Library clips

PB Wiki has updated, new features are: embed a spreadsheet (this is different than what JotSpot did with special wiki pages like spreadsheets), voice chat via YackPack, event planning, video upload, and Word Doc Installer…email to a wiki is an essential feature.

Most interesting is the YackPack feature as now the wiki blurs the line into a collaborative telecon whiteboard without having to be a web conference like Vyew (but Vyew does allow post conference asynchronous features).
What I’m not sure about is without a screenshare feature you may not see the others people’s cursors and edits as they happen, JotSpot Live enables you to see real-time edits with requiring a web conference screenshare.

The other feature I like is embedding spreadsheet widgets or pre-defined wiki pages (ie. the wiki page itself is a spreadsheet). I think this will become a common feature of wikis, a wiki page no longer has to be a regular webpage, it can be a spreadsheet page, or a word processor page, etc…why point to these pages when you might want it to be part of the wiki, or at least embedded as widgets.

I wonder what Google will do with JotSpot, maybe the JotSpot wiki will tie together Google Office, where you can create a communal and collaborative website where you can choose the filetype format for each page.
Or perhaps you create the Spreadsheet using Google Spreadsheets, and then at JotSpot when you make a wiki page it can ask if you want to use a Google Office URL as your wiki page, or a choice to embed it.

Perhaps wiki’s as well as being an editing/creation tool can also become an office 2.0 assembly tool, where you can create rich office 2.0n web sites.

Let’s see what other special wiki pages or concepts emerge as the enterprise demands more out of wiki’s…see CogMap for an organisation chart wiki.

Related:
My Documents 2.0

moodmill - mood microblogging, as if Twitter wasn’t initimate enough, also see lifemetric.
I’d like to see a similar site as a status indicator.

OnMyList - make a list, see more.

NoteMesh - collaborative notes for students, kind of a wiki for class notes

NoteTango - similar space as NoteMesh

YourDraft - Share your drafts, other ways are; collaborative note services like Google Notebook, a wiki, office 2.0 word processing, review sites like ReviewBasic, Approver, WriteWith, etc…

Dave Winer is on to something new called Twittergrams, using Twitter as a presence blog that points to mp3 files, click on the mp3 file to listen to a Tweetcast…so basically Tweets are being used to notify you of presence audio bytes.

I tweeted about my ideas on this: 1, 2, 3, 4.

Firstly I posted about a service like Twitter called MySay, only the tweets aren’t text, they are audio tweets.

Another service is NowThen, where the tweets have photos, so they are more MMS rather than SMS.
Then we have Yodio which mixes it all together (audio, photo’s, video, text).

Back to audio…

1.
MySay allows you to send audio from your mobile phone to the web (audio tweets), since Twitter doesn’t allow this the option is to point to an mp3 file in your Tweet.
When people read your tweet on the web they can click the mp3 file and stream or download it, when people read your tweet on their mobile they can click on the mp3 file to stream it (not sure how you would download it on your phone…maybe you could get audio tweets as mobile email attachments or MMS)

2.
To make this easy we preferably need two things: host for audio files, and send audio files to the web from your mobile phone.

Audio byte services like MySay, jott, Evoca, Pheeder surely allow you to email or MMS an audio file from your mobile phone, have to look into this…if they do, then this covers are our requirements.

3.
Twitter would have to be able to recognise and action certain URL’s within Tweets…if I post a Tweet and include a link to a hosted mp3 file, we should be able to click on this and play it within Twitter, just like the del.icio.us playtagger…peterc doesn’t see why not, since their former service, odeo, was all about audio.

Anyway the same goes with actioning other file types, such as a video player for video files and an image viewer for image files.

4.
Just like del.icio.us, your Twitter feed could accept enclosures, so in the end you are Twittercasting or presencecasting.

How it comes together

SENDER
- you are walking home and have a thought to share, you record yourself on your phone audio feature
- you MMS or email your audio file to an audio byte host like MySay or evoca
- somehow you need this service (MySay or evoca) to SMS you the hosted URL created from your audio file
- then you SMS a tweet containing the link to your audio file

RECEIVER
- if a person you follow has posted an audio URL in their Tweet, this tweet will be MMS’d/emailed to you rather than SMS’d, and automatically have the audio URL within the Tweet converted into a file attachment

I’m not too techie on these things, but the concept is there…I’m sure it would be much easier if Twitter incorporated MySay type features, so we wouldn’t have to hack a work around.

Any suggestions?

[ADDED 5/07/07: Just noticed Twittergram is up and running, give your tweet a title and browse/upload your mp3 file, this will be stored on the Twittergram server, hit submit and it will post it as a new tweet.
Your tweet will also appear at another profile http://twitter.com/twittergram.
If you get this tweet update on your phone, you would have to click on the link and have to stream the audio file from the web…what I’d like to see is a kind of MMS update so you don’t need the mobile web to listen to the file.

Twittergram also has mobile phone posting…call a number and then it will record your voice (basically voicemail).

The Twittergram Twitter profile has enclosures, making it a micropodcast feed, to do this for your own account, you could register your Twitter feed at Feedburner and enable the podcast feature (giving it enclosures)]

A while back I posted on the various ways a blogger and visitors can communicate and interact…I thought I’d use some of these tools and enable more ways for a visitor to contact me over just the usual email.

Email - Contactify widget

IM - GTalk button (the regular button didn’t link correctly for me, and what about a status indicator…that’s better, still not working, maybe I have to wait till my new contact has accepted my invitation)

Chat box - Plugoo (visitors can use the chat box, and I chat back using IM, and what about a status indicator)

SMS - jaxtr (visitors send me an SMS)

Voicemail - jaxtr (fill in your number so Jaxtr can call you in order to give you a number to call me, see more)

Call - jaxtr (fill in your number so Jaxtr can call you in order to give you a number to call me, see more…currently I have it on default voicemail, unless I approve that caller)

NOTE: Since Jaxter is live in over 40 countries, it will only cost visitors a local call…I think…they also mention that your carrier may charge you to receive SMS.
If you are registered and both use Jaxtr, then it’s free, I think…for live calls you get 40 free credits a month (if you invite friends to join you get 20 credits per invite)

Jaxtr is not just for bloggers, it’s a service where you can call your contacts for free, unlike MobaTalk or Evoca, your visitors can’t record a message from their browser, and have them there for others to see, same goes with Texterize SMS.

No RSS podcast feed for your account, probably a good thing since this is a more private communication.

I nearly forgot to mention that you can record a greeting, called a VoiceBlast.

All I have missing is live talk (as I don’t use the talk feature of GTalk or Skype), but the YackPack Walkie Talkie widget looks awesome, and the caller doesn’t need to download anything, just click and call.

Anyway for similar services to Jaxtr, check out my post.

Here is my contact page.

[35/05/07: TechCrunch have an informative post on Jaxtr]

Now with the Read/Write Web in full effect there are many ways to anchor, bookmark, comment, note, mark-up, review, annotate, clip, and share webpages.

NOTE: This post is attempting to focus on annotating and leaving notes on webpages, for the many web note services check out, Fifty Ways to Take Notes by Solution Watch.
But since web note service that have a sticky feel are so cute like webnote, Jotcloud and the peculiarly named Firedoodle, I have included many, especially the productive stikkit…and let’s not forget to mention fancy sidebar wiki notes.

And I’ve purposely left out memediggers (digg), social bookmarks (del.icio.us) and recommendations (StumbleUpon)…hmmm what about ShadoWeb.

Let’s start off with Silkscreen which does many things
- record your browser with playback
- share your browse history
- screenshare
- annotate and markup webpages

Web Sticky notes

SharedCopy (review)
- mark-up a webpage and invite others to see via your unique URL or simply make your URL public

MyStickies
- added feature of seeing all your notes on one page and organise your notes by tag

Protonotes (review)
- added feature of a review/modify collaborative process

Posticky (Review)
- like others you can add sticky notes to webpages and share them, and you can also have a sticky startpage with access via mobile, email and reminders.

Stikkit (review)
- unlike the others this isn’t for leaving notes on webpages, it’s more on collaboration and productivity, like: send a stikkit meeting invite and use it for documented notes afterwards

StickyTag (review)

blogEverywhere
- blog about a webpage on the actual page, and read what others have also posted, and leave comments…even cc: the post to your regular blog

Fleck (review)
- leave sticky notes on webpages, you and others can action these notes like: email this, blog this, save this…you can also put a footer button on your blog posts, so people can annotate your post, a bit like the ReviewBasic button

JumpKnowledge
- annotate a webpage and like Fleck add a footer button and like blogEverywhere cc: the post to your regular blog
- the buttons are…annotate and; email, blog, save, and print

For similar stuff see linebuzz and webride, Zpeech and Grouptivity Discuss.

ShiftSpace (review)
- annotate the web

[ADDED 20/11/07: Jjot]

[ADDED 12/07/08: Awesome Highlighter]

Social Network Sticky notes

Study Stickies

Stickis (review)
- tag your stickis
- have your own blog like stickis stream,
- others can reply to stickis (sticky conversations)
- when you visit a webpage you can see summaries of stickies from your network via a tray (reminds of of BlogRovr, as any page you visit, you will get blog posts from your subscriptions that have reviewed that page..actually they are from the same family)
- also has a feature where you can subscribe to blogs, maybe this feature is like the BlogRovr service.

Socialight
- social network blogging, where your posts are sticky notes attached to a location

Desktop Sticky notes

memento

Stickies

3M Post-It Notes (review)
- the original

SnagIt Notes (review)
- sticky notes for screenshots

Stickit

QuickNotes Plus
- send sticky notes to your friends desktop, similar to IM

RSS feeds and alerts via a desktop sticky, see mentations, and particls.

Chat

Chatsum - chat with others on the same page like Others Online, Weblin, itzle, gabbly, dai.sy, zpeech and yakalike, but you can also leave notes.

Also check out collaborative browsing with me.dium.

What about sharing your web browsing with Clutzr, slifeshare, and attenTV.

Web Clips

Notefish (review)
- share

Google Notebook
- share and collaborate

i-Lighter

Wizlite
- highlight, share and collaborate

footnote
- share and collaborate

Net Snippets

Social Network Web Clips

Clipmarks
- social network

Web-Chops (review)
- social network

diigo (review)
- social network

Trailfire (review)
- annotate and share not only web pages, but web trails…now has groups trails, communal trails

Document Review

- see here (includes wikis)

Desktop widgets, Startpages, Webtops

- I can imagine lots of stickies and notes, if you know of some leave a comment…we may also include collaborative do-it all pages like zude and z-cubes (a page whore)

Link to a spot

purpleslurple (review)
- create a unique URL for a particular spot on a webpage

citebite
- added feature of highlighting the text

What about generating a hyperlink list by scrapping all the links on a page and listing it as a bibliography with inline numbers denoting which part of text the link in the bibliography refers to…also see here and here.

Not sure what Relates2 is about…also check out DrawHere.

Hmm, web annotation is totally old school.

[ADDED 3/07/07: Taskee - visitors can leave comments on a blog, refering to the URL they are commenting on]

[ADDED 27/07/08: Protonotes]

OK, I’m finding it too hard to keep up, so I’m gonna let go, and whatever is important will surface (I hope), this is my new approach, call it flow or attention scarcity or whatever.

As part of my huge feed purge, I’ll share some of the web2.0 lists and web 2.0 blogs, where you can keep up on the latest, ‘cause I can’t, so lets spread the load.

Please note that all these feeds are great recommendations for web 2.0 enthusiasts, if you are one of these blogs I mean no disrespect, I’m just cutting my load to the base minimum.

TO PURGE - Web2.0 link blogs or lists

BuzzShout - New Websites
http://feeds.feedburner.com/Buzzshout-NewWebsites

Dexly - New Sites
http://www.dexly.com/mostrecent_rss.php

eHub (not sure about letting this go)
http://feeds.feedburner.com/eHub

Everything 2.0
http://feeds.feedburner.com/Everything2-0

copy-log
http://feeds.feedburner.com/copylog

I want to…
http://philbradley.typepad.com/i_want_to/rss.xml

Killer StartUps
http://www.killerstartups.com/rss2.php?status=all

NEO Binaries: Web 2.0 Application Listings
http://feeds.feedburner.com/nb/applications

SocialTrackr.com
http://feeds.feedburner.com/SocialTrackr

Startup Meme
http://feeds.feedburner.com/StartupMeme

SimpleSpark
http://simplespark.com/catalog/feed/new/?PHPSESSID=5aee4fd64239abc5fb80bb63c5e9ee17

FeedMyApp
http://feeds.feedburner.com/feedmyapp

Listio
http://feeds.feedburner.com/Listio-web20-directory-all

TO PURGE - Web 2.0 blogs

Everybody to go
http://feeds.feedburner.com/EverybodysFeed

eConsultant
http://blog.econsultant.com/

Mapping the web
http://feeds.feedburner.com/MappingTheWeb

makeuseof
http://feeds.feedburner.com/Makeuseof

Webby’s World
http://feeds.feedburner.com/WebbysWorld

GotoWeb2
http://feeds.feedburner.com/Go2web2

Solution Watch (just ‘cause it doesn’t post much anymore)
http://feeds.feedburner.com/SolutionWatch

Web2.0 Central
http://web2.0central.com/

What I’ll stick with for now

I guess you could say it’s my Top 10 Web 2.0 blogs

TechCrunch
http://feeds.feedburner.com/Techcrunch

mashable
http://feeds.feedburner.com/mashable

Robin Good’s Latest News
http://www.masternewmedia.org/robingoodlatestnews.xml

Frantic Industries
http://feeds.feedburner.com/Franticindustries

rev2.org
http://feeds.feedburner.com/Rev2org

Digital Inspiration
http://feeds.feedburner.com/labnol

Read/WriteWeb
http://readwriteweb.com/rss.xml

Profy
http://feeds.feedburner.com/Profycom

WebWare
http://www.webware.com/8300-1_109-2-0.xml

StartUpSquad
http://feeds.feedburner.com/StartupSquad

Here are my Top 10 essentials

Blogarate - a cross between memedigging, ratings and recent visitors widget…basically whack some code on your blog and on your post footer and people can rate your posts and they get submitted to Blogarate as well.
They figure a rating is a dig, so collecting these tagged and rated webapges becomes a kind of what’s hot news list…kind of reminds me of the Spotback Rate Everything Widget…see more.

Web-Chops - a social bookmark clipper, just like clipmarks, not only are you bookmarknig a page, but you are also clippings sections and commenting. [via RRW]

Placeblogger - geo blogging, in the realm of socialight and outside.in…see more. I find Global Voices is mostly place blogging.

Loudervoice - a site that reviews stuff, you can blog right within the service or ping your posts from your own blog, basically what the former Soapbox (Soapadoo) was all about.
Here are the review publishing tools, and check out LouderTweets…similar idea to twitigg. [via m]

Blogger Backup - back up your blog posts offline, see BlogbackupOnline for an online way.

I’ve been using Podchains to bookmark audio and video files (podcasts), but it’s a closed system, so I’m looking for something new.

What I want to do is simply bookmark media files, a little uploading/hosting space would be cool (just like Podchains), but it’s not essential.

I can use del.icio.us, but I’d rather just use it for regular websites, and use a more focused tool for podcasts.

I researched this topic a little in a past post, but it’s not my forte…this post is more of a Shoutout for recommendations.

Here’s a little write up of the focus of various services:

SUBSCRIBE
IonDB, Democracy, TVtonic, fireant, etc…
Web-based
mefeedia, SplashCast

HOST/SHOWS
YouTube, Vimeo, blipTV, OneMinuteWorld, OurMedia, Pluggd, Viddyou, esnips, divshare, PodShow, blubrry, SplashCast (also subscribe to media feeds, and create media mashups), blogTV, etc…

LIVE STREAM
YouTV, Ustream, Operator 11, Mogulus, Veodia, blogTV, etc…

BOOKMARK
Videobomb (from Democracy), Scouta, VodPod, dabble

NOTE: that some services like Splashcast and mefeedia, also provide a mini RSS Reader widget for your blog sidebar

A feature I’d like, similar to divshare and del.icio.us (playtagger) and others is that when I link to a media file in my blog post eg. mp3, wmv, etc…and I have the file bookmarked in my collection, it will display a player so visitors can play the file write from my blog post.

Another feature I like is a widget or linkroll for my sidebar, showing the latest media I’ve bookmarked, and being able to play it from the sidebar.

What about if I download any of these files and what do I use to store these files, this means I have 2 databases one with the files to stream, and one with the files I have downloaded.
I save these files on a desktop service like WindowMediaPlayer or a a client I got with my mp3 player.

There are also services where you can upload your collection, a bit like the HOST section in this post, an example is MediaMaster, see my at my post.

As you can see my choices are from the bookmark section:
Videobomb
Scouta
VodPod
Dabble

What are your experiences with the above?

What should I choose?

What recommendations do you have?

Are there similar bookmark services, just for audio?

This my first post where I get something for it, the guys at ThinkFree sent me a USB stick loaded with ThinkFree Portable in exchange for a review post.

NOTE: there is a portable version of their presentation product just for the iPod.

I like the idea of Portable Apps, the fact that you are not just carrying around data or files, but the actual programs as well, just plug ‘n play. Since the office suite is portable you can use it on your friends PC without having to install anything, when your done your friends PC is none the wiser.

How handy is this if you are in an unfamiliar place and you have to give a presentation; in your pocket you have the program and the file to deliver in a flash without having to install anything, online versions are also handy for this scenario, but what if the net is not available.

I guess the closest competition is OpenOffice portable and it’s free, compared to ThinkFree Portable $50 license.

ThinkFree have a few offerings, they are in the online office game (see here), also in a server flavour, and a desktop edition.

ThinkFree Viewer offers some web 2.0 fancies:
- Publisher (a link icon or embedded window for your blog post)
- Blog plug-in (when ever you link to an ThinkFree Online document and view icon will appear)
- Desktop Widgets
- Browser Extensions (right-click fun)

NOTE: MS Office file types can be opened and edited with ThinkFree

ThinkFree Docs is basically a shared Document Management Storage facility (not in the realm of Koral) for your online documents in web 2.0 fashion, similar to Scribd.
If you don’t use ThinkFree Online, you can upload your MSOfiice documents, webifying them.

Others players in the online office market are Google Apps, Zoho, Peepel, Zimbra, then there’s Preezo, Empressr, Thumbstacks, Slideshare, Slideburner, and a suite like ShareMethods…also see storage, access, and sharing solutions from Box…and what about egnyte.
Then there’s email, graphs, calendar, charts, drawings, diagrams, etc…but I have to stop somewhere.

ThinkFree Portable

So what do you get…you get a place on your keychain to store your online office documents plus a portable version of the programs, and the compatibility to edit MS Office documents.
As long as you have a PC, you will be able to knock up or access documents over coming any kind of technical barriers, I like the simplicity of plug ‘n play for us non-techie types.

I plugged in the USB stick and clicked on the drive, then launched the stick and was presented with a Start menu filled with a few portable programs, I chose ThinkFree and it loaded a new icon on my systems tray, from here I right-click to choose from Write, Calc (soon to incorporate Edit Grid), and Show.

Nothing much to say really except that I felt like I was using MSOffice, no really, it feels like a clone…and I suppose that’s a good thing. Since it’s so alike MSOffice, you feel at home, there’s no learning curve, I’m not a power user of any of these office products, but I could easily do all I can with MS…not sure what the unique features are from ThinkFree.

When I edited a file I could save it wherever I liked, when I saved it on my desktop, it opened in MSWord as an RTF file, when I saved it on the USB stick it opened in TFWrite.

The best thing to do when testing this product out is open a file that lives on your desktop from within ThinkFree, I opened a Powerpoint presentation within TFShow and there was no difference at all, very compatible…only thing I found missing in Show was the kiosk function of Powerpoint (using slides as a web of slides instead of a linear back and forward).

All in all, I like that there’s no learning curve, it works smooth, and that I can have data and the program to run it all in my pocket, and running it is as simple as plug ‘n play, no installing or technical know-how.

Products like OpenOffice and ThinkFree are great alternatives to MSOffice; they cost less, basically the same products, and seamless compatibility, plus portable editions, why wouldn’t you use these products instead. Perhaps they may not yet have the sophistication and experience of MSOffice, but if you have a smaller business and don’t need every advanced feature from these products, then they are a great choice…as I mentioned I’m sure they have unique features of their own.

Only drawback I found, which is a matter of time, is being able to synch my portable file with my TFonline version.

TechCrunch has a post on ThinkFree taking this very seriously.

In related news, check out a screencast of the new flash based Word Processor from Virtual Ubiquity called Buzzword, now this is different.

[ADDED: Web Office Suite: Who’s Leading The Pack?]

This roundup is all things Twitter

Twittermosaic - watch Tweets as blocks, hmmm, what about tetris tweets, that would be fun, maybe one for information aesthetics.

Twit Dir - search people, see who is popular

TweetAhead - schedule tweets, see what tweets will be appearing at Twitter soon…a better AutoTwit.

twitter timer - add this account as a friend and post a direct message reminder, and it will send you a reminder post

Twitigg - Tweets that contain a URL will appear at Twitigg, if many Tweets have the same URL, then it will be more popular, you can also vote…digg the story.

Egorcast - post to twitter, jaiku, wordpress using Jott…this is usally audio posting, but Jott must now have posting text, or perhaps speech to text.

I haven’t tried this, but a good meta-tool would enable you to write a post and tick which services you want it to publish to…you don’t want to publish to all services all the time…having twitter replies in your jaiku steram seems odd.

brabblr - a meta-posting tool for micro or presence blogging…post to Twitter, Jaiku, and more from the one spot [via m]
This is still invitation only so I didn’t get to see how it works

…see more about status aggregators from Ross Mayfield…I didn’t know Plazes had presence blogging, makes sense.

I mentioned that offline blogging clients could incorporate posting to presence blogging sites, no doubt we will see meta-posting presence services (as a few above) and perhaps even incorporating reading updates…a kind of RSS Reader and presence blogging service in one…actually more like a twitter app such as Tweetr, but only for more than one service (BTW, Tweetr rocks).

Twitter replies - see just posts in your stream that are made to you from other people, from their post:

“- The Replies Tab will display an archive of @replies
- @Replies are followed by an ‘in reply to’ link for context
- @username automatically links the username to the profile”

I like that Twitter have tailored their service according to how people are using it, but I think it could still be more refined.
Firstly it’s not necessarily a reply, it could be a shout out, and secondly you may be replying to a users third last post, where it defaults that you are replying to their last post…if you threaded this as a discussion it wouldn’t make sense.
And thirdly, I feel that if I chat too much on Twitter that I’m being annoying to others who follow me, as I’m no longer posting presence to an audience, I’m posting to one direct person, and this is what direct messaging is for isn’t it…although since “@” posts are public, others can jump into the conversation.

Jaiku tackles replies by having a comments feature for each post, but then Twitter would have to reply to a unique post number eg @ johnt 1456…1456 being the unique ID of the post you are replying to.

See more tools at Twitter Tips and Tricks.