DgtizeD

This post was written using the writely word processor (http://docs.google.com). Basically I wanted to do a test post using the new publish system to see if writely would make a suitable replacement to the textile backed text editor in Typo. So this is going to be a feature testing post.

Features I like thus far:

• Revisions are pretty cool. This document auto saves every couple of seconds, and generates a new revision for every one of these saves. The advantage to this is I can later go back and rollback to any prior revision if I mess something up.
• Drag and drop image placement from a browser interface. I don’t think I need to comment on this other then that it exists and is thus awesome.
• The ability to publish to this document to a blog from the word processor interface.
• Collaborate is cool, though I don’t know as I have as much use for this. If I there was a way to collaborate and use Latex instead that would be cool. Speaking of which, if you can embed pictures in these documents, then it should be possible to embed math images. I wonder if it would be possible to get MediaWiki style equation editing? That would definitely be very nice. I guess MathML probably works.
  

Problems thus far:

• While save to word, pdf, open document, and rtf are all cool, it would be really nice if I could preview this document at a sensible column width so that page breaks, page count, and other standard “what is the format of this document on a physical medium” type of things worked.
• Obviously the font problem is by virtue of the list that browsers guarantee. Can’t something be done about this though? Why is there no pleasant format for automatically installing cross platform fonts from the web?
  

Features from word that are missing:

• Grammar checking — as much as it may or may not suck it does catch some things and is therefor kind of nice. If you can spell checking in the browser it ought to be possible to do grammar checking.
• Auto-spell checking every time it auto saves instead of every time I hit recheck.

I think this would be even more awesome if say open office allowed one to edit documents and save each revision in this document list. I like the idea of a central document repository with versioning. I just wish I had a better editor then the web interface. The web interface is very impressive given that it is a web interface, but it remains a web interface.

The real question in my mind then, is when the presentation/powerpoint replacement is coming? Or are they too worried about the storage space necessary for that?

Update:
Well the post worked, however tags and extended post are clearly not working. That is to be expected, tags aren’t too much of a problem, but perhaps I can hack the extended content to work by looking for Google page breaks when posts are submitted. I could probably do something with the tags issue at the same time.

Would that Google had a web api for this app like the one it has for calendar!

If this is garbled, cheers to Saleem’s for dollar PBR night. First, from reddit, chinese military base. The concept of building a scale model of an area 450 by 350 kilometers is just staggering. Unfortunately I don’t exactly follow how one would use this to train for helicopter navigation. Does one train in a scale sized helicopter? For that matter, by what factor is the area scaled?

Also interesting, is this article, entitled
find the black helicopters. Are amateur intelligence analysts the wave of the future? What happens when these photographs are updated more frequently? How soon before google maps style footage is featured in either a Tom Clancy novel or a cheesy hollywood spy movie? When will big brother be everyone? I for one welcome our new satellite overlords. So long as they avoid becoming too cliche.

Next!

I was reading this forbes article and it made me curious about customer habit datamining. Customer habit datamining is of course the process of trying to identify what sort of customer a person is by there buying/reading/viewing habits. Specifically to determine what would be best products/services/information to provide for the customer. Amazon of course does it’s bayesian based book suggestions. They maximize the probability of next item to purchase from what you have purchased and viewed already with what everyone else using amazon has done. Tivo of course does the same thing. Google even does it for it’s adwords by maximizing the advertising market value of a keyword against the page it is on.

The concept of Google doing this type of targeted marketing across all of it’s services seems to terrify people however. Cries of 1984, Big Brother, and the ensuing multitude of corporate dystopian futures ring throughout the air. As well they should. That data is our informational identity in the modern world. A ghost psyche if you will. It falls back on the dangers inheritant in people knowing your true name in cultures that believed in some types of magic, of voodoo dolls, and photographs that steal a persons soul. A modern cause for an ancient superstition. Once aquired by someone it could be bought, sold, traded, used to impersonate, advertise to, convict, and a whole host of other worries and fears, both rational and superstitious.

Yet at the same time many of the potential services available from something else being able to predict your next action are useful. People around the world depend on eachother for many of these predictions. From common interests in books, topics for study, potential friends, and even significant others, people use these predictions from others all of the time. Really it’s a question of trust, of intended use, and how much privacy you personally want.