I had a great time at Nebraska Library Camp II today. If you've never been to an unconference before, the idea is that you gather with no pre-planned topics. Then you talk about what you'd like to talk about, and then you break into smaller groups based on those topics.
Why? Well, whenever we get together for a conference, the greatest exchange of ideas usually seems to be between sessions, in those hallway and lunchtime discussions where you talk about what your library is doing and hear about what everyone else's libraries are doing. The unconference tries to take that kind of passionate exchange into a slightly more structured setting. I think it worked out pretty well.
I participated in three breakout sessions: the future of cataloging, the future of ILL, and Google Books. If you're interested, you can read my notes on the Nebraska Library Camp II wiki. Remember, these notes are not my ideas, just a record of what the group as a whole discussed. I wish I had so many good ideas myself.
Looking forward to the NLA/NEMA Fall Conference tomorrow and Friday. Should be awesome!
Showing posts with label google. Show all posts
Showing posts with label google. Show all posts
Wednesday, October 28, 2009
Monday, September 28, 2009
Google Reader
Well, I've been dissatisfied with the instability of Bloglines for a while now, so the switch to Google Reader seemed like the perfect thing for me. I'm glad this lesson came along to give me the nudge to quit procrastinating.
Likes:
Items are not marked as read until you actually scroll down to view them. This is especially wonderful when my browser hangs up and I have to relaunch. With Bloglines, every time that happened, any items which had loaded, but which I had not yet actually looked at, were lost forever. With Google Reader, they're still there waiting for me. This alone guarantees that I will stick with Google Reader and leave Bloglines behind.
I love the hotkeys, especially j and k. It's nice to have an alternative to scrolling.
I like the presence of links to open articles in a new tab. (Just after the title--look for the two arrows in a little circle, resembling a fast forward button.) That saves me the trouble of right-clicking and selecting "open in new tab" every time I want to look at the comments for a post.
Dislikes:
Google Reader loads very slowly, even on DSL. It's not as bad as Google Maps, which is almost unusable on my home connection, but it's still a little troublesome at times.
In Bloglines, I could order the feeds within a folder, and I could get all new items from site A, then all new items from site B, etc. So I could have a gradual and carefully planned transition from serious to silly, or vice versa. In Google Reader, it's always newest item first, so clicking on one of my folders gives me a mess like D, B, A, C, C, A, A, B, D, A. That drives me nuts. I'm going to have to create a lot of new folders and reorganize everything so that blogs of dissimilar tone don't get all mixed together.
Overall, though, the pros outweigh the cons. A good feed reader has become an absolutely indispensable tool in my day-to-day life, both at work and at home, and there's a lot to like with Google Reader.
Likes:
Items are not marked as read until you actually scroll down to view them. This is especially wonderful when my browser hangs up and I have to relaunch. With Bloglines, every time that happened, any items which had loaded, but which I had not yet actually looked at, were lost forever. With Google Reader, they're still there waiting for me. This alone guarantees that I will stick with Google Reader and leave Bloglines behind.
I love the hotkeys, especially j and k. It's nice to have an alternative to scrolling.
I like the presence of links to open articles in a new tab. (Just after the title--look for the two arrows in a little circle, resembling a fast forward button.) That saves me the trouble of right-clicking and selecting "open in new tab" every time I want to look at the comments for a post.
Dislikes:
Google Reader loads very slowly, even on DSL. It's not as bad as Google Maps, which is almost unusable on my home connection, but it's still a little troublesome at times.
In Bloglines, I could order the feeds within a folder, and I could get all new items from site A, then all new items from site B, etc. So I could have a gradual and carefully planned transition from serious to silly, or vice versa. In Google Reader, it's always newest item first, so clicking on one of my folders gives me a mess like D, B, A, C, C, A, A, B, D, A. That drives me nuts. I'm going to have to create a lot of new folders and reorganize everything so that blogs of dissimilar tone don't get all mixed together.
Overall, though, the pros outweigh the cons. A good feed reader has become an absolutely indispensable tool in my day-to-day life, both at work and at home, and there's a lot to like with Google Reader.
Wednesday, June 24, 2009
Google Maps
It took me forever to get around to doing the actual exercises for Thing #25: See the world and be seen using Google Maps, because I use Google Maps all the time anyway. I like the ability to switch between map view and satellite view, because map view makes a cleaner printout, while satellite view makes it easier for me to make a mental map of landmarks to guide me. When street view is available, that's better still. After looking at the satellite and street views, I know what the building looks like, which side of the road it's on, and what's around it, so even a place I've never visited before looks familiar.
I'll admit I've never really used terrain view, but this is Nebraska, and most of the places I go are relatively flat, so it hasn't seemed as useful. Now, when I called up the terrain view around Mount Fuji, Japan, there was something worth looking at.
The traffic view was new to me. I guess I just never noticed it before. It could be useful in helping to find the main streets in a strange city. I had also never explored the "more" options before. While there are lots of photos downtown, there are none in my neighborhood. There is one photo of a statue pinned to the wrong part of the city. (I know, because I recognize the statue, and the marker is about 20 blocks away from the actual location.) However, that does not seem to be editable data, so the error will have to stand. The Wikipedia flags are pretty cool. There's an article for a church about a block and a half from my home. It was kind of fun seeing what other historic buildings are around my neighborhood.
"Explore this area" was also new to me, and enabled me to watch a video of a police chase through my city three years ago. Seems like Google Maps is littered with fun and interesting Easter eggs.
Assignment Part 1. The state capitol building is at 1445 K St. 68509. It looks pretty cool in satellite view. You can see the Golden Sower, even if you can't make out any details. Even at maximum zoom, the cars are tiny. However, just a guess, but it looks as though on the day the picture was taken, there was a white car parked illegally on H Street, just in front of the capitol entrance on that side. I can't guess why; there were plenty of open parking spaces mere yards away.
The street view of the Eiffel Tower, Paris, France, was pretty cool. I love that you can shift the camera angle upward to see the tower. The random street in Japan was fun. Love the Hello Kitty billboard. Because I wanted to see if other areas were as well defined, I checked out a street view over in Akihabara, Tokyo, and found it to be likewise clear and detailed, although not as entertaining, because I ended up looking at the underside of an overpass. But much of Japan is not rendered in great detail. When I tried to look at the town of Nemuro, I couldn't even get a decent, clear satellite view. It would not be very helpful if I were traveling there.
Regarding the kangaroos in Australia (which were cool to look at), how did the lesson planners find this place? Searching "kangaroos in Australia" didn't lead me to the same location.
By the way, since this lesson mentioned the satellite view of Carhenge, did you notice that there's a street view from the nearby highway? You can see a nice, if a little blurry, landscape view of Carhenge that way, too. It's also fun to back off from Carhenge a little to look at the crop circles. No, not the "unexplained mystery" kind, but the center-pivot irrigation patterns, our polka-dotted Nebraska landscape.
Assignment Part 2. Our library comes up with a basic name search, without needing the city, state, or university info. That's nice. The marker for the Criss Library pointed to the middle of a parking lot south of the UNO bell tower. However, I could not edit the map to move the marker to the actual library, because the listing had been claimed by someone else. Oh well. At least it's reasonably close. If someone gets to that parking lot, they can see the library easily. And one of my coworkers put a second marker directly on the library building, so that also helps.
All the other information on our marker is complete and correct. Looks good!
Assignment Part 3.
I was unable to do anything with regards to my library's listing, as it had already been claimed, but whoever did all the work did it well and was fairly thorough. We already have a Google Map embedded on our library website.
I did not try creating a customized map, because I have nothing to map at the moment. But if the Paraprofessional Section is able to continue broadcasting its spring meetings to remote sites in the future, it might be useful to create a map of all the confirmed meeting sites across Nebraska. I may think of other uses as need arises.
I use Google Maps more than other mapping services primarily because of ease of use and familiarity. I have never had a mapping failure from it yet. However, other mapping services also have satellite views, and when I look at the satellite view of my apartment complex in MapQuest, the image is considerably newer than the view in Google Maps. Google Maps shows a garage that was torn town years ago, and some half-completed roof construction. The MapQuest image shows the completed roof as well as the parking lot that replaced the garage. Likewise, when I check on the Midwest Crossing construction site, Google Maps shows the old buildings that no longer exist, while MapQuest shows an early stage of the construction. (What's really funny is that the Google Maps street view is considerably newer than either site's satellite view, although still far from current.) So while Google Maps has more bells and whistles, it may not always be the best mapping service if you are looking at an area that may have undergone some recent construction.
I'll admit I've never really used terrain view, but this is Nebraska, and most of the places I go are relatively flat, so it hasn't seemed as useful. Now, when I called up the terrain view around Mount Fuji, Japan, there was something worth looking at.
The traffic view was new to me. I guess I just never noticed it before. It could be useful in helping to find the main streets in a strange city. I had also never explored the "more" options before. While there are lots of photos downtown, there are none in my neighborhood. There is one photo of a statue pinned to the wrong part of the city. (I know, because I recognize the statue, and the marker is about 20 blocks away from the actual location.) However, that does not seem to be editable data, so the error will have to stand. The Wikipedia flags are pretty cool. There's an article for a church about a block and a half from my home. It was kind of fun seeing what other historic buildings are around my neighborhood.
"Explore this area" was also new to me, and enabled me to watch a video of a police chase through my city three years ago. Seems like Google Maps is littered with fun and interesting Easter eggs.
Assignment Part 1. The state capitol building is at 1445 K St. 68509. It looks pretty cool in satellite view. You can see the Golden Sower, even if you can't make out any details. Even at maximum zoom, the cars are tiny. However, just a guess, but it looks as though on the day the picture was taken, there was a white car parked illegally on H Street, just in front of the capitol entrance on that side. I can't guess why; there were plenty of open parking spaces mere yards away.
The street view of the Eiffel Tower, Paris, France, was pretty cool. I love that you can shift the camera angle upward to see the tower. The random street in Japan was fun. Love the Hello Kitty billboard. Because I wanted to see if other areas were as well defined, I checked out a street view over in Akihabara, Tokyo, and found it to be likewise clear and detailed, although not as entertaining, because I ended up looking at the underside of an overpass. But much of Japan is not rendered in great detail. When I tried to look at the town of Nemuro, I couldn't even get a decent, clear satellite view. It would not be very helpful if I were traveling there.
Regarding the kangaroos in Australia (which were cool to look at), how did the lesson planners find this place? Searching "kangaroos in Australia" didn't lead me to the same location.
By the way, since this lesson mentioned the satellite view of Carhenge, did you notice that there's a street view from the nearby highway? You can see a nice, if a little blurry, landscape view of Carhenge that way, too. It's also fun to back off from Carhenge a little to look at the crop circles. No, not the "unexplained mystery" kind, but the center-pivot irrigation patterns, our polka-dotted Nebraska landscape.
Assignment Part 2. Our library comes up with a basic name search, without needing the city, state, or university info. That's nice. The marker for the Criss Library pointed to the middle of a parking lot south of the UNO bell tower. However, I could not edit the map to move the marker to the actual library, because the listing had been claimed by someone else. Oh well. At least it's reasonably close. If someone gets to that parking lot, they can see the library easily. And one of my coworkers put a second marker directly on the library building, so that also helps.
All the other information on our marker is complete and correct. Looks good!
Assignment Part 3.
I was unable to do anything with regards to my library's listing, as it had already been claimed, but whoever did all the work did it well and was fairly thorough. We already have a Google Map embedded on our library website.
I did not try creating a customized map, because I have nothing to map at the moment. But if the Paraprofessional Section is able to continue broadcasting its spring meetings to remote sites in the future, it might be useful to create a map of all the confirmed meeting sites across Nebraska. I may think of other uses as need arises.
I use Google Maps more than other mapping services primarily because of ease of use and familiarity. I have never had a mapping failure from it yet. However, other mapping services also have satellite views, and when I look at the satellite view of my apartment complex in MapQuest, the image is considerably newer than the view in Google Maps. Google Maps shows a garage that was torn town years ago, and some half-completed roof construction. The MapQuest image shows the completed roof as well as the parking lot that replaced the garage. Likewise, when I check on the Midwest Crossing construction site, Google Maps shows the old buildings that no longer exist, while MapQuest shows an early stage of the construction. (What's really funny is that the Google Maps street view is considerably newer than either site's satellite view, although still far from current.) So while Google Maps has more bells and whistles, it may not always be the best mapping service if you are looking at an area that may have undergone some recent construction.
Tuesday, May 26, 2009
Twitter Search and Google Alerts
For Thing #24: Feed Your (Library’s) Ego, I started with Twitter Search and searched "Criss Library." Most of the tweets were actually from the library or the university, but there was one from a student saying our women's restroom contains "the most flattering mirror in the world." Who knew? They all seem like rather ordinary mirrors to me.
I subscribed to the feed for that query. Over the course of the next several days, watching the Twitter Search feed for mentions of my library made me start to like Twitter a little.
Then I went over to Google Alerts and set up a comprehensive search for "Criss Library" to be performed once a day. (Including the quotation marks turned out to be important, as proximity does not seem to be weighted in Google searches. Without the quotation marks, the top hits included multiple articles which happened to include the words "criss-crossing" and "library," not particularly near one another.)
Before I could finish setting up Google Alerts, however, Google went down. (5/14/2009, shortly before 10:15 am CST.) Boom. I couldn't load Google, Blogger, Bloglines, or any other site associated with Google, including sites that had nothing more than a Google ad on them. But I could get non-Google sites to load. I searched Yahoo news for "Google," but I only got links to Google sites and services, no actual news about Google being down. So I went over to Twitter Search and searched Google. I immediately saw a passel of tweets about Google acting funky, taking a dive, etc. The hash tag #googlefail was already beginning to show up. Refreshing the page every few seconds provided more information, in many languages.
My respect for Twitter jumped enormously. It turned out to be the only useful news source on the Google outage. Even if I have nothing to tweet, I can envision myself using Twitter Search often from now on, whenever things go "weird." (Watch, now that I've said that, Twitter will be the next thing to go down.)
Google was back up in a few minutes, but still, it was truly astonishing how many things were inaccessible during that brief outage.
After Google was operating again, I went back and changed my Google Alert to a feed and added it to my Bloglines subscriptions.
Then as long as I was in Bloglines, I decided to try the Bloglines Citation Search. I did it exactly as described in the exercise, and I got NO citations for the Criss Library website.
To ensure that I wasn't just doing something wrong, I tried a citation search for UNO's website. That brought in quite a few hits.
So now I know, no one is citing our site. How sad.
Interestingly, however, when I did a citation search for my library's catalog (a different URL than our website), I actually got one hit. Woo-hoo! Unfortunately, it was from one of my own blog posts, which had a link to a catalog record.
One thing I learned, though, is that the citation search does not include the open web. If it did, the Wikipedia entry for my library would have come up, because it contains a link to my library's website.
I did subscribe to the feeds for the searches for my library's website and catalog, however, just in case anyone ever decides to cite us.
I didn't bother trying out Flickr Comments, because I have no photos uploaded to Flickr. However, on a whim, I went to Flickr and searched "Criss Library," and I was rewarded with a lot of nice photos of my library. I decided to see if there was any way I could subscribe to a feed of that search. After exploring a bit, I determined that it was not possible. From various posts on the Flickr forums, it seems like quite a few people would like to have feeds of search results. I wonder if in the future, Flickr will decide to add that feature. That would be very useful. (Note that feeds based on tags are possible. However, I didn't find that useful because the photos of my library were not tagged consistently).
After reading the description of FairShare, I decided to give it a pass for now. If no one is citing my library's website, then it's unlikely that anyone is reposting the content from any of our RSS feeds. Even if they are, since the feeds are mostly lists of new library materials for various collections, I don't think we'd care if anyone passed that info along. However, FairShare sounds like a cool service, and I might explore it later when I have more time.
Now, part 2 of this assignment. "Respond to at least one of the results you found. Wait a few days to see if they respond back." This is the hard part for me. I enjoy using technology, but I am not by nature a social person. I like to read discussions, not participate in them.
Darn these exercises, forcing me to overcome my fears.
Well, the most recent thing to come though the Twitter Search feed was from heatha_bee, who had "Library-envy" for our single-service desk and Kaneko sculpture. That made me smile. Of course, I had no idea what to say back to her. Eventually, I responded, "You envy our single-service desk and Kaneko? What library are you at? I'm a cataloger at Criss Library." That's excruciatingly lame, I know, but it's the best I could come up with.
Not long after, she responded that she was the head of ILL at UNMC, and had been at my library for a meeting. I responded with something even more lame than my first tweet, and I never heard back from her, presumably because she left for Alaska. I know if I went on an exciting trip, I wouldn't be tweeting about anything remotely work related, so I can't blame her.
In other news, just this morning, Google Alerts alerted me to a post on the California Oregon blog, which reposted the text of the Wikipedia article for the Dr. C.C. and Mabel L. Criss Library. Looking over other posts on that blog, I can find no pattern whatsoever. I can discern neither theme nor purpose for the blog. The only common thread is that all of the content seems to be reposted from other sources. I can't tell who is creating this blog, nor who the intended audience might be. And so I can't figure out the reason for their interest in the Criss Library, nor why they would simply reproduce a Wikipedia article with no context or comments. The about page for the California Oregon blog is just a spiel about Wordpress. It is very weird. The sheer randomness of the reposted entries and the lack of original content makes me suspect it may be run by a process rather than a person, but I can't tell for sure. It seems harmless, but also useless.
Anyway, out of this exercise, I plan to keep following the feeds for Twitter Search and Google Alerts related to "Criss Library." If I see anyone ranting or questioning something about my library, I will have an opportunity to open a conversation or refer something to one of my colleagues. Maybe this could help us to solve problems we may not be aware of. That's not necessarily what I think of as "marketing," but it is public relations.
I subscribed to the feed for that query. Over the course of the next several days, watching the Twitter Search feed for mentions of my library made me start to like Twitter a little.
Then I went over to Google Alerts and set up a comprehensive search for "Criss Library" to be performed once a day. (Including the quotation marks turned out to be important, as proximity does not seem to be weighted in Google searches. Without the quotation marks, the top hits included multiple articles which happened to include the words "criss-crossing" and "library," not particularly near one another.)
Before I could finish setting up Google Alerts, however, Google went down. (5/14/2009, shortly before 10:15 am CST.) Boom. I couldn't load Google, Blogger, Bloglines, or any other site associated with Google, including sites that had nothing more than a Google ad on them. But I could get non-Google sites to load. I searched Yahoo news for "Google," but I only got links to Google sites and services, no actual news about Google being down. So I went over to Twitter Search and searched Google. I immediately saw a passel of tweets about Google acting funky, taking a dive, etc. The hash tag #googlefail was already beginning to show up. Refreshing the page every few seconds provided more information, in many languages.
My respect for Twitter jumped enormously. It turned out to be the only useful news source on the Google outage. Even if I have nothing to tweet, I can envision myself using Twitter Search often from now on, whenever things go "weird." (Watch, now that I've said that, Twitter will be the next thing to go down.)
Google was back up in a few minutes, but still, it was truly astonishing how many things were inaccessible during that brief outage.
After Google was operating again, I went back and changed my Google Alert to a feed and added it to my Bloglines subscriptions.
Then as long as I was in Bloglines, I decided to try the Bloglines Citation Search. I did it exactly as described in the exercise, and I got NO citations for the Criss Library website.
To ensure that I wasn't just doing something wrong, I tried a citation search for UNO's website. That brought in quite a few hits.
So now I know, no one is citing our site. How sad.
Interestingly, however, when I did a citation search for my library's catalog (a different URL than our website), I actually got one hit. Woo-hoo! Unfortunately, it was from one of my own blog posts, which had a link to a catalog record.
One thing I learned, though, is that the citation search does not include the open web. If it did, the Wikipedia entry for my library would have come up, because it contains a link to my library's website.
I did subscribe to the feeds for the searches for my library's website and catalog, however, just in case anyone ever decides to cite us.
I didn't bother trying out Flickr Comments, because I have no photos uploaded to Flickr. However, on a whim, I went to Flickr and searched "Criss Library," and I was rewarded with a lot of nice photos of my library. I decided to see if there was any way I could subscribe to a feed of that search. After exploring a bit, I determined that it was not possible. From various posts on the Flickr forums, it seems like quite a few people would like to have feeds of search results. I wonder if in the future, Flickr will decide to add that feature. That would be very useful. (Note that feeds based on tags are possible. However, I didn't find that useful because the photos of my library were not tagged consistently).
After reading the description of FairShare, I decided to give it a pass for now. If no one is citing my library's website, then it's unlikely that anyone is reposting the content from any of our RSS feeds. Even if they are, since the feeds are mostly lists of new library materials for various collections, I don't think we'd care if anyone passed that info along. However, FairShare sounds like a cool service, and I might explore it later when I have more time.
Now, part 2 of this assignment. "Respond to at least one of the results you found. Wait a few days to see if they respond back." This is the hard part for me. I enjoy using technology, but I am not by nature a social person. I like to read discussions, not participate in them.
Darn these exercises, forcing me to overcome my fears.
Well, the most recent thing to come though the Twitter Search feed was from heatha_bee, who had "Library-envy" for our single-service desk and Kaneko sculpture. That made me smile. Of course, I had no idea what to say back to her. Eventually, I responded, "You envy our single-service desk and Kaneko? What library are you at? I'm a cataloger at Criss Library." That's excruciatingly lame, I know, but it's the best I could come up with.
Not long after, she responded that she was the head of ILL at UNMC, and had been at my library for a meeting. I responded with something even more lame than my first tweet, and I never heard back from her, presumably because she left for Alaska. I know if I went on an exciting trip, I wouldn't be tweeting about anything remotely work related, so I can't blame her.
In other news, just this morning, Google Alerts alerted me to a post on the California Oregon blog, which reposted the text of the Wikipedia article for the Dr. C.C. and Mabel L. Criss Library. Looking over other posts on that blog, I can find no pattern whatsoever. I can discern neither theme nor purpose for the blog. The only common thread is that all of the content seems to be reposted from other sources. I can't tell who is creating this blog, nor who the intended audience might be. And so I can't figure out the reason for their interest in the Criss Library, nor why they would simply reproduce a Wikipedia article with no context or comments. The about page for the California Oregon blog is just a spiel about Wordpress. It is very weird. The sheer randomness of the reposted entries and the lack of original content makes me suspect it may be run by a process rather than a person, but I can't tell for sure. It seems harmless, but also useless.
Anyway, out of this exercise, I plan to keep following the feeds for Twitter Search and Google Alerts related to "Criss Library." If I see anyone ranting or questioning something about my library, I will have an opportunity to open a conversation or refer something to one of my colleagues. Maybe this could help us to solve problems we may not be aware of. That's not necessarily what I think of as "marketing," but it is public relations.
Wednesday, January 21, 2009
Thing #19: Google Documents
Thing #19: Apps, They're not just for desktops any more. Alas, another neat thing I can't use at home. My browser won't support it.
I love the idea of Google Documents, especially for those days when I forget my flash drive. In fact, I composed this post in Google Docs. And it's a great thing to show library patrons who need to work on their documents both at home and the library. The utility of this web-based document creation, editing, and storage is blazingly obvious. Of all the things we've seen in Nebraska Learns 2.0, I believe that this is the one that has the greatest potential to be useful to the widest spectrum of people. Flickr isn't for everyone. Neither is Twitter. Some people might not have a use for RSS (although that's harder for me to imagine), but everyone who uses a computer creates, uses, and shares documents of some type. And beyond its utility, the interface is intuitive and friendly. This app is pure gold, and I'm mighty grateful to you Nebraska Learns 2.0 folks for introducing me to it.
I have to disagree with the idea that web-based productivity software will be the death of Microsoft Office and other software products. First of all, at least at present, the web apps lack a lot of the functionality of the full software versions. I found the Google Documents slideshow function to be primitive, and it failed to import slides from an existing .ppt slideshow. I didn't do much with the Google Documents spreadsheet function, because I'm not a big Excel user, but it looked fairly basic to my untrained eye. But even with documents, which seems to be the nicest function, it's lacking a lot of the capabilities of Microsoft Word. For example, I imported one of my Word files (a template for printing DVD case inserts), and the formatting was blown all to heck. So you might not be able to put the final touches on a document that needs to look a certain way for printing.
Also, there's a security issue. Are Google Documents really private? Are you sure? Are you absolutely sure Google's robots aren't scanning the files? Are you absolutely sure they never, ever will? There will always be a handful of paranoid people (like me) who want to keep our most important files on our hard drives, which gives us at least the illusion of having control over them.
Lastly, there is the question of whether Google will really store your documents indefinitely. While Google as a whole seems to big to fail, they are not immune to the need to reorganize and kill off projects. While it's vanishingly unlikely that Google would ax Documents without giving people a chance to rescue or transfer their files, the possibility exists in theory.
Don't get me wrong. I love Google Docs, and I can tell I will be using it regularly and referring many others to it. For documents I need to share, or that I want to access from multiple computers, or which I intend to eventually put out on the open web anyway, it is fantastic and full of win. I think this is my favorite new tool I've picked up from these exercises.
I love the idea of Google Documents, especially for those days when I forget my flash drive. In fact, I composed this post in Google Docs. And it's a great thing to show library patrons who need to work on their documents both at home and the library. The utility of this web-based document creation, editing, and storage is blazingly obvious. Of all the things we've seen in Nebraska Learns 2.0, I believe that this is the one that has the greatest potential to be useful to the widest spectrum of people. Flickr isn't for everyone. Neither is Twitter. Some people might not have a use for RSS (although that's harder for me to imagine), but everyone who uses a computer creates, uses, and shares documents of some type. And beyond its utility, the interface is intuitive and friendly. This app is pure gold, and I'm mighty grateful to you Nebraska Learns 2.0 folks for introducing me to it.
I have to disagree with the idea that web-based productivity software will be the death of Microsoft Office and other software products. First of all, at least at present, the web apps lack a lot of the functionality of the full software versions. I found the Google Documents slideshow function to be primitive, and it failed to import slides from an existing .ppt slideshow. I didn't do much with the Google Documents spreadsheet function, because I'm not a big Excel user, but it looked fairly basic to my untrained eye. But even with documents, which seems to be the nicest function, it's lacking a lot of the capabilities of Microsoft Word. For example, I imported one of my Word files (a template for printing DVD case inserts), and the formatting was blown all to heck. So you might not be able to put the final touches on a document that needs to look a certain way for printing.
Also, there's a security issue. Are Google Documents really private? Are you sure? Are you absolutely sure Google's robots aren't scanning the files? Are you absolutely sure they never, ever will? There will always be a handful of paranoid people (like me) who want to keep our most important files on our hard drives, which gives us at least the illusion of having control over them.
Lastly, there is the question of whether Google will really store your documents indefinitely. While Google as a whole seems to big to fail, they are not immune to the need to reorganize and kill off projects. While it's vanishingly unlikely that Google would ax Documents without giving people a chance to rescue or transfer their files, the possibility exists in theory.
Don't get me wrong. I love Google Docs, and I can tell I will be using it regularly and referring many others to it. For documents I need to share, or that I want to access from multiple computers, or which I intend to eventually put out on the open web anyway, it is fantastic and full of win. I think this is my favorite new tool I've picked up from these exercises.
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