YouTube is Ubiquitous

Ubiquitous essentially means "everywhere" and that about sums it up for YouTube. People of all ages have sent me links to particularly hilarious videos. Politicians used them for the first time in this recent election. Parts of it are unabashedly commercial, but I have also seen family videos posted.

A library could appear to be really with the times by incorporating clips into their web site or include clips with book discussions. Many authors are featured as are libraries themselves. Videos are considered to be far more commanding than audio feeds alone. Visual messages have always been known to dominate the human learning experience and are considered to be essential when making presentations. Basically, they are one tool among many, but this is one that particularly engages the viewer.

"Twilight" Author Featured

Web 2.0 Awards

I chose to explore widgets partly because I just like that word and because I am also trying to understand what widgets are a bit better. "YourMinis" promises streaming online radio and it mostly works. It does not work while you are writing a post, but it does for someone reading your blog. Sometimes selecting a station resulted in music, and sometimes it didn't so I suspect future versions of this will be even better. There are just so many interesting ways to customize our world.

Zoho Add-On

Now I am sold even more on web-based software. It was supremely easy to post Zoho to my blog, but even better, I was able to edit the text once I was in the blog. The colors and fonts all carried over into the blog perfectly.

Zoho T(z)est

Today I am writing my blog post using Zoho Writer, an online software tool similar to Microsoft Word. I can instantly see that this is a tool for the new world of work. We are now a global workforce with many employees working from home offices. What a great collaboration tool and time saver. I am reminded of the story of the startup of Federal Express where a college student was told that his idea of delivering documents overnight would never be feasible and would not catch on. The rest is indeed history. This idea could follow that same path and put a serious dent in Federal Express' business.

In a library setting, typical hours of employment are 9am to 9pm and it is common for employees to work all kinds of shifts. Having this tool would facilitate input on documents where multiple opinions are encouraged, such as setting policy, or even working on school group projects. One example could be the weekly work schedule, posted for review:

	MON	TUE	WED	THU	FRI
John	9-5	12-9	12-9	9-5	9-5
Mary	12-9	9-5	9-5	12-9	12-9

So far, I have tested out Zoho's fonts, colors, and a table. Haven't figured out how to resize the table, and I suspect there will be other features that are simply better on Microsoft's products, but in general, I am pretty impressed. We have seen the future.