Most of us actively use the Internet (along with newspapers and magazines) to find advice that informs our day-to-day activities and more significant life events. Whether it’s things to do, places to go or some help with a home remodeling project, we often rely on the media companies whose brands we’ve come to trust. And for good reason, as they have lots of very useful information and advice.

For example, I regularly go to Boston.com for things to do tonight – not only for listings, but also advice on things I can do for under $25. Next month’s vacation requires brainstorming about where to go, so I’ll see what USA TODAY suggests; and once I’ve settled on a destination, I want reviews and advice. And, HGTV.com is my first stop for advice about the kitchen remodeling project I’m about to tackle.

While finding timely and relevant advice from my trusted media companies is relatively easy – sharing it in an effective and consolidated manner with my friends and family is not so simple. I find myself cutting and pasting links into an email, calling a friend to tell them to check out a particular item or  – worse yet – tearing articles out of magazines and bringing home a mass of paper to share with my wife. All of which makes collaboration, decision-making and taking action less efficient.

How do you share the advice that you find from your trusted media brands?

Jeff Jarvis had a very interesting post earlier this week about the imperative to align the content economy with the link economy. In short, content producers historically sold their content to generate revenue from those who syndicated it. Today, the link economy works the other way around. When you get traffic, you need to figure out how to benefit from it.

Jeff goes on to suggest that helping the market find the good stuff and providing context and meaning around it are business opportunities. We agree, and also think that there are other, not-so-obvious opportunities. Early efforts around microformats and other semantic approaches are helping to re-imagine content in ways that will provide even more value atop the link economy.

The internet is a great place to find useful and relevant advice. I’d argue that we are even a bit spoiled by the ease with which we can search for and almost instantly find vasts amount of advice on topics ranging from “how to grill pizza“, to “how to give eco-friendly gifts” to even “tips on traveling with kids during the holidays“.

As we mentioned in a previous post, we call the writers who provide this expert advice Life Experts. And not surprisingly, a significant portion of these Life Experts are bloggers, passionately focused on subjects that are important to them. When passion and personality are paired with expert advice, the result is an interesting mix of informative and entertaining content.

Here is just a few of the blogs that I read regularly for advice:

• Simple Living: Zen Habits and Unclutterer
• Frugal Living: Wisebread and Dumb Little Man
• GTD: 43 Folders and Lifehacker

…and the list goes on.

What blogs give you the most useful advice?

For years, I’ve used a 5×7 piece of paper folded in quarters to keep track of my personal to-do list and weekly shopping lists. As Lifehacker recently commented:

There’s a reason there’s still so much paper around in this hyper-connected, everything-online age: the stuff is cheap, portable, compatible with all your applications, and everyone masters the interface by the time they’re out of the first grade.

Notwithstanding its simplicity, my piece of paper lasts about 2-3 weeks before it becomes so tattered and full of cross-outs that I need to start over.

Here are more of my paper-related issues:

1. Data entry: from week to week, I add new items, but I forget to cross off items like cat litter…so now I’ve got enough cat litter for a litter of cats
2. Data reuse: at the end of my piece of paper’s useful life, I re-copy 75% of the list I started with (not unlike my to-do list, but that’s a story for another day)
3. Multiple lists: invariably my wife or I find a recipe we want to try on the weekend so I end up creating a completely separate shopping list and juggling between two lists at the store
4. Sharing: to further complicate matters, we have a weekend home, so my wife and I will split shopping duties as we need to stock two places with purchases from different stores…

Even though I’m someone who is generally slow to change (and I certainly wouldn’t classify myself as a Web 2.0 techie)…I have to think there must be a web-based solution out there that not only addresses the paper-related issues but also provides even more value (like the ability to automagically add ingredients from recipes into my shopping list or proactively reminding me when I need to re-stock an item or the fact that the cat litter I usually buy is on sale, etc.).

So far, I’ve tried Backpack, Remember the Milk, Cozi and several other web based list makers – only to conclude that while they address some of my data entry, reuse and sharing issues – they’ve primarily replicated paper on the web. I’ve found that the effort required to keep them up-to-date, send to mobile, set recurring reminders, share with my wife, etc. takes more time than my current paper-based solution. Personally, I also find the blank slate nature of many of the new solutions to be off-putting…give me some guidance, a little structure or even better, anticipate my needs.

It’s these ideas – guidance, structure and proactively making the web useful – for tasks as simple as shopping lists that we’re focused on as a company and with the product we’re building.

Over the past several years, we’ve all used the Web to get things done and to create, consume and share information and advice. We’ve actively engaged in a wide variety of user-generated activities that’s fueled the explosive growth of social networks, new technologies and fundamentally new ways of interacting with each other.

However, our “social me” – as others including Loic LeMeur have described and visualized it – continues to evolve and fragment, it becomes ever more time consuming and impossible to keep up without making some choices:

The recipe is quite simple (isn’t it always), but the execution much harder. Let go. Let me repeat that. Just let it go. I see Twitter, Friendfeed, and all these other sites as rivers of information, anecdotes, posts, friends. I tap in whenever I feel like it, join the conversation. But I leave when I need to get back to real life. Alexander van Elsas

At the same time, our lives become more complex and demanding and we increasingly have to focus on personal productivity. And while today’s Web world has something for everyone – the problem is, we’re not everyone… you’re you and I’m me. We each have a unique profile and unique needs, and the best way to harness all that the Web has to offer is by helping each of us get things done in the context of our own lives.

And that’s what Spring Partners is all about – using the power of the web to help make each of our lives easier.