Steve Dotto here.
How the heck are you doing this fine day?
Me?
Well, my bags are packed and I’m ready to go.
I’m heading off on another business trip.
Now it used to be that when I headed off to travel, I used to really enjoy the time on
the airplane because it gave me time to sit down and write without any distractions, to
open my notebook computer and do some writing.
Well, that doesn’t happen anymore because the seats are so darn small, it’s too cramped,
I just don’t feel comfortable writing anymore.
So instead now what I do when I’m traveling is I recapture that time and I use it to read
all of the little bits of information that I haven’t had time to consume over the past
little while.
And to facilitate that, I use a tool called Pocket.
Pocket allows me to clip all of the different articles and posts that I want to have a look
at later and store them for offline browsing when I have the time, specifically in my case
when I’m travelling.
I know a lot of you are saying, “Wait a minute, Steve.
You’ve shown us how to do similar things on Evernote.”
Yes, you can do similar things on Evernote but Pocket works better for this particular
purpose, for clipping informational articles that you are interested in reading at a later
point and then delivering those to you wherever and whenever you happen to want to consume
them.
And so that is what we’re going to be looking at today on DottoTech.
Pocket is a free app.
You can buy a premium version that includes some extra bells and whistles and bigger storage
and longer term storage and those sorts of stuff but you can try it out with the free
version and get a really good feel for everything it will do.
Let me show you how it kind of fits in your life.
Let’s say that you’re browsing along at a typical website.
Now I go to Social Media Examiner on a pretty much daily basis.
I read a lot of the articles right away but some of the articles I say wow, I want to
spend some time and think about this one and maybe even store for it future research or
read it later.
So here’s a typical one, analyzing my content with Google Analytics.
That’s something I’m not going to understand in just a few seconds.
Are you?
So here instead of just reading the article now, what I’m going to do is I’m going
to save it to Pocket so that I can read it or reference it at a later point.
How I do that is as simple as can be.
Into my browser, I’ve installed the Pocket Clipper.
I just click on that and it allows me to add tags which allows me to do search Later.
If you use this a lot, you might want to be classifying articles into business and personal
and travel, into different categories for research later.
But as soon as you’ve click on the Web Clipper, it has saved the article already.
So now when you go into my Pocket List, we can see I’ve got this brand new article
that’s been clipped.
If I go in, I can read it here on my computer at any point in the future even if my computer
was, for whatever reason, offline.
But that’s not the real strength.
The real strength is it is syncing through the web now to my mobile device and I’ve
got it set up on my smartphone.
I’ve got the 6+, the larger of the iPhones, which I find great for reading.
This is what I’m going to be reading these articles on when I’m travelling.
Let’s take a look at the account or the app.
When I open up the app, we see right away that it’s already sync and it’s got this
Google Analytics content on my account.
So now I can read this one whether I’m connected to the internet or not.
When we open up the article you see that it strips out all of the ancillary information
around the sides and just basically gives you the meat of the article itself allowing
you to read it.
And if there’s rich media included like in this particular case, the podcast, we can
listen to it as well.
So it gives us all of that rich content available to us to consume at our leisure.
This is a powerful tool when it comes to being able to store and being able to access information
that we want future reference to when we want and when we need it.
Now the smartphone doesn’t just work as a reader.
Now this doesn’t have to be an iPhone.
It could be an Android phone.
It can be a tablet of some sort.
It could be another notebook computer.
But it doesn’t just work as a reader.
It also works as a research tool and a collection tool.
For example, I use the Pulse app to browse through the different Pulse articles that
come from LinkedIn and as I scroll through, I might find—Apple says iPhone pre-orders,
I’m not too interested in that; Google Car, I’m not too interested in that.
Oh, LiFi, how your LED lifestyle can help you to connect to the internet, that sounds
like an interesting article.
I open the article.
Again, I want to save that article.
I don’t necessarily want to read it right now so what I do is I tap on the Share tool
and go Share Via.
That brings up all of my different share options and one of those options is to store it in
Pocket.
As soon as I tap on that, it now clips our article and it saves it to Pocket.
So if I go back to my computer now and refresh my list, that new article from Pulse should
be here.
There indeed we see that article from Pulse.
And this doesn’t just work for Pulse.
This works for Zite.
This works for Flipboard.
This works for dozens and dozens of different applications.
So anything you can view on your browser, you can gain access to but any information
that you view on many, many other news-related or information-related apps, you can also
click for future reading.
So now my next business trip, I’m going to be that much more productive because I’m
going to spend that down time learning, increasing my skill set, increasing ideas and just basically
becoming a little bit better informed.
I hope having watched this video today, you feel a little bit better informed.
Now remember there are three ways to stay in touch with us here on DottoTech.
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both you and for I. Until next time, I’m Steve Dotto.
Have fun storming the castle!