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Here’s something to think about: What would it have been like if the great minds of our time maintained blogs?

I was thinking about this earlier today pondering the results of a blog if Einstein could have used this method to relay his thoughts. As you know, blogs are nothing more than a medium to output thoughts, theories and other observations, so I believe that geniuses like Galileo or Einstein would have utilized this form of communication to its fullest potential.

These great minds would have left no stone unturned in their quest to bring forth information to the masses, especially if their method in doing so was by simply filling in a ‘New Entry’ and clicking Publish.

Simple and instantaneous “mind-blogging”.

It’s a simple answer to a dead-simple question; GMail is a better alternative to any other web-based email service out there and I’ll explain why.

When Google announced their web-based email service in early April, on April Fool’s Day in fact, the Internet was buzzing with rumors. There were those who believed Google’s announcement was an elaborated April Fool’s joke, attributing their reasoning towards Google offering 1000MB (equal to 1 Gigabyte) of space, an unheard of amount for webmail and the fact it was coupled with the announcement for a proposed lunar outpost (which, surprisingly turned out to be a hoax).

Then Google’s Vice-President of Products, Jonathan Rosenberg, confirmed that Google’s web email service was indeed real. Real enough that Google opened exclusive beta-testing to employees and then offered sporadic invitations to their testers to invite other people to test the product. This viral campaign proved successful, to the point where many of these invitations have been sold on Ebay and swapped for other items and services on the web site, GMailswap.

Last week, I received a GMail invitation from a friend and proceeded to sign up for the service. The process was extremely smooth and streamlined and it didn’t take long before I was in awe of what GMail had to offer; notably how quickly the Javascript application works and the threading features of email conversations. In a nutshell this is akin to how threading works in forum services, wherein each post of conversation precedes the current reply.

GMail also offers ‘labeling’, similar to archiving your emails into folders except with labels you can more effectively archive information because you can apply more than one label to an email. For instance, if your friend from Hawaii sends you an email about an island resort you could attach ‘friends’, ‘hawaii’ and ‘vacation’ labels to the email. GMail would then sort this email into these respective areas, for easier reference on a later date.

In short, it all works exceptionally well save for a few features that need to be implemented in order for it to be a full-featured web application. For starters, I would love to see a more robust address book allowing for additional contact information (address, birthdate, etc.) other than just name and email. GMail also lacks a group email feature. Moreover the ability to select a group of contacts in your address book to send an email to.

My wife became frustrated with this, especially when she was attempting to inform people of her new email address. Due to the lack of a group email feature she had to manually select each individual contact as opposed to clicking a checkbox next to each record, selecting ‘Email All’ and then sending off the email.

GMail is understandably in the beta testing stage and Google has already received valuable input towards bettering their service. I would imagine several of these features will be available before the service launches for public usage thus the reason why it’s still being tested.

All in all, it’s fun to watch the service flourish on a daily basis and already GMail is a worthy contender for a serious email application.

Everyday I make a trip to the gas station to fill up my 44oz with some caffeine enriched soda. When you purchase the drink initially they charge you $1.25 and every refill thereafter it costs just $.75 cents. I’ve been doing this like clockwork, to the point where the attendants take one look at me, ring the cash register and I slide my change across the counter.

Yesterday, oddly enough, as I was getting into my car a man across the way, filling up his BMW, stood there staring at me. At first I thought he was maybe looking at something in the distance, but then I noticed he continued staring at me when I pulled away. It was creepy. If you’ve ever seen Michael J. Fox’s Frighteners and remember Jeffrey Combs’ performance you would get an idea of how eerie this experience was. I felt like Harry Potter in the Prisoner of Azkaban, getting my soul sucked out by his deep gaze.

Then my mind did a funny thing, as it usually tends to do. I imagined he was some sort of Government agent, sent on a top-secret mission to a gas station to keep an eye on my every action. As I stood there staring back at him, shuddering, I imagined him watching me come out with my 44oz and sighing to himself, “Another large Pepsi, I see. Why am I always assigned these people?”.

My copy of Dan Cederholm’s Web Standard Solutions is on its way according to Amazon.com and should (if all goes well) arrive in a couple days. I ordered it yesterday, after convincing the company I work for that it would make a worthwhile addition to my web development & graphic design library.

Currently I’ve thumbed through and broke the spine on the following books in my collection:

• HTML with XHTML and CSS (5th Ed.) by Elizabeth Castro
• XML for the World Wide Web by Elizabeth Castro
• Photoshop 7 Killer Tips by Scott Kelby and Felix Nelson
• Photoshop Down and Dirty Tricks by Scott Kelby
• Eric Meyer on CSS and More Eric Meyer on CSS by Eric Meyer
• Designing CSS Web Pages by Christopher Schmitt
• Cascading Style Sheets by Owen Briggs, Steven Champeon, Eric Costello and Matt Patterson
• Design-it-Yourself: Logos, Letterheads, and Business Cards by Chuck Green

I highly recommend these books as not only wonderful reference guides, but well-written and concise resources that will ultimately spark your creativity.