Cool is overrated, but no one has invented an alternative.

I say this as someone whose coolness quotient is wholly dependent on my knowledge of certain cool things. Beyond that, it sort of drags in the mud.

To boost my cool creds, I’ve been trying to move over fully from Yahoo! to Google mail. Besides better integration between Google services, Gmail is considered way cooler than Yahoo! Mail among the technorati. The problem is I’m having detachment anxiety.

It took me forever to give up Prodigy, CompuServe, Aloha.net and 56k modems, so no surprise: making the transition from Yahoo! to Google has been painful and drawn-out. I find myself flipping between the two, reducing my productivity and confusing myself about how to do one thing or another.

But I’ve got a plan that starts with moving my Yahoo! contacts to Google. Follow along if you are jumping to Gmail, too.

1. Log into your Yahoo! Mail and click on the Import/Export link in the top right of your address book page.

2. Scroll down to the Export options and click on the Yahoo! CVS: Export Now button.

3. Save the cvs file to your desktop. Go your Gmail account, and click on the Contacts link. In the upper right corner, click on Import. Hit Browse, find the cvs file on your desktop and click on Import.

Google will let you know how many of your contacts were imported. All but two of mine did and those were easily fixed for import.

The process wasn’t bad at all. Won’t be too long before I say adieu to Yahoo!

There’s a New Yorker cartoon where people are sitting around a conference table and someone says: “You say it’s a win-win, but what if you’re wrong-wrong and it all goes bad-bad?”

I’ve been to those meetings.

They drone on and on. You just want to slit your wrists so that you have an excuse to go to the bathroom.

I’m sorry to say I have no solution to interminable meetings.  But you may want to check out a nifty Web solution that can help you avoid a two-hour commute for a meeting that lasts 20 minutes.

GoToMeeting.com is one of several sites offering a way to connect with people across town or around the globe and it is one of the simplest setups I’ve seen. You can sign up for a 30-day trial and test it yourself immediately.

If you’re convening a meeting, you send invitations that include a URL for the presentation, the audio phone number and an access code. Come time for the meeting, participants go to the Web address and call into the phone number. There is no elaborate pre-registration. Only those you invite get access to the URL and access code. GoToMeeting claims the online sessions are secure and encrypted.

Once you’re all in, the presenter switches the computer view to his or her screen and everyone can see the pie charts, competitors’ Web sites or whatever else can be shown on a computer screen and you can talk to each other. Presentations, demonstrations and collaborations, including the sharing of documents, are all possible with GoToMeeting.

There are different pricing plans depending on how much meeting power you need. The cheapest monthly plan is $49 and includes unlimited meetings for up to 15 attendees. Other products, including the better-known Webinar service, scales up from there. You can also avoid phone charges with GoToMeeting’s VoIP option. Not least of all, the service  is now compatible with Macs as well as PCs.

We ran into one hitch when testing the service. Black boxes appeared on the computer screen of Andreas Arvman, our digital content editor and faux meeting participant. The boxes obscured some of the content that I was showing on my screen.  But I suspect it’s a browser issue, so we’ll be testing it in different browsers.

Let me know your experiences with this meeting service. And, while you are at it, tell me your favorite excuse for avoiding a meeting. Here’s mine: “My dog ate my PowerPoint.”

The day is fast approaching when we won’t need to buy software. We’ll find whatever we want free on the Web.

Think my head is in the clouds? Take a look at one of the latest examples of Web applications at 280slides.com.

This beta presentation application could some day seriously rival PowerPoint and Keynote. At some future point, we may look back and see it was a key development in the march away from Microsoft Office and other desktop software.

What is really startling is how robust 280slides is. This is not just a simple presentation app. You can create slides in multiple fonts with a decent choice of background designs.

If you want photos or video in your presentation, you can upload them from your computer or connect to them from Flickr and YouTube.

You can save your slideshow on the site. Then when you are ready to give your presentation, call it up on your browser — provided you have an Internet connection. You can also download your presentation and open it up in PowerPoint or embed your presentation in your blog or Web site.

Of course, you won’t get many of the more advanced features of PowerPoint and Keynote in 280slides, but for simple, straight-forward presentations, it’ll do the job amazingly well.

And did I mention it was free? Try it and let us know what you think.

Nicholas Carr writes a provocative article in the July/August issue of The Atlantic Monthly that posits, a favorite chichi word around here, that Google is making us stupid.

This isn’t based on any reliable research, other than a University College London study of online habits that notes people on the Internet are ADD. It doesn’t quite say this, but it does find that Web visitors don’t read deeply. Rather, they skip from one information source to another like mejiro in search of the perfect fig.

Carr takes the premise beyond the scientific into the murkiness of the anecdotal by asserting that he and others believe they are losing their ability to read anything lengthy. Journal articles, research papers, long books, Proust — all are tough going now.

If he’s right, this has dire implications for any human activity that requires sustained concentration — advanced math, philosophy, languages, medicine and throwing the round ball into the triangle hole at the Punahou Carnival game booth.

I have an alternate theory, but it requires intellectual rigor to own up to it: Carr and the rest of us are simply getting old. And I happen to have scientific proof of this, at least as it pertains to me. I say “proof,” because it doesn’t take much to convince me I’m on a steep decline.

Brain Age 2, the latest version of the Nintendo DS game, was recently installed on my daughter’s console. Based on the research of Japanese neuroscientist Dr. Ryuta Kawashima, Brain Age claims to train your brain to stay sharp with 10 minutes daily of word and number games.

At the outset, you go through several exercises to determine your starting brain age. I thought I was pretty good at video games, but still the animated Dr. Kawashima laughed his head off announcing my brain age was 80.

So it may be true that Google is turning our brains into oatmeal. Or it may be that we no longer have the requisite number of brain cells to read more than three paragraphs into a story.

As for those of you who are young and suffering from the same affliction of shallow, peripatetic reading, your head may have already been reprogrammed by Google. Intervention is your only hope.

First one to e-mail me gets a copy of “War and Peace.”

I sincerely hope you weren’t thinking that you’d see a new iPhone unboxed.

The phone is on my mind as well, but Apple likes to draw out the anticipation and I have no more early access to the phone than you do. So until July 11, we must suffer in common silence, broken by the occasional anguished cry and thrashing on the ground.

Before you hurt yourself, here’s a near-perfect diversion, a Web calendar called 30 Boxes that’s been out for a while but getting good press.

It’s not fully descriptive to call 30 Boxes simply a calendar since it is more than that. You can add events to a calendar that can be shared or not, send reminders to your cell phone, and organize yourself with a to-do list. But like they say in those late night Veg-O-Matic ads, that’s not all.

If you are tired of having your social network pages scattered here and there, 30 Boxes may be what you need. In one spot, it allows you to keep updated on messages or other changes to your Facebook, MySpace, Flickr, Twitter, etc. accounts.

You’ll need to link back to your pages if you want to send Facebook pokes, for example, but it’s pretty handy nonetheless to see things pulled together.

Invite your buddies to make 30 Boxes a less lonely place. You can add your buddy’s Web stuff to your space. Privacy controls allow you to keep your information secret, at least as secret as one can be on the Web.

Take a tour and let me know what you think.

Next week: 280Slides.com, a Keynote-like presentation application on the Web. Thanks to MacBreak Weekly for this tip.