Poken: The Future of Social Networking?

At a conference about internet and society last week in Amsterdam the first Pokens were given away to participants. A Poken is a small gadget you can keep on your key chain. When touching someone else’s Poken you automatically exchange ‘business cards’ and links to your social network profiles on LinkedIn and Facebook. Is this the future of social networking?

A social networking gadget

Have you ever been in the situation when you’ve met an interesting person at a party and afterwards you tried to find his or her profile on the internet, but you forgot the exact name and you didn’t know where to start searching? In such a situation Poken could have saved you from a lot of trouble: You both grab your Poken, hold them together, they glow their lights and you’re done! Read more

Follow Me on Twitter!

I waited for a long time, as I just didn’t understand why I would use it. But from now on you can follow Streamlined Mind on Twitter. Let’s see it as an experiment. I don’t know what it will bring me and if I’ll enjoy using it for a long time. We’ll see. In the meantime, become my twitter friend and we’ll talk!

How to Use the iPhone as a Planner

In June I asked the question: Will the New iPhone 3G be a Good Planner?. I didn’t have an iPhone myself back then, as it wasn’t available where I live. Since august I’ve been using one though, so this is a good moment to get back to that question and see how the iPhone holds up to the expectations I had back then. A lot of people visited this website because they searched for “iPhone planner” in Google, so I guess there’s quite some interest in such thing.

To my knowledge there is no application that can do everything you need to create a waterproof planning system. But can you make your iPhone a good planner by combining a few applications? This was one of the main reasons why I bought an iPhone in the first place. I was using a Moleskine weekly planner at the time to hold my appointments and to-do lists. I used iCal mainly for setting reminders. I played around with different GTD applications, but they Read more

How To Use The Internet to Communicate Effectively

We might assume most students use the internet regularly these days. For work as well as social activities it’s a tool that we rely on a lot. But how to use the internet to communicate effectively? Let’s look at the different tools we can use and especially how they can be used to communicate in an educational setting, and what are their advantages and disadvantages?

In the past we had few options if we wanted to communicate with people over a long distance. We had telephones and we had letters, that was basically it. Right, I’m forgetting about telegrams and faxes, but let’s focus on widely spread, mainstream tools everybody has access to. The phone was the way to communicate directly to a person and sending a letter was the indirect way.

Nowadays phone calls are still made, and the mobile phone allows us to talk with each other whenever we want. Letters are still sent too, though way less often. And if we look at how we use computers to communicate we can roughly make the same distinction between direct en indirect communication: Read more