It’s hard enough to schedule meetings with folks in your own office let alone on the other side of the world. Now that I am managing a virtual project team that literally spans the globe I need any advantage I can get to facilitate meetings and conference calls.

One tool that I have found invaluable is the World Clock Meeting Planner for the fine folks at time and date.com. To get up and running simply pick your home location and any other locations where your team members may be. The results are provided in a handy and easy to use reference table. There may be other online tools out there that do the same thing, but for my purposes I can’t find one that is more simple or easier to use.

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Having one place to call “home base” on the web is essential for organization and productivity. For me despite my numerous attempts to try other services and sources I always seemed to gravitate back to my Google Personalized Homepage. Perhaps it is the simplicity: it’s clean and easy to use or maybe it was the flexibility/customizability: I can monitor my Gmail, Google Calendar, specific web feeds, and use other features like the To Do list, notepad and links all from one location all thanks to the myriad of available gadgets. Regardless, it seems to work the way I do. And if it doesn’t, I can create a gadget with relatively little effort to make it!

Another aspect that I grew to appreciate was the fact that it is a work in progress so I never know what features may be added next. Take for a example the fact that almost a year ago I realized the limitation of working from a single page. Needless to say I wished that my Google Personalized Homepage would have tabs so I could add different page views (think Firefox) for different purposes. Amazingly not too long after I had that thought the tabbed page views appeared. From my perspective it may not be perfect but it did work for me.

This morning when I logged in to read the news, check my feeds and catch-up on email I noticed something different.

Wondering if I had missed something during the day yesterday, I headed off to the Google Press Center to see what was going on. Low and behold, there was a link to a blog posting from last night making the announcement titled: “You’ve got gadget mail“. It seems that not only has Google decided to formally name (or rename) Google Personal Homepage to iGoogle, they have also added some additional features to make it even more user friendly.

In addition they have also made the process of creating gadgets for your page or website even easier:

…because starting today, without having any programming or web design experience at all, anyone can create Google Gadgets for iGoogle and send them to friends. Simple gadget templates include a photo gadget, a “GoogleGram” greeting card-style gadget, a YouTube video channel gadget, and a free-form gadget.

To make yours, choose the gadget template you’d like to use, enter your info, and enter your friends’ email addresses. You can always make changes to your gadget, and you can even set some kinds of gadgets to update automatically so your friends will see a new message daily.

Today we’re also making the themes that have been so popular on iGoogle in the U.S. available on every edition of iGoogle around the world, and we’re making iGoogle available in 22 new locales. Visit iGoogle and click “Select theme” to pick a theme for your own page.

Simple as it may be, Google really has figured out how to “democratize” the creation and distribution of content for people worldwide. It’s a great model to embrace and also warrants the question: What are you doing to make your associations website / content more accessible and easy to use and remix so it works for your members?

One of the attributes that has been cited as a key differentiator between what the web was and what it is now is the fact that the new technologies have created an architecture of participation. One need look no further than services like MySpace, Flickr, YouTube, Wikipedia or any blog to realize that anyone with an idea, some time, a decent internet connection and some basic tools could become a content creator. But how many people are actually creating content? Have we reached a tipping point whereby as many content consumers are also producers? While the amount of hype surrounding the read-write web would lead many to believe so, some initial studies are suggesting otherwise.

A recent article by Bill Tancer, general manager of global research at Hitwise - a leading provider of online competitive intelligence - was published in TIME Magazine (Who’s Really Participating in Web 2.0)seems to challenge that fundamental belief based on a thorough analysis of internet traffic and activity. The recent data appears to indicate that only a very small percentage of online activity is related to participation (the creation and publication of content). Furthermore, the Pareto Principle (also known as the 80/20 rule) which states that 80% of all consequences stem from 20% of the causes, does not appear to be applicable when it comes to user-generated content, as much less than 1% of visits to user-driven sites are participatory.
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