Library clips

sharing ideas thoughts and feedback

September 1, 2005

Writely

Filed under: tags, tools

This is a collaboration tool with the latest web 2.o features, design, and programming.

Writely is basically a text editor or word processer (similar to a web-based version or Word)…also has some wiki, web editor, and tagging features…most of all it’s social (collaborative editing, VIP viewing).

You can create a new document or upload a document from Word.

The toolbar is the standard word processing type toolbar, above it are tabs: edit, authors, viewers, history, html, preview, etc…

So you can edit a document, see the HTML version, and preview the document as a webpage.

Once you have revised (re-edited the document) several times you can check the history tab for the different versions (this is the wiki like feature).

You can also flag or star a document (I suppose it acts as a favourites tab…there is also a tab for active documents (I guess a space for one’s you are working on), you can also tag your documents…or view all documents.

In the document index it also shows who changed the document and time/date.

This obviously leads to the fact that you can make your documents shareable (collaborate)…invite by email…this is done by clicking on the Authors tab (you can also see the list of authors).

On the bottom of each document is a box that tells you if anyone is editing the document at the same time as you…read the website for more.

There is also a Viewers tab, where you can allow all or select people to see your published version (if you still have to make some edits it won’t show until you publish it again).

Other collaboration tools:

Moonedit (real-time)
SubEthaEdit (real-time)
pleasereview (real-time)
Chalk (not yet released)
Writeboard (not yet released)
Web Collaborator
Quickreview
Webnote (to-do)
Scrivlet (to-do)
Ta-da lists (to-do)
Jybe (co-browsing)
Jyve (co-browsing)
Jot Spot Live (real time)
Zoho Writer
Gobby (real time)
Tudu lists (notes)
Remember the milk (notes)
Planzo (calendar, notes)
Gobby (real-time) [ADDED 26/10/05]
JotSpot Tracker [ADDED 16/12/05]
Rally Point [ADDED 16/12/05]
Synchro-Edit (real-time) [ADDED 16/12/05]
…and of course all the wiki’s out there

This is a great place to create blog posts…at the moment I have drafts within my blog, drafts in Word, bits I want to blog about in Webnote, del.icio.us, Bloglines clips, etc…

That is of course unless you use an offlines blog editor such as Qumana, blogger for word and the rest…this tool isn’t focused for that type of thing but it can be used this way (very versitile)…best thing for me anyway is that I don’t have to download anything.

You can even store images, as opposed to using other free web-based tools such as Flickr, or ImageShack.

…continue

Mathemagenic’s RSS Reader wishlist

Filed under: rss, readers

I tried to comment on one of Mathemagenic’s posts about her RSS Reader wishlist, but I kept getting error’s so I’m deciding to post about it, and let her know by trackback.

This is the very rough style of my comments, I’ll leave it the way it was written as a comment:

Rojo is your answer
(it is an RSS reader and a social bookmark manager in one)

-feeds organised in tags instead of folders (a feed can also appear in multiple folders)
-feed items you clip can also be organised in tags (this is the social bookmark aspect)
-items to read later are kept in a flagged folder (unlike Bloglines where they stay in the feed)
-choose to read a tag/folder of your feeds in a stream (organised by date not by feed) or you can expand your tag/folder and click to read a feed at a time
-also an add-on to clip an item to del.icio.us
-share stuff with your community

Synching and protected feeds seems to be Attensa’s strength

…and posts per conversation (well that is the icing on the cake…so far it’s just an RSS from BlogPulse conversation tracker for me)

Here are some relevant links from my posts:

http://libraryclips.blogsome.com/2005/06/03/rojo-free-web-based-rss-reader/
http://libraryclips.blogsome.com/2005/06/14/clip-from-rojo-to-delicious/
Here are the rest of my posts about Rojo (via del.icio.us, I use this as a title index of my blog):
http://del.icio.us/libraryclips/rojo

Here are the attensa links:
http://www.techcrunch.com/?p=188
http://ehayes.typepad.com/ehayes/2005/08/attention_strea.html

Other players:
BlogBridge
http://del.icio.us/libraryclips/blogbridge
RSS Bandit
http://libraryclips.blogsome.com/2005/07/12/rss-bandit-desktop-reader/

Wow, I was just thinking if you could trackback a blog when you are talking about them in the comments of another blog…I wonder if monitoring incoming links of a blog post include links in the comments of other blogs.

Yodel

Filed under: blogs, rss, conversation, search

Yodel is the beginnings of a new blog/rss engine

Data Mining (co-creator of BlogPulse) has the scoop.

The idea is to move away from top lists based on incoming links to ranking blogs in other ways, such as influence, communities, topics, etc… (better for discovery, and blogs lost in the long tail)

background to this evolving idea.

MSN searches feed content

Filed under: rss, search

We know that MSN generates an RSS for your search query…now apparently it can search within your feed content, as opposed to searching the html content…ie. searching in the feed version of your content is searching just within the body of your page, eg. just the blog posts, and not any of the sidebar stuff.

But the issue is what if you don’t have full-text feeds, then it is only searching excerpts of your post (this is not a complete picture)

…see more on this.

Here’s an analysis by people that you can always understand, they always seem to make things clear.

e-snips

Filed under: General, tools

Mary Ellen Bates - Tip of the Month is on eSnips (which I think is a watered down version of Net Snippets).

Basically instead of saving bookmarks you are saving parts or a section of a page, here more:

” If I am doing research for a client, I can highlight the portion of a web page that I think would be useful, click the “Snip” button on the toolbar, and that content, along with the URL, is stored in my eSnips account. If I want to save a screen shot, I pull down the “Snip” menu and select Screen Shot. I can even specify whether I want to grab the full page or just a section, and - if the latter - whether I want to snag a portion of the page in the shape of a square, rectangle, ellipse, and so on. I can add a title and description to the snipped content, and then I specify in which folder within my eSnips account the file should be saved. “

The features of this tool focus on snips of pages so it is geared to do this one function well, but it is also possible to do it with a tool like Furl (clippings field is for highlighted content from the bookmark, and comments field is for your thoughts).

You can also do this using a 3rd party tool with del.icio.us, like pasta or wetaste.

Another related tool is Purple Slurple, which enables you to alter the URL of a page so it points to the exact spot you imply.

ADDED 20/09/05: What I forgot to add is that you can actually store files from your PC on e-snips (this is geat when you haven’t got your PC handy, or as an alternative to saving it in an email), and invite people to have a look (although your file eg. a word document, doesn’t have its own URL), hopefully Furl will implement this in the future…actually you can upload files from your PC to Writely, and share them with people, or share them with everyone, and your file has it’s own URL, so it’s your own webspace to publish your word documents…

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