Google Docs & Shared Folders

Google Docs is constantly getting updated. It seems there's a noticeable tweak to its features about every month. Why should you care? Mainly because Google Docs is probably the easiest and most powerful way to create collaborative documents via the web. This web-based suite of applications includes a word processor, spreadsheet, presentations, and the creation of forms. Each of these kinds of documents can subsequently be displayed as web pages. So, for example, this means it's pretty easy for you to create forms and have the data automatically placed into a spreadsheet for you.

One of the newest enhancements to Google Docs has been the inclusion of shared folders. This is a particularly welcome addition for doctoral students who may be doing some sort of collaborative work. As stated at the Google Docs Blog:

The biggest update is the introduction of shared folders -- far and away the most requested Google Docs feature. Shared folders work how you would expect them to and we hope they will make it easier for teams and groups to collaborate on documents together.

To share a group of items, all you have to do is put them all into a folder and share the folder. As you'd expect, if you add an item to a shared folder, it will automatically be shared and if you add someone to an existing shared folder, they will instantly get access to all of the folder's content.

We've also made it easy to upload multiple items to Google Docs. Instead of picking one file at a time, our new upload page lets you choose multiple files and upload them simultaneously, in just a couple of steps.

You can keep up with the latest news by bookmarking their blog and checking it out about once a month. Here's the link:

google docs blog link

Dollhouse exploring human boundaries

dollhouse poster, originally uploaded by Mathew Mitchell.

The Dollhouse is a mid-season television show that began around March 2009. I'll confess, I started watching simply because it was created by Joss Whedon. As is typical for Whedon, the spring episodes were all about setting and creating context. As the show begins a second season it's starting to stretch and explore key themes in a very interesting and visually stunning manner.

What I've found just as interesting as the Dollhouse show, is the kind of enthusiasm it's generated amongst people who don't like watching most of the fare on the tube. This has come out in a variety of ways, but just in the past week there have been two especially noteworthy discussions of Dollhouse.

First has been a blog post written by Kevin Burke working at Geek Buffet. His October 10th post is titled: Is Joss Whedon’s Dollhouse the Most Intellectually Engaging Series on American Television? This is a great first place to learn about the show and why some are seeing it as a new trailblazer. As Kevin writes:

Television rots your brain, or rather, it softens it for Alec Baldwin to slurp like a slushie drink, or so he said in an advertisement during the 2009 Super Bowl. This popular image of television and other forms of visual programming as stultifying rather than edifying is being proven incorrect by the increasingly intelligent content produced for these media. While popular series from Dancing with the Stars to Two and a Half Men may offer little to no intellectual engagement at the same time as these series are finding massive audiences, so too are smart shows from Dexter to Deadwood, from The Sopranos to The Wire finding audiences despite their darker subject matter. While many people will escape the despair of economic gloom in Survivor or some variety of mischievous Housewives, we in the know take solace in the broadcast of intelligent, intriguing long-form fiction which, when done properly, challenges us to think about the human condition in ways that we might not have considered previously. Art has come to the boob tube, if only more of us would pay attention, literati especially.

Just a few days ago a new website appeared titled Dollhouse: Why I Watch. Apparently the Dollhouse needs a bigger audience to survive and one person with mad-crazy web-skills has created this promo site. It's stunning. Really. Stunning. The Why I Watch website is a great example of how to communicate using a blend of visuals, music, and well selected text. My jaw is still on the ground after viewing the site. I only wish I had 10% of the same skills as the person who developed the site. More to the point, Why I Watch effectively tells the story of many different people and why they view the Dollhouse. Check out the sections titled Why I Watch and Why Others Watch.

These days it seems the very best in television has no real rivals in the movies. It used to be that movies contained the best in this visual storytelling form, but the tables seem to have turned, especially as new storytellers learn to take advantage of the novelistic storytelling opportunities television offers.

Dropbox and iPhones

Dropbox video, originally uploaded by Mathew Mitchell.

Recently the wonderful Dropbox service came out with their iPhone application (free just like the desktop app). The iPhone application works very nicely and intuitively. I noticed one feature about it that seemed "cute" but dull: it had a favorites feature. When you are looking at any viewable document within the iPhone app you can also mark it as a favorite. I thought this was cute, but not very helpful. I was wrong, very wrong.

The favorites feature not only gives you quick access to certain documents (regardless of folder stored in), but it actually downloads those favorite documents to your iPhone for permanent storage. This is important for two reasons. First, if you have a largish document then you don't need to download it from the web every time you want to view it. Thus accessing this document from an iPhone or iTouch is pretty quick. Second, if you have certain documents you want to view when roaming is turned off (think of traveling to France or England), then you still can because the document is on the phone itself. Thus I already have a number of PDF maps of Paris (including metro and bus routes) in my favorites folder.

Dropbox for the iPhone won't allow you to view all of your documents, but it does allow you to view a wide variety of formats including PDFs, most image and music file formats, Word and Excel documents (both DOC and DOCX or XLS and XLSX), Keynote presentations, Pages and Numbers documents, contact vCards, CSS files and more. It's an outstanding start for version 1 of this application. And the team at Dropbox is already hard at work on an updated version that includes more features. Very impressive.

What is DropBox?

Dropbox was first released about a year ago. It's a great way to sync and share documents between various devices. You can easily share documents with other users, or share documents across various devices you own, or both. The folks at Common Craft recently created a simple, effective overview of Dropbox: