eh? we continue our work with different aspects of the coding/backend work. i'm happy to report that the carousels are almost complete and we continue to educate ourselves about building canned searches from the books, movies and music pages. once we have some more pages built we will be able to load some of the text-heavy content so that we can really begin to see how the website comes together.

so, are there tools or websites that you just can't live without today, regardless of keeping up with.....everybody?