Give Me The Online Life

Call me a geek, but it’s days like today that make me glad I’m online.

Over the last few months, I’ve gradually been falling victim to the Google Renaissance and moving a lot of my activities onto Google servers:

• Moved the family calendaring application from Mediabee to Google Calendar
• Moved my blog-reading schedule from Bloglines to Google Reader
• Put a couple of significant, shared Microsoft Office documents into Google Docs format
• Made ‘Google Personalized‘ my default browser home page
• I even played with putting my task list on the Google-friendly, very cool, Australian site rememberthemilk, but found that Outlook still did the job well enough
• Started using Google Notebook instead of scraps of paper.

Last weekend, I got into the Mashup craze with good old Google Maps, and started mapping my company’s contact information.

And now, this week, Google have switched on the full Google mapping functionality I’ve been hanging out for. In Australia, you’re now able to trace driving directions and search for local businesses, and more, with the Google Mapping engine (including Google Earth).

There’s probably a whole bunch of other stuff, but the ‘driving directions’ functionality is one that really helps me out in a strange city. Especially when I’m being given new places to visit each weekend by my birthday-party-going offspring. Whereis does a great job, but not smoothly enough.

I’m waiting for Google to switch on a setting in Gmail whilch allows me to manage my non-Gmail accounts, then I can add a line that says

• Moved my email from Outlook to Gmail

I really think Microsoft has cause to be scared of Google.

Now that I have moved a lot of my e-life onto Google servers, I hope I don’t.