Getting cozier with my favorite COSie

Sebastian invited me to join this blog right at the beginning, but I've been so busy that now is the first chance I've had.  Onfolio has increasingly been an asset in my busyness, not to mention my business.

Over the last month, I've begun using Onfolio to organize travel documents, e-tickets, conference materials, and so forth because it's now so easy to capture e-mails directly from Outlook. Also, with the very welcome integration of the feed reader, I'm capturing more personal interest items in addition to the work-related research projects that originally made an Onfolio addict of me.

I've just installed the newest beta release. My only serious complaint about the Onfolio 2 beta  was that it seemed terribly slow in Firefox. It may be my imagination, but this new one seems speedier. Am I dreaming, lucky, or what?

Another point, and this one goes to the somewhat bizarre title of this post. My biggest issue with blogs and blogging and all the trappings is that the blogosphere as a whole is much techier than the world at large.  The recent Pew study on the "State of Blogging,"  while supporting the credible claim that blogs are now an established part of online culture, still tells us that only 38% of online Americans claim to know what a blog is and only 5% use feed readers to access blogs.

In my opinion, those numbers suggest that we need to find better, simpler ways to make blogs and news feeds understandable and accessible to the broader online world. Applications like Onfolio boost personal productivity and make it easier for people to control information overload online. (By the way, I'm doing a study and writing a book on the topic -- so please take my info overload survey and then download "Infomaven's Top Ten Tools for Taming Information Overload Online" -- of which, it goes without saying, Onfolio is one.)

In his recent keynote at the New Communications Forum, Andy Lark offered a good metaphor for RSS feeds, calling them "TiVo for the Web." But I've still had trouble explaining Onlolio and its ilk to the uninitiated  -- partly because applications like this don't seem to have a consistent name or description.

So I made one up. I call Onfolio (and its competitors) "COS" applications -- that's Collect/Organize/Share,  COSies for short. Having tried a couple of others (and, yes, found some things to like about them, as well), I'm coziest with Onfolio, and getting cozier all the time.

COSies. Whaddya think?