Dur­ing the last two years, pretty much every aspect of my life has changed, with things only now just start­ing to set­tle down. For the first time dur­ing that win­dow, I took a month off (August) and am not doing any travel or pre­sen­ta­tions for work. Instead, I’ve spent a small por­tion of this newly-recovered time try­ing to re-establish rou­tines that long ago fell by the wayside.

One of those rou­tines is how I keep up, some­thing I haven’t been doing very well dur­ing this time. I’ve been exper­i­ment­ing with dif­fer­ent aggre­ga­tors, try­ing to find one that makes me more effi­cient that I can access while on the go. I’d given up on the mobile access, mainly because I was look­ing at it through the lens of my Treo since it’s the one inter­net access point I always have with me. It took me a while, but I finally got around to try­ing Google Reader, and so far I’m pretty impressed, mainly because of Google Gears. Besides the fact that it’s pretty cool, it’s incred­i­bly use­ful if you’re a lap­top user and I think it has the poten­tial to play an impor­tant role in the next few years.

Basi­cally, Google Gears is code that any­one can embed in their online tools to make them avail­able offline. It’s inte­grated into Google Reader via a one-time install that doesn’t even require you to restart your browser. Once acti­vated, a lit­tle icon appears in the upper right-hand cor­ner, green for online, pur­ple for offline.

It sounds sim­ple enough, but here’s what hap­pens when you click the green but­ton. Gears down­loads all of the posts in your Reader (minus the images) so that you can keep read­ing when you’re offline. You can still use the stan­dard key­board com­mands to nav­i­gate and quickly scan your news, just as if you were online. When you do get back to a live con­nec­tion, you click on the pur­ple icon, Reader goes back online, and it syn­chro­nizes your un/read items back to the Google servers, includ­ing any items you starred for future reference.

–or–

Now that I have a lap­top I am will­ing to carry back and forth to work, Gears has been a god­send. I load up feeds at home in the morn­ing, go offline, read them on the train, go online before leav­ing work, load up my aggre­ga­tor again, go offline, read new items on the train, and then syn­chro­nize again when I get back home. I’ve had so lit­tle time lately (mov­ing to a new house could be a full time job in itself!) that this has been the only way I’ve been able to track the online world for the past cou­ple of months.

Like other dis­rup­tive tech­nolo­gies such as dig­i­tal video recorders (like Tivo), MP3 play­ers, and feed read­ers, it’s chang­ing how I inter­act with information/media, espe­cially since other sites can use Gears, thereby offer­ing their ser­vices even when the user is offline. The other place I have used it is on the to-do site Remem­ber the Milk. One day I logged in there and could mag­i­cally add Gears to it. Now I can man­age my lists on the train, at the air­port, or any­where else (as long as I’ve remem­bered to click on that icon and tell Gears to take that site offline so I could keep using it). These days I really wish I could add Gears to Word­Press so that I could also blog while read­ing my aggre­ga­tor. I won­der how long it will be before Google adds this func­tion­al­ity to Blog­ger, Google Docs, etc.? And what if the rumored gPhone includes Gears in an ebook reader, mobile Google Apps suite, Gmail, etc.? The com­bi­na­tion of mobile and offline could be powerful.

It’s a great idea, one that has already helped me. It’s not as use­ful for you if you’re not a lap­top user, but it’s still an inter­est­ing idea to think about. Even­tu­ally, wire­less broad­band will be ubiq­ui­tous and main­stream, and we’ll just never be offline. But we’re a few years away from that, and I’m now won­der­ing if there are any library ser­vices that could ben­e­fit from incor­po­rat­ing Gears so that users can keep access­ing them when offline. It’s prob­a­bly not pos­si­ble to make the cat­a­log avail­able this way, and really, what patron would think to take the cat­a­log offline to keep search­ing it (plus, you’d lose accu­rate shelf sta­tus). Maybe there are other pieces, though.

This type of tool is a bridge to an approach­ing future when we’re all a live IP address all the time, wher­ever we are, so it’s some­thing I’m keep­ing in the back of my mind. Espe­cially when I’m offline.

It will be inter­est­ing to see if other sites imple­ment Gears, and maybe it will even show up on InfoDoo­dads list of the Top 13 Web 2.0 Tools for Librar­i­ans. We’ll see.