Side Effects

At the adult services meeting last week, several of us commented on the progress of our 27 Things program. Before the meeting, I had checked the numbers on the registration list and saw that we had ~130 who had signed up. Although I don't think there are quite that many on the official blog list, it certainly has been interesting to read what my co-workers have written. I've discovered a fellow bird lover and one dealing with house construction or remodeling issues. I've read some deep and thoughtful comments about the state of our libraries and I'm hoping that some of my favorite bloggers will continue to post occasionally even after the official program is over. It is this side effect of getting to know one another through our blogs (the 28th Thing, if you will) that has actually been one of the most useful for me.

Backpack-Web 2.0 winner

I just investigated Backpack as a Web 2.0 application. Because I was enjoying playing with zoho, I looked at the nominee and winner's lists until I found zoho. I saw that it had come in second in the category of organization. The application that came in first in that category was called Backpack and it was impressive-allowing groups to share everything from calendars and documents to maps and images. We can certainly do all that on Outlook 2007 - but Backpack seemed to do it more seamlessly and was completely web-based.

Alas, Backpack was not one of those free applications. In fact, for even a small group (say a small business or a work team of up to 6 people) it was about $25 a month.

I guess I'll stick to Outlook and try to master wikis...

zooming with zoho

As someone who has been teaching word processing since the late eighties, I didn't expect to have any trouble with the basic Zoho. Indeed, it is all fairly intuitive (or more correctly - similar enough to any other word processing program) and seems easy to use.

Now though, comes the test of all the other features. I can already see that it would be useful if you didn't need to copy and paste a section of text into your email or attach a file just to be able to work on a document from home or in a different location. And it would certainly be useful for team work like the Training Day group which gets going this week.

First, I will put in a link. Next, I will try to send it to my blog... Wow! I can't believe how easy that was. All I had to do was click on the share tab and there it was. I wish I had seen this two weeks ago- I still have a document on my home PC that was the blog required for Thing 14 or 15..Thoughts on Web 2.0