Online apps and tools

I enjoyed looking at the sample videos and slideshows for this lesson. I've used Google docs before to hold our family budget - not so much for collaboration but more to get access to the spreadsheet no matter which PC I was on, whether or not it had a compatible Office suite on it.

As I listened to people talk about Google docs I drew a parallel to the wiki and at first it seemed that they were essentially identical tools and that you'd use them for the same purpose. But the more I thought about it I saw some differences - a wiki is good for having collaboration on multiple topics and is usually more presentation-focussed. An online document can be used and edited by multiple people as well but the content seems the main priority. There can be crossover, though - we're using the private wetpaint wiki that we created to collaborate on a template to use in the library, but we could just as easily use google docs or a similar service.

I went to Slideshare and searched on library 2.0 - a few of the presentations looked interesting, like Library Hacks and The UnLibrary, but they never got around to loading for me. I also had a look at a few of the sites mentioned in the presentation - dimdim looks really interesting, as I think it might be a way of having multiple person video chat, which I haven't been able to figure out how to do before.

I created a sample library survey form using Google docs and was surprised how easy it was. Forms have never been my favourite thing to do when working in HTML, but it was very painless and easy (though I've just noticed it hasn't included my third question for some reason or display the questions, just the text boxes).

Zoho looks feature-packed, and I signed up for a free account. I found it interesting that a google docs competitor allows you to sign in with your google account credentials. The wiki looks really good, especially compared with the buggy wetpaint site that our team has been using as a wiki for the last few months. I'll definitely have to check this out a bit more. The document and spreadsheet tools look similar enough to google docs that I'd have to play with them both for a while before I settled on a winner.

I've enjoyed this lesson and I've come across some really great tools for work and home.