Library clips

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

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 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.

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.

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…

The choices (search/browse)

Directory vs. PageRank vs. clustering vs. social search vs. personalised search vs. human-indexed web vs. social tags vs. computer processed tags vs. rss

For starters (for me anyway) there was Yahoo! Directory, ODP, or Google search (based on Page Rank)

To alleviate overload of results and relevancy this was what followed (not sure if that equates to the old precision vs. recall issue):

Cluster results – Clusty, Gigablast, Mooter
Here is more on Clusty.

Keyword extraction – TagCloud
Here is more on TagCloud.

Refine searching (similar to Clustering) – Teoma, Ask Jeeves

Here is more on Teoma
Here is more on Ask Jeeves

Search by social network (re-ranking) – Eurekster
Here is more on Eurekster.
(there are also engines that base relevancy on social network ratings of pages)

Search by your search history plus implicit profile (re-ranking) – Google Personalised
Here is more on Google Personalised (mentions old explicit profile approach).

Search by your reading behaviour at the granular level (re-ranking) – Findory
Here is more on Findory.

Search by RSS - Technorati, Feedster, Blogpulse, etc…
See more on indexing issues:
SEW: How Search Engines Index RSS & Why It Doesn’t Necessarily Matter
For the Vox Populi, Part II: A Comparison of How Some Blog Aggregation and RSS Search Tools Work for Keyword Search

Browse social bookmarks - Furl, del.icio.us, Spurl, Simpy, Connotea, CiteULike, etc…
More here:
Ontology is Overrated — Categories, Links, and Tags
CollaborativeRank

Search full-text human/social web – Zniff (Spurl), Simpy, Furl, or meta-search (Gataga-now defunct)
Zniff searches the full-text of the Spurl bookmark community, as Furl and Simpy have full-text search of their bookmark communities.
I think Zniff has got the idea, just incorporate tags (human indexed web) as part of the ranking…Gataga would just augment this by being a meta-engine…then re-rank again for personalisation.

Even with tagging, search is still needed (discovery vs. findability)
See here:
Yahoo My Web Tagging & Why (So Far) It Sucks…and more.
Coming To Terms With Tags: Folksonomies, Tagging Systems And Human Information

Some of my related posts:
Zniff clusters
Gataga: meta-tag search
Google with del.icio.us clusters
RSS: full-text or summaries!
Blogs/RSS Engines: keyword search comparison

…and finally:
Tagging alone is not a panacea for retrieval!

All this re-ranking, when you can become search experts, using boolean syntax, fielded searching, etc..dig into the opaque web! (I think this means using your search intelligence to get those results that are relevant to you at the top of your results)…but will lay people develop skills..

That’s the issue, lay searchers, and also many experts are both finding relevancy and exhaustivity an issue (one more than the other)…what will the semantic web do…will it finally be a library catalogue for the web (DC) and probably more (ontologies and all that stuff)…Google don’t care, keyword search works for the lay person…what about the research needs of the scholar…even if people go to the trouble to add metadata to webpages to help relevancy in searches, the search engines have to take notice of this input in their indexing procedures.

Context, relevancy (re-ranking, metadata, concepts) applies more than ever in the time crucial environment of the enterprise…here are 2 articles on enterprise search:
Beyond keyword search: How a “concept” search can improve information gathering in a CI context.
Recent Trends in Enterprise Search

It comes down to ranking for relevancy (general and personalised), search syntax, user interface, education in searching and how search engines work, and most of all understanding there are an array of tools for an array of needs.
That is, web search engines are serving individual purposes and needs…because they can do a lot of things it doesn’t mean they do them all well…if keyword search doesn’t serve your purpose (eg. scholarly research) use a subscription database…maybe Answers.com is better for facts…there is more than one tool (a world outside Google).

[ADDED 10/10/05: Better query refinement]