Google Office

Has anyone else tried using docs.google.com? I noticed that attached spreadsheets now have a link with their google mail entry that takes you off to google docs. I've been experimenting with this capability - which provides basic Web-based word processing and spreadsheets.

The most interesting feature is the support for collaboration. Your spreadsheet or document is saved at Google - not on your computer. So, you can look at it anywhere there is a computer on the Web. You can share a document or spreadsheet with any number of viewers or collaborators. As you (or your collaborators) make changes, everyone sees them realtime. Seems pretty extravagant, were millions of people to use this at a time - lots of CPU cycles being used up somewhere.

I am still hesitant to put anything sensitive - financial data, for example - on Google's servers. But, for other types of data, why not? It has the same advantages that google mail has - use anywhere transparent access without installing any new software. All you need is the Web and a browser - you don't even need a hard drive.

Nice Visualization

This is a time series of housing prices visualized as a roller coaster:

YouTube Evolution

An honest attempt to make a short punchy Evolution-for-dummies video. I think they need something that explains variation, too - or it still falls short.

Crashing the Charts

An all Web musical transaction. Still using a Web-based middleman - iTunes - to sell their music, but I suspect Apple's cut is a lot smaller - and that Black Lab's cut is a lot bigger than a brick and mortar distributor.

Blogs re: Journalism

Blog Around the Clock says it all.

The Seriousness of the Web

I found this an interesting post about Gil of Brazil and his talk at SXSW. The long transition to the Web is not yet far along. How can you tell this? So far, the Web is mostly for amateurs. The Serious People are still in universities, on TV, movie studios, etc. If you are a Serious Person, you still go through the channels, not directly to the Web. This is beginning to transition - with political blogs being one of the first areas of progress. The left blogosphere is giving the media a run for its money. Good political analysts and adivisors - at least on the left - now sometimes bypass traditional media and go straight to the Web for their operational platform.

When will musicians and artists go that same route? And writers of book-length fiction or non-fiction? When will the first full-length film come out on the Web - all by itself - not distributed by a studio and provided through some cable company or whatever?

This will be the way it works 10 years from now. The disruption is still to come.

Twittering

I don't really get this entirely - twittervision. It reminds me of the poor soul in the last MIT Technology Review (or was it Scientific American?) who was recording everything he did - all the time. Who would waste their life looking at his life? It's the essense of vicariousness.

Also, there is such a thing as a grocery store that is too big. I've been in one. Twittervision seems to have the same issue.