Web 2.0 Applications

The era of collaborative applications appears to be on hand. I was wondering last week if it was necessary to actually buy and install copies of software such as Microsoft Word and Microsoft Excel when Google has started making available google word processor and google spreadsheets. This offering in the personal productivity space has spread to other areas such as photo or video editing with Adobe and other players offering applications accessible via the Internet without the need to install software on the local machine but use the entire service online. Collectively, a lot of these are being referred to as Web 2.0 (I believe O'Reilly introduced this term according to Wikipedia) to stand for the whole new generation of applications that allow users to collaborate and participate in so called communities.

A number of these were featured on the popular computer related program on BBC world Click. I was quite impressed with the dazzling array of applications which are accessible via the Internet. Some of those featured sites are listed here to give an idea of whats being built today. Its almost like Jeff Bezos predicted in his TED talks way back in 2004 where he predicts that what we have seen with respect to Internet applications is merely the the tip of the iceberg.

1. www.clipmarks.com - A site to store, email, blog or save parts of any website instead of the entire content. While I have not tried it extensively, it sure seems like a nice idea. You need an email address and username to sign up as part of the registration, and it has extensions for firefox as well as IE which I believe help in posting directly from the the browser itself.

2. www.rememberthemilk.com - For all those in need of a personal secretary to keep track of appointments and tasks, this web based online task manager offers a near perfect solution. With an easy to use registration form (one of the finest I have seen), this site can get you up and running in a matter of minutes.

3. www.tumblr.com - A different type of blogging tool, which does not force you to conform to specific blogging formats and you can blog pretty much everything from videos to pictures to quotes to links, and regular posts too. Email id based registration necessary but its extremely easy and you get your own subdomain too.

So these are some sites to try out, definitely some of you would find these useful. Enjoy!!

In the interest of better English

I consider English to be a native language of India for sometime now, even if many Indians, myself included would not call it their mother tongue, it is still a native tongue since many of us, think in English, and count in English and that pretty much dictates the primacy of the language. Now, having said that, I must however admit that there are times, when I am unsure about a particular usage of a phrase, a word or a term or am unsure about the grammatical correctness of a particular sentence and so on. In fact, in this instance I was looking for a way to learn to use WHO and WHOM in the grammatically correct way when I stumbled on some links which I thought were interesting. One of the links below does explain a simple HOW TO on the usage of WHO and WHOM. I hope you will benefit from these links.

http://www.sfwa.org/writing/chadvce.htm - This link is very interesting and touches upon interesting topics in English including a guide on usage of WHO and WHOM.

http://www.elmoreleonard.com/index.php?/forums/viewthread/20 - Elmore Leonard’s Ten Rules of Writing. This would be interesting for all those interested in getting a few tips on writing. Some of the tips are so easy to remember and follow.

http://www.wsu.edu/~brians/errors/errors.html#errors - This is definitely one of the better references I have found on the Internet to help with common errors in English. You can use this to just browse when you have the time or look for specific errors which you may search by keywords.

I hope you find these useful.