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Thursday 08 January 2009

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Google Docs and Spreadsheets

Google have announced 'Docs & Spreadsheets' which is an overhaul of the original Writely interface and integration with Google Spreadsheets. I must admit I prefer the Google Docs interface and was interested to see that Docs can still publish to a blog (just like Writely).

The documentation suggests that tagging the article with keywords will be mapped to matching blog categories and that the document title will indeed be preserved in the blog entry.
However, a simple test confirms that neither of these two features work as advertised (on WordPress at least). Sigh.

browser upgrades

Just remembered that I was 'shocked and ashamed to discover' that my father (Silver Surfer) was using IE7 when I last took my laundry home so I felt obliged to upgrade from IE6. I also took the opportunity to upgrade to Firefox 2.0 RC2 from 1.5.0.7. No detailed, lengthy reviews, I'm afraid. I did notice some changes to the user interface (IE now looks like Firefox 1.x) but most importantly, all my Firefox extensions still appear to work.

blog editors

The WordPress rich text editor is pretty good but has an odd bug which is a little irritating. It keeps confusing paragraph end with line break

I tried Writely which worked but has no support for adding categories, omits the title and uses an obscure post slug so now I am trying Performancing for Firefox which has none of these limitations and works fine.

Google Reader gets revamp

Apart from the 'vi' shortcuts, I was slightly underwhelmed by Google Reader when it was released last year. Imagine my surprise, when I just used Google Reader to quickly check that I had reinstated full text feeds for this blog. Unless I see it with my own eyes, I just don't believe it. Google Reader launches with a modest splash screen with some exciting announcement (which I immediately skipped) and I was greeted by some unexpected and welcome changes to the interface. All my feeds appear in a hierarchy grouped by 'label'. However, I must admit I am confused. They used to be 'labels'. Now it appears 'labels' are dead and my categories are 'folders' or 'tags' depending on the context. Google has also added:

• Shared articles (but not grouped feeds)
• Reading feeds via bookmarks which is an interesting idea
• Integration with Google Homepage
• Quick subscribe
• Support for mobile phones (err, no thanks)

Even more strange is the fact I have happened upon something brand new all by myself. Nothing on the blogs which I just scanned a minute ago. Nothing on Technorati. Nothing from Robert Scoble. Nothing on the RSS related blogs. No text message from the wife. Nothing on the Google blog. No IM from my son. Nothing on the Google Reader blog. Nothing on digg. Nothing on reddit. Nothing on del.ici.ous. This is it. I am finally going be famous. My 15 minutes is here. I am going to be dugg and the WordPress servers will creak under the strain. Apart from the fact it took me 7 minutes to compose these words, by which time this exciting Web 2.0 development will be yesterday's vinegar stained fish'n'chip paper.

Google Notebook

Google recently announced some enhancements to the Notebook and I must admit that, while the concept left me cold initially, I am now starting to make more use of this software. While I use Blinklist for shared (more permanent) bookmarks, I tend to use Google Notebook for snippets, jottings, interesting links and, err, notes that I may need to access from both home and work (in fact potentially from any computer). For example, yesterday I had a query about my online tax return and was forced to call the pension administrator followed by the Inland Revenue and jotted down answers to my questions. Previously, I might have emailed myself the notes from work to home so I then could write a followup letter. This would mean the information was accessible from work (Sent) and home (Inbox) but having it available on a Google server is preferable and less typing. I used to keep draft blog postings in WordPress but didn't like the drafts cluttering up the dashboard so now these random thoughts also get stored in Google Notebook. Obviously, all of my notebooks are private but there is some interesting information out there lurking in shared notebooks that isn't accessible from conventional sources.