From TechCrunch:

Google Takes Out Ajax Spreadsheet iRows

A popular Hebrew blog is reporting that the two founders of Israeli startup iRows have been hired by Google. Along with ZohoSheet and NumSum, iRows is one of a few online Ajax spreadsheets that competes with Google’s own Excel-clone. The blog reports that the founders will retain the intellectual property in iRows, but that the site will be shut down.

If this is accurate, the deal is a mirror of the Google-Gtalkr deal from May 2006, where the founders, brothers Wes and Dudley Carr, joined Google and agreed to close the site down.

This is a shame. iRows was one of the best online spreadsheets out there. Now there are fewer choices for people, and that’s bad.

[tags]irows, google, techcrunch[/tags]

Out on a walk today, the ground all covered with leaves. Thought it would make a nice wallpaper for my PC desktop – and it does – and cropped a bit for this blog’s header.

Will leave it up for a bit before returning to my rotating header, which this will be a part of.

One of the frustrations of my job is when I am searching the web for information on what other councils are up to in my field. The trouble is that, by and large, I only really want to find results from the websites of local authorities in the UK.

So, using Google Coop, I’ve created my own. The main difficulty I had was tracking down the websites of every council in the country, but once that was done (and I have saved the list in about five different locations, just in case), it was all downhill.

I’ve called it LGSearch. Hopefully others will find it useful too.

[tags]local government, search, lgsearch, google coop, cse[/tags]

Nick Bradbury has announced the new release candidate of FeedDemon 2.1. It certainly feels more robust than the previous beta version.

One of the more noticable changes is that the little bank of button that let you do stuff with a post, like email it to a pal, or bookmark the post in del.icio.us, now appears at the bottom of the post in question. All of this means that when you have read a post you don’t need to scroll to the top again to perform an action on it. Nice one!

Ben, in the comments, wrote:

But they already have Google Notebook (http://www.google.com/notebook) which I always thought of as a WYSIWYG wiki.

JotSpot certainly fits in with their suite of web services though.

I think the last point is the key. I don’t think the Googleised version of JotSpot (Gspot?) will be intended as a service to the everyday web user in the way that, say, the toolbar, desktop search and notes are. Instead, it will be the glue that sticks all their ‘enterprise’ (by which I mean services a small to medium business could use) services together – Docs, Spreadsheet, Gmail, Calendar, Reader, Blogger, Base, Page Creator.

What Google is currently lacking with all the services above is a common platform, or a base, from which they can all be launched. For instance, they really need to sort out a single Google ‘drive’ where all files, whether blogger posts, Gmail attachments, docs, spreadhseets, Picasa photos or whatever, are stored under a user name. JotSpot could act very well as a file manager for all of this as well as providing the collaborative space to link them all together with multiple users, with shared files across a certain group, for example.

So, you could have a small business with a number of home based employees, each with certain access to certain files, along with a wiki-based intranet (effectively) which would act as a communication tool as well as a base for project management and the like. All files could be accessible to all employees wherever they are based, wherever they log in.

And that would be pretty cool. Of course, companies like Zoho are already providing something very similar. But they don’t have the Google brand to break through in the way an integrated Google system could.

Technorati tags: google, jotspot

So, NaNoWriMo starts tomorrow. This means I am going to have to cut back a little, and so it’s likely to be my del.icio.us daily posting only for a little while. This is a bit of shame as there is plenty going on at the moment (I def. want to get a post written up about Google/Jotspot in more detail), but there we are.

So how am I attacking NaNoWriMo? Well, I’m going to write it in Google Docs, mainly. A file for each chapter. I’ll post snippets on here as I do them, categorised as NaNoWriMo (like this post is). Other bits may find themselves on Palimpsest and the PBwiki we have set up for Palimp members.

Wish me luck!!

Been using the FeedDemon 2.1 Beta3 for a while now. Here’s a couple of thoughts:

• Each blog post has a link to post it to del.icio.us, it’s been there for a couple of versions now. But if I click a link to another post, or to expand a summary feed, the link disappears. Can we have a link on the main toolbar to send the current page to del.icio.us, or our blogs please?
• If I clip a post in NewsGator for later viewing, can it be automatically sync’d to a News Bin in FD please?

JotSpot has been purchased by Google, according to the official Google blog:

OK, I can finally blurt it out: JotSpot is now part of Google, and I couldn’t be more excited.

Three years ago my friend Graham Spencer and I set out to start a new company. We’d both recently left Excite, which we co-founded, and we had spent a few years starting a nonprofit together. We brainstormed scores of ideas, debated late into the night and ultimately exchanged a mountain of email and documents. We realized we needed a tool to help us organize our thoughts or we’d quickly become overwhelmed. So Graham set up a wiki. I was hooked because it immediately changed the way we worked together. Everything was kept in one place, not locked in email threads or on different computers. We could both make changes to the same document, without having to know HTML (well, without me having to know HTML). After twenty minutes of using a wiki, I was convinced that they were like the Internet in 1993 — useful, but trapped in the land of the nerds (which both Graham and I proudly inhabit). So we set out to start JotSpot as a way to bring the power of wikis to a much broader audience.

As we built the business over the past three years Google consistently attracted our attention. We watched them acquire Writely, and launch Google Groups, Google Spreadsheets and Google Apps for Your Domain. It was pretty apparent that Google shared our vision for how groups of people can create, manage and share information online. Then when we had conversations with people at Google we found ourselves completing each other’s sentences. Joining Google allows us to plug into the resources that only a company of Google’s scale can offer, like a huge audience, access to world-class data centers and a team of incredibly smart people.

Google seem to be on something of a feeding frenzy at the moment. Still, a well deveoped wiki system will certainly fit in wth the collaborative online office they are building with Docs, Spreasheet and Calendar.

Technorati tags: google, jotspot