Google Computing Tools

Some observations on computing -

I have invested some time with new tools from Google to organize my on line activity.

Far more than a search engine, Google is angling for dominance of the internet space through a variety of internet applications and tools.

Google Reader
The reader is a news aggregator that allows you to subscribe to various web content and be alerted to new postings or activity. Why is this helpful? I used to go to whattheythink.com every morning to see what was new in the industry. Now, using Google reader, I subscribe to the site using their RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feed and collect new articles as they are posted.

Using Google Reader, you can subscribe to many sites that support RSS feeds, organize them as you wish, and check off the stuff you don't want, and keep the stuff you do. I use the reader to subscribe to many industry sites, sift through the crap, and pick the links to post to this blog. Here is the link to the RSS feeds for whattheythink.com

It's kind of like a newspaper that you build yourself. You'll see.

Google Notebook
No doubt you have skimmed over something on the web, and said "I'd like to read that later" or "where did I see that". Google notebook is the answer. Using this tool you can right-click any web page and save it to a notebook that you have created. It's like a three ring notebook for the web. There is a link on the blog to my shared notebook for industry topics as an example. If you would like to collaborate, send me a note.

Firefox
Firefox is Google's internet browser. I can't put my finger on it, but it is much better that Microsoft's Explorer. Notebook and Reader work better as you would expect, and picking up RSS feeds is much simpler using the RSS icon in the www address bar. Firefox also supports tabbed browsing which is a better method for holding multiple sites open while browsing. You can duplicate this in Explorer by opening a separate instance for each site you want to view. I am using this feature now to write this blog in one tab, and pick off the web site addresses for the embedded links in another tab.

Google Documents
While the notebook application is for storing and sharing web based content, Google Documents is for sharing documents of our own creation. Using this app you can upload Word documents or Excel spreadsheets, or anything saved in HTML. You can also use their interface to create documents from scratch. Coming soon is a web based powerpoint as well. This is Google's run at Microsoft Office.

More to come on this. I am still trying to figure out how to post documents, and share with registered blog readers.