When I started working at home I realized how inconvenient it was to not have a fax machine (we don’t have a land line - but our printer can fax…). I spent ages searching for a fax tool that would let me do everything with PDFs online. Today I find a link to Drop.io fax on Lifehacker.

Drop.io itself is a pretty neat service:

Drop.io enables you to create simple private exchange points called “drops.”

The service has no email signup and no “accounts.” Each drop is private, and only as accessible as you choose to deliberately make it. Create multiple drops, add any type of media, and share or subscribe as you want. To make a drop just click the big red button that says ‘drop it’

Adding fax, just makes it that much cooler!

You can now fax documents directly into and directly out of your drop, for free.

No more fax machines, or expensive online fax services. Faxing just shouldn’t be that hard - and it should be free. With drop.io it is both easy and free.

I was working on some Google Docs today and noticed a little New! icon in the top corner. I clicked it only to find this:

Looks like we can now edit our Google Docs offline - I’ll have to play with this before my next Office 2.0 class.

I have written a bunch about this handy tool - most recently I was happy to announce that a version for Mac was released. Now I’ve been pointed to an article about Evernote on Machinist.

Evernote is a forgetter’s dream, but the tool isn’t only for those of us gone mushy in the brain. In the same way that GPS forever changed our relationship to physical spaces, the permanent, constant archiving of both the monumental and the mundane in life will surely alter how each of us navigates the social realm. During a recent interview, I asked Libin whom he considers his target market. In the mode of a TV pitchman, he answered, “Everyone wants a better memory.” And yet this makes sense: Everyone forgets, and Evernote makes it so you never have to.

Read more…

Technorati Tags: evernote

I just found out about Photoshop Express and had to sign right up. You can see my page at http://nengard.photoshop.com.

Upload, sort, polish, and store up to 2GB of photos. All for free. Resize, tint, distort, and more — add your mark to all your images. Then show them off on Adobe® Photoshop® Express or your Facebook page.

Sounds pretty handy - I’ll have to give it a whirl tomorrow.

Check out the news!

Our team has a real affinity for free-spirited types, and so we spend a lot of time thinking up ways to make Google Docs friendlier even to people on the go. If you’re one of those, you already know how you can access your Google Docs from anywhere, how nice it is to avoid having to email yourself files or back up docs with a thumbdrive, and how easily you can collaborate with others.

Of course there was a teeny thing missing: you needed an Internet connection to make Google Docs work for you. Now, for documents, that’s no longer true. As you’ll read on the Google Docs blog, starting today and over the coming weeks we’re rolling out offline editing access to word processing documents to Google Docs users. You no longer need an Internet connection when inspiration strikes. Whether you’re working on an airplane or in a cafe, you can automatically access all your docs on your own computer.

There is a video too.

[update] … and don’t forget about other office tools like ThinkFree which is offering a similar offline service. [/update]

Right now librarians are using wikis to keep track of their conferences and conference schedules (like mine for CIL2008), but Sched.org looks like it would be a much better alternative. Right now it only has a schedule for the SXSW conference, but the site does say “Coming Soonish: Create a Sched for your own event.” I can’t wait to see where this tool goes!

Check it out and read more at TechCrunch.

Trevor Owens talked to us about Zotero. The slides are already online and the video should be there soon.

What is it?

Zotero is a Firefox add on that lets you:

• store items and take notes
• bring in attachments
• drag and drop into the collection and tag things if you want
• archive entire webpages and highlight text and add sticky notes

Pages that support Zotero have an icon that appears in the address bar in Firefox (like the RSS icon)

State of the Community

• Hundreds of thousands of users
• 2288 discussion on Zotero forums
• 23 language locals all user contributed
• 80k views on quick start guide last month

Get Involved

• Make your tools play nice with Zotero (just a note - Koha does)
• Make your campus a Zotero campus — offer support and promote Zotero among students
• Get your hands dirty and extend Zotero
• Get things to work with Zotero by having them generate COinS
• See who’s recommending Zotero and tell people about it!!

Stats from the Room - and the Future

Trevor asked us a few questions to see how many people were aware of/using Zotero:

• How many people here have used Zotero - almost all hands
• How many are in institutions where Zotero is supported - not many hands at all
• How many are in institutions where other management tool is supported - lots of hands

After these results, Trevor stated: “Okay, this has to change!” He’d love to see more academic institutions using Zotero, the future of the tool hopefully includes moving from being just a client side app in your browser to being an entire suite of tools. They’d love to have a reliable set of syncing plugins for tools like del.icio.us, and plugins for MS Word and Open Office.

He pointed out the SIMILE page at MIT, a project that

seeks to enhance inter-operability among digital assets, schemata/vocabularies/ontologies, metadata, and services. A key challenge is that the collections which must inter-operate are often distributed across individual, community, and institutional stores. We seek to be able to provide end-user services by drawing upon the assets, schemata/ vocabularies/ ontologies, and metadata held in such stores.

Lastly, he mentioned that Zotero will be introducing something in collaboration with the Internet Archive entitled, Zotero Commons, in the opes of encouraging a new type of openness.

More can be found about this at Dan Cohen’s blog:

I’m pleased to announce a major alliance between the Zotero project at the Center for History and New Media and the Internet Archive. It’s really a match made in heaven—a project to provide free and open source software and services for scholars joining together with the leading open library. The vision and support of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has made this possible, as they have made possible the major expansion of the Zotero project over the last year.

Conclusions

I have to admit that I don’t use Zotero that much - I have it installed, but never took the time to explore it. My cousin swears by it and can’t live without it - and others have said the same thing - maybe I should start poking at it. Trevor’s presentation was great and taught me a lot and made me want to learn more about Zotero and how I can use it to my advantage.

Technorati Tags: code4lib, code4lib2008, zotero, code4libcon2008

Looks like LinkedIn didn’t only add a new look, but new features. You can now update your status:

When did this happen? I feel like I’m missing out on so much! I was adding a couple of new books to LibraryThing this morning and saw “status” so I said “what is that?” and clicked it. It’s a way to keep track of which books you’ve read and haven’t read! Finally - no more tagging books with “read” and “notread”!

Technorati Tags: librarything

When I was taking my classes online, I could have used a list like this so that I could work with my classmates on projects. Mashable has a list of 13 online presentation apps.

• AjaxPresents
• BrinkPad.com
• Empressr.com
• Google Documents
• Preezo.com
• PresentationEngine.com
• PreZentit.com
• SlideRocket.com
• Spresent.com
• ThinkFree.com
• Thumbstacks.com
• Vcasmo.com
• Zoho Show

I have only used a couple of these and haven’t event heard of most of them! Check out the list and see which on is best for you.

Geeze, I go to a conference and come home to find that Google Docs has changed - and so has LinkedIn! LinkedIn has released a new design. So far it looks good to me - I can find everything I need and it’s a bit cleaner/moderner. Check it out.

Technorati Tags: linkedin

I noticed yesterday while trying to work with other Code4Libers on a document summarizing the Lightning Talks that the Save button had disappeared. Now this AM when I went to edit a personal document I only needed to make one small change and went to hit ‘Save & Close’ and had to wait for the auto-save before closing the document.

Technorati Tags: google, google docs

I like this idea. When someone becomes an expert in one area of technology people depend on them for answers to lots of other seemingly related things. Meredith has started an FAQ page for the questions she gets frequently. I like this for multiple reasons. One it’s efficient, two it’s a great way to give back to the community and three it’s a resource I can bookmark and use

Check out Meredith’s FAQ.

I’ve been sitting on this article all day. I’m not sure where I stand on the issue - but I still feel that it’s something I should bring to your attention:

Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) today announced Google Apps Team Edition as the simplest and fastest way for groups of employees and students to collaborate within an organization using Google Apps™. Once users verify their business or school email address, they can instantly share documents and calendars securely without burdening IT for support. Team Edition can easily be switched to Google Apps Standard, Premier or Education Edition for communications and collaboration across the entire company.

Now, I’m using Google Apps as part of a series of tools to assist in me telecommuting - however - mine was IT approved. I can see how this would be great for small orgs without and IT staff - but if your IT staff has reasonable (and I stress reasonable) policies in place for not using Google Apps, should employees be going against those guidelines? I have to agree with Joel:

Google’s approach seems predicated on the old adage that it’s always easier to get forgiveness than permission.

Is this wrong? I don’t know - I know I’ve followed this “old adage” before (in various arenas) - would I with this? I might - but I can certainly see the IT point of view.

So, in short - I’ve brought it to your attention and now you can make up your own mind about it

Technorati Tags: google apps

I use TinyURL all of the time to shorten long URLs, but did you know that there are 90+ other tools out there that do the very same thing?? This list was found via the I want to blog.

Did you know that Google had public calendars that you could add to your personal calendar? I didn’t - not until someone in one of the classes I was teaching pointed it out. This is why I love teaching small, hands-on type classes, I always walk away learning something from the students. Anyway, if you search for holidays for example you can get the holidays for several countries and add them right to your calendar with one click. It’s very handy!

Technorati Tags: google calendar, calendars

When I first saw this video I thought - ooo - a neat way to do webinars. I’m always looking for free tools to assist in web programs (not sure why - just something I’m interested in). After trying it out with a friend though - I have to say that Browmi has a little more usability testing needed before it’s ready for prime time.

Found via MoMB, Browzmi is described:

You can now browse, chat, share and discover the web together with your friends

First, after we signed up we couldn’t find each other to become fellow “browsers.” We ended up using the new user list to find each other - and after about an hour of poking around found out that the “tag search” also searched for people. It looks like browsing together is not instantaneous as I was hoping - it requires that fellow browsers click on what their friends are browsing in order to join them - this also means that you don’t see what your friends are typing - so it’s hard to know when they’re about to leave a page. At one point my friend and I both clicked on each others “browsing” button and found ourselves swapping places

In short - a neat tool to play with and a maybe even a tool with potential, but right now, it’s just a toy for me.

Technorati Tags: browzmi

I mentioned TasteBook a while back and that I was disappointed to find that I couldn’t add my own pictures - well that has all changed! I got this email today:

I wrote a short while ago about finally understanding how to use Yahoo! Pipes and since then I’ve been playing. I have come up with a pretty complicated looking Pipe that does something so simple - something we’ve wanted for a while.

Just click the image to the left to see the full screenshot - but basically I’m using this to pull the RSS feed out of our Wikindx page which we use to keep our Abraham Kuyper Bibliography and editing the results so we only see new items and we don’t see who did the adding - since our users don’t care who it was to added the item - they just want to know that there is a new item.

Anyway, if you were confused about what Pipes could do - then I recommend reading Mashing Up Multiple Web Feeds Using Yahoo! Pipes, an article By Jody Condit Fagan in the recent issue of Computers in Libraries and then start poking around. Another great way to learn about pipes is to clone other people’s pipes and learn from what they’re doing.

Technorati Tags: yahoo pipes, rss

When I started at Jenkins ages ago, I had this program on my computer called SnagIt - and had no idea what it was so I said I didn’t need it. Now I know what it does and it might actually be as handy as Snapper. Thanks to Lifehacker I just found out that you can get a version of SnagIt for free if you’d like.

Normally not-free screenshot application SnagIt is being given away in a slightly older version for free"”good news for technical writers and others who want to upgrade beyond the PrtSc key.

Instructions on downloading this free licensed version can be found at Digital Inspiration.

Technorati Tags: snagit, screenshots

Thanks Jill for letting me know about this Add On for Firefox.

TinyUrl brings the http://tinyurl.com functionality into your browser. It takes a long URL as input, and gives you a short URL to use in it’s place.

Installed!

Technorati Tags: tinyurl, firefox

So, I read on TechCrunch and Lifehacker about Windows Live Community Builder and I want to poke around a bit (because I’m trying not to be prejudiced) - but the link takes me to a very minimal looking page.

I tried a few different links and then thought … hmmm … this is Microsoft, I wonder if it will work in IE - and low and behold it does. How can you expect to get respect if your tool doesn’t work in all browsers? I guess I’ll just have to wait to try it out until I can use it in Firefox, because it’s not that important to me to have to use IE for just one website.

Technorati Tags: windows live community builder, windows live, internet explorer, firefox

I mentioned a while back that I hadn’t tried out Zoho’s office tools in a while. I also said I’d have to go take a look … which I didn’t! Now I’ve learned about Zoho Meeting and I really want to make the time to poke through the other tools offered by Zoho.

• Meet Online
  Have a live meeting with your colleagues or friends
• Demonstrate
  Showcase your product to prospective customers
• Troubleshoot
  Support your clients by solving their issues online
• Embed
  Embed Zoho Meeting in your blog, wiki, notebook or any web page

Hopefully I’ll find some time soon and share the results with you all!

Technorati Tags: zoho

I have added all of my PPT files to SlideShare - unfortunately I didn’t read the instructions and my tags have all been jumbled together. Anyone have any idea how to edit tags once they’re added? Because I’m not seeing it.

Looks like SlideShare is the tool of choice for the IL presenters this year. You can find many presentations from IL07 already online on SlideShare.

Technorati Tags: il2007