When researching possible stories, I sometimes use the Stumbleupon toolbar button but I recently came upon two other toolbar buttons which pretty much perform the same function. You may be interested in using them yourself for surfing the web.

Google’s “Picks For you”

This one won’t be for everyone’s tastes for the following reasons. First of all, you need the Google toolbar installed. Secondly, you need to activate Google search history. You also need a Google account but anyone with a Gmail account already has one of those. So you kind of need to be a bit of a Google fan to have all of that and you also need to trust them with your search history (so anyone that values their privacy may howl with protest).

My current web obsession (and productivity drainer) is iGoogle. For those of you who don’t know what this is all about, this is Google giving you a free personalised search page, instead of the standard “no-frills” search page that you are normally confronted with when you go to Google. By using iGoogle (the Artist Formerly Known As Google IG), you can give yourself some spiffing artistic headers as well as install some productive - as well as some not so productive - widgets on the page (or as Google likes to call them, “modules”).

With the advent of Apple’s new iPhone and iPod Touch, a whole host of websites have set up mobile version of their regular site. Notable among these various sites is Gmail and all of the related Google web services. (disclaimer: for the rest of this article I will be referring to the iPod touch, but I tested the application to the same extent on the iPhone as well.)

For a while I didn’t have any native mail application on my iPod touch. I bought by iPod in September and didn’t want to pay 20 dollars for the January application upgrade. Being a Gmail user, I was delighted to find that Gmail was such a versatile web app and can be conveniently accessed both from iPhone and iPod Touch.

I am back with another mobile productivity application. You remember me covering Goog-411? I loved that and I love this as well. Way to go Google!

If you are using an iPhone, the newest Windows Mobile 6.1 device, a Blackberry, Android or ANY device with ANY type of mobile browser and you want to grab some local information, point your mobile to: www.google.com/m/lcb.

With this new doo-hickey you can look stuff up without typing! Google automagically discovers your city but that’s it. Maybe someday they can grab your latitude and longitude by triangulating your mobile… (no I do not watch too much “24″!)

This will probably be a shorter post than the other posts in shortcut series because there aren’t really that many shortcuts for Google Calendar. But the ones that exist are extremely useful and help to explain why Google Calendar is one of the best web calendars on the market.

Again, I am going to quickly run through the important keyboard shortcuts to show you scenerios where you could use them and in the process remember them. By mastering the keyboard, you can ditch that mouse, enter your appointments in a flash and keep up with your schedule without breaking a sweat. Where we’re going, who needs secretaries?

Much has already been said on Make Use Of about keyboard shortcuts but I want to focus specifically on the ones I use most often. I’ve often found that it’s easy to be totally overwhelmed by the sheer volume of shortcuts out there (who can remember them all?) so I’m going to boil it down for you to the absolute essentials and ignore the rest. Today, it’s Gmail.

Inbox

So when we are looking at our Gmail inbox, what are the shortcuts we need to remember to open our emails? Answer : J, K and enter.