For the purposes of this post we’ll keep things short and simple. Set-up and installation of the app on my BB 8330 (Curve) was quite easy. The application is pretty polished and intuitive and I haven’t experienced any technical issues yet.

There are one or two issues that I have note specific to adding categories to the post (e.g. I couldn’t move into the category field directly rather I had to access it via the BlackBerry menu key. And once I was in to the category selection dialogue it wasn’t really clear how to select the categories that I wanted to assign to the post – I did finally figure it out and you have to use the “Change Option” menu option to toggle the checkbox on or off – which seems a bit kludgy).

Other than those two usability issues, which aren’t really major, I am extremely impressed and am definitely going to continue to experiment with the app.

More to come…

I love Google Reader and use it to manage and maintain all of the feeds that I read on a daily basis. For me, the challenge is the fact that I don’t always want to open it up in my browser. I guess sometime I just get lazy or don’t want to really see how much reading that I have to catch up on. Fortunately for me, and others like me, there is a viable alternative that leverages Google Reader but is really usable from the desktop. It’s not new but I just came across it recently. Readair is a Google Reader application created on the Adobe Air platform, which means its fast, slick and cross platform.

It’s really nice and simple and is a great application for catching up on all those RSS feeds that you have piling up on you! Here is a nice screenshot:

Check it out for yourself, but I think it’s the answer to many of my feed reader issues. The icing on the cake? It’s available for Mac and Windows. You can download it here: ReadAir. Useful, usable and a huge time saver! I highly recommend it.

The 2007 Technology Conference marked my first real introduction to ASAE. It also served as my introduction to the Jeff and Ben, which led to me introduction to the Blogoclump as a whole, which in turn jump started my blogging and involvement in the association community. That chain of events made the event more than worth the price for admission and a great reason to attend it again this year. I just made the trip from PA to DC this afternoon and am happily settled into my hotel room at the Embassy Suites.

From the look at the agenda, the educational sessions look pretty solid and definitely relevant to me, especially as I make some changes at work.

I am currently in the process of shifting my focus from the leadership online learning area to leading a very large project that will impact our component organizations and is looking at literally transforming our online components into true communities of practice. I’ve been working on this project for over a year already in a stretch assignment that I did in conjunction with my other position, but it’s become apparent that due to the complexity, critical importance and my own bandwidth that a choice had to be made. I chose to go this route because of the challenge and the fact that the project involves people, technology, processes, complex systems, and a lot of change management. I also think that the project is going to really set the help establish a new baseline for our communities for quite some time to come.

I’m going to do my best to post regularly from the event and share some of the insights, conversations, lessons learned from not only the formal event but also the informal learning that takes place. It should be great and I look forward to the days ahead.