So this past week I had a week long intensive class.  One of my hobbies to help myself may attention in class is to spend time searching the internet for new great technologies to use.  Now, you may be thinking, “but joel, if you are surfing the web then you aren’t paying attention.”  Well, this is true — but i’m freeing my mind up to do other things so that i can stay engaged in the class longer.

This week was a good week for new technology discoveries.

ZohoWriter:  an online wordprocessor that you can store documents on that you can then automatically email, save as a word document or as a PDF.  This is arguably the way of the future.  Google just bought Writely and as soon as they open it back up for membership i will start using that because i hope it is universal with gmail and google desktop and google earth and google calendar (soon to be released)

Mambo:  a higher end blogger, and content manager.  It is really, really easy to set-up and it looks great.  It has the capability for users to sign in and for users to see different information.  I don’t know what i will use it for, but its good to know that it is out there.  The only problem is that templates are scarce and most people want you to buy them.

Local.live.com:  this is a beta, but when it gets fully released it will be awesome.  This is essentially the next version of map software — it has street level maps that you can direct so it looks like you are actually walking on the street.  Right now there is limited areas of Seattle and San Fran.

Plaxo:  This is amazing.  It is a free service where a person can keep all their contacts.  But that isn’t the amazing part.  the amazing part is that if someone moves, changes email addresses, changes phone number then it updates your contact book automatically as long as the other person keeps their plaxo account up to date.  I can’t wait to fully have the time to set this account up.

Ma.gnolia.com:  For those of you who are familiar with del.icio.us this is very similar but the interface is much friendlier.  It is essentially a socail bookmarking system that keeps track of your bookmarks and shares them with people.

icalx.com: I’ve been using this for quite sometime to help brooke and i manage our schedules.  But what this does is keep an updated calendar on the internet that is accessible to whoever i give the info to.  I use Mozilla Sunbird for my calendar and so I have Sunbird set-up to update it.  It will become even more powerful when my calendar becomes crazy(er).

And the really cool part is all of these are free and all but local.live.com are open-source and non-Microsoft.

peace
joel