On my books blog, folks seems to be enjoying What Now? A Post-apocalyptic Reading List. I guess it’s those winter blues spurring them to read depressing novels about the end of the world (they’re my favorites too!). In fact, several people got to the list after searching for “how to rebuild society after the apocalypse.” I’m glad somebody is thinking ahead.

If you’re interested in the apocalypse, you might want to check out An Empty Earth, which is essentially my research notebook where I mix together a soup of vaguely apocalyptic thoughts, links and other resources. The Ruins of Detroit is a popular example.

Here, you guys seems to be enjoying learning how to give Google Wave invitations and how to create a GTD project list. (Does anybody actually use Google Wave? Because I haven’t found a use for it.) I have posts that are so much more entertaining, but the public likes what it likes, I guess.

I’m skipping my cooking blog, because it’s always the same posts that are popular (their titles are so Google-able).

I see a lot of people have been visiting my blog because of my recent offer of Google Wave invitations, and judging by the search terms, some are confused as to how to give out invitations. I always try to be helpful, so here’s a quick tutorial.

To give out invitations, you must have gotten some from Google. I don’t think everybody got them. If you were invited by Google to be a beta tester, you did. If you were invited by someone else, you probably didn’t. Google will be sending out more invitations as soon as their servers can handle the additional capacity, by the way, so keep checking.

Open up Google Wave. In your Inbox you should see a Wave sent just to you with the subject “Invite others to Google Wave.” Click on it to open it. At the bottom of the Wave, you’ll see the number of invitations you have and a box to enter the email addresses of folks you’d like to invite. Once you enter an email address, scroll down in the Wave a bit (use that teeny scroll bar on the right side of the Wave), and click the “Add to invite list” button to nominate them.

This is important — I don’t think the nominations are automatic. Google wants to control the flow of people coming onto the service, which may explain the delay in someone receiving your invitation. Have patience. I’m fairly positive everyone I nominated eventually got their invitation.

And that’s it. I haven’t actually been using Google Wave, sad to say. Anybody else doing something cool with it?

• Just today, Google announced yet another service: Google Dashboard. They say it’s so you can track all your data that Google is keeping for totally benign reasons (and because you asked them to). I say that this is a handy way of accessing all of your Google stuffs from one place.
• Also as part of Google’s “data liberation” efforts, Google Docs now lets you pull out all of your documents in a handy ZIP file and convert them to the file format of your choice. Here’s my friend Dave Mason’s take on the whole data liberation thing.
• Surely you’ve seen that commercial for the new Motorola Droid phone that attack the iPhone head on? If not, go here to watch it. I likes it!
• Google has also come out with a free GPS navigator. Here’s some analysis on why this is going to kick TomTom’s and Garmin’s collective asses from Gizmodo.
• Got Google Voice yet? I just did. The Google Voice blog offers some advice to newbies.
• Still scratching your head over what exactly Google Wave is and how to use it (if you got one of the highly coveted invitations). Here’s a complete guide to Google Wave from Mashable. For extra credit, Lifehacker offers three worthwhile Google Wave searches and Go2Web20 highlights 11 useful Google Wave extensions you may not know about.
• Here is a sampling of some of the 140 mind-bogglingly obtuse interview questions you might get asked if you applied for a job at Google — with answers! I say, if we’re really all going to work for Google some day, they’re going to have to make their application questions a lot easier. For example: What is your name? And do you worship your benevolent Google overlords? (Correct answer: Yes, Supreme Leader.)

I got a lot of very nice comments on my last post offering to give away some Google Wave invitations. The whole thing was so much fun, I should do more giveaways (except this is the first time I’ve actually had something to give away that other people want). Anyway, I decided to part with four invitations. It was tough picking out who to send them to, but I finally decided to go with the commenters who made me smile or laugh out loud.

So, congratulations to: Francesco, Cjdownunder, Max Xie, Sleeper. Your invitations are in the mail.

Thanks, everyone, for visiting, and I hope you drop back by sometime.

Yesterday I got invited to preview Google Wave. I was kind of surprised, because I don’t think I signed up for the invite. Google Wave is a collaboration tool, and right now the only person I’m collaborating with doesn’t know how to embed video (maybe when he’s 2). Maybe the overlords at Google read this blog and know how big a fan I am (ha!).  Regardless of how I got it, Google Wave is still pretty cool to play around with.

I got some invitations to send to others along with my invite. I gave a few away on Twitter last night, which was fun for a short while. Now I want to try an experiment. Tomorrow I will give the people who leave my favorite comments on this blog post a Google Wave invitation. Since I don’t expect to get more than one or two comments, I’d say the odds are pretty, pretty good.

My husband recently opted to get the Android phone over the iPhone. He loves it, especially how it integrates with all his other Google stuff. Now he can email me, chat with me on Google Talk, snoop on my Google calendar, all from his phone. He hasn’t looked at me since he got it. He sends me tweets from the same couch I’m sitting on. I think he wants to marry his phone.

The point is, Google keeps doing neat-o stuff and releasing it for little dollars, and that means that Google is slowly taking over the world. We’ll wake up one morning and find that Google has awarded the Nobel Peace Prize to itself. And we won’t care, as long as Gmail is up.

I personally use iGoogle as my home page, Gmail for email, Google Talk for chat, Google Calendar to manage my schedule, Google Reader for reading websites, Chrome for web browsing and Google Docs for all my documents. I have set up my Google Profile so people can find my online stuff easier. Google even helps me track the swine flu. Once the Chrome OS comes out, I will strongly consider ditching Windows. Google Wave does not seem like it will be the game changer everyone thought it would be, but it’s probably a nifty little program that I would definitely use if I actually collaborated with anyone. All in all, Google owns my ass.

And I don’t care. Should I? I’m not sure. Google messes up occasionally, as they did with the iGoogle redesign last year, and as far as I can tell, they do not believe in customer support, at least not for their non-paying customers. But all of their software does a good job, it’s free, it’s easy and it plays well together. By the time we figure out the downside, it will probably be much too late…

P.S. LifeHacker offers up seven easy ways to integrate your Googled world and free tools to back up your Googled data.