Have you ever worked on a group project that involved looking at webpages and giving critical feedback? If so, your meetings might go something like this:
Bob: Did you get that list of websites I sent you?
Laurie: Yes, and I looked at them.
Maria: Me too, I sent some more sites to the group.
Bob: Yeah, I saw those too. I really liked that one with the voice-over.
Laurie: Really, which one was that?
Bob: Uh, I think it was by the University of States.
Maria: I liked the one by Anywhere University.
Bob: Why?
Maria: It had some unusual features and was interactive.
Laurie: I don’t remember that one either.
Bob: Let’s look at it on my laptop (group huddles around laptop).
Laurie: Oh yeah! I remember that one. I didn’t like it.

You know where this meeting is going—everyone collectively trying to remember what they did and did’t like about the websites.

Is there an easier way? This is what I was asking myself after a recent task-force meeting discussing the creation of a new online tutorial. And thanks to a group member’s suggestion, we’re using Stickis.

To use Stickis you’ll create a login and then you’ll need to download the Stickis toolbar into your Firefox browser (sorry, no Explorer version).

Once you’ve got the toolbar you can start viewing Stickis and commenting on pages. In the screen shot below you can see I’ve been alerted, on the bottom right pull-out bar, that there is a Sticki on the page. To view the Sticki I simply need to click the pull-out bar and the Sticki (or Stickis) appear.

To view other people’s Stickis, you’ll need to subscribe to their Stickis. One really cool feature of Stickis is the ability to limit viewing of your Stickis to certain people our groups of people. To set this feature up you need to visit ‘Settings’ on your Stickis homepage and then visit the ‘Restrictive Tags’ link and choose a tag that you will only use for that person or group. For example, our task force is using the tag “rottenfruit” and everytime I see something that is for their eyes only I tag it with the word “rottenfruit.”

Stickis is a great product and should increase the productivity of my work group.

p.s. If you get tired of the Stickis alerts, or you’re not working on a project where you need to use the Stickis, simply “disable Stickis” in the Stickis toolbar.