Starting sometime early next year the New York Times will start charging for content on its web site.  Is this the start of a new internet business model, or the last gasp of a dying industry?  Times will tell (pun intended).  But it seems to me that they are on the right track.  The charge will only affect more active site visitors, who presumably see value in the content and would be willing to pay for that.  Occasional site visitors won’t need to pay.  Makes sense, but how do you track this?  Will those casual visitors still need to log-in somehow?  Enter your email here?  Or maybe limit how many articles can be viewed from an IP address in a day?   It will be interesting to see how they pull this off without scaring users away.

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I recently received an invitation to a Google Wave account, so I’m taking it for a spin.  I’m not quite sure what to think yet — you really need to collaborate on something real in order to get a feel for it.  So I’ve stated a wave (Google Wave, capital W refers to the Google client software, a wave, lower-case, is the content) to discuss the use and requirements for collaborative tools at Yale.  If you have an account and want to join let me know.  If you want a Wave account, let me know — I have a couple of invites. Read the rest of this entry »

These days, with regular blog posts and in the course of a typical work week, I find myself doing a fair amount of writing.  But what struck me recently is how rarely I use Microsoft Word to assist with that writing.  When writing something that requires thought I normally start in a simple text editor.  I find the lack of options helps me focus — and when it comes time to move it to an email, blog post, or even a Word file, it is easy to copy and paste the text.  MS Word’s tendency to drag along boat-loads of non-standard formatting is such a pain I actively avoid using it for any writing destined for web delivery.  Start collaborating with a tool like Google Docs and Word becomes superfluous.

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“Email-this” type links on articles or blog posts are so old-fashioned.  Face it, nobody uses email anymore — or perhaps it is a matter of “nobody goes there anymore, it’s too crowded” (salute to Yogi Berra).  Twitter is the hot property of the moment, so why not Tweet-this.  And of course there is a WordPress plug-in that does exactly that.   I’m giving it a spin on the blog — go ahead and tweet on of the posts and let me know how it works for you.  I saw this technique used on a ComputerWorld article, although their implementation wasn’t quite a neat (not WordPress!).

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I received an email contact from Onlinecourses.org mentioning their latest post on Firefox Add-ons. I’m a bit of a Firefox add-on addict so I always enjoy seeing which ones someone else highlights.  Their list includes my all time favorite, ScribeFire — a tool for easy posting to a blog right from Firefox.

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Need to distribute a document?  Whether you are emailing it, adding it to a course site, or putting it on a web page, you should be using the Adobe Acrobat PDF (portable document format) file type.   Adobe gives their version of the viewer program for free, but charges for the full, professional version of Adobe Acrobat which allows the conversion of a document to the PDF format.  This professional version has a lot of powerful features, but if all you want to do is convert Word, Excel and other documents to the PDF format, the purchase cost is a little much.  One of these free alternatives may be just what you need:

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