Back Again!


Hello everyone!

I'm back after a long hiatus. My wife and I have been travelling and running paperwork here and there for the purpose of adopting our new daughter, Aly (see photo.)
We have a little more work to do, but we're nearing the end (or beginning) of our journey.

Anyway, I'm going to have a little time in the next few weeks to catch up on my reading and web experimentation.

In the meantime, I've been looking at Google's combination of JotSpot, Google Docs, Google Pages, Blogger, Gmail, Google Calendar, Notebook, Picasa, and Google Base. I have been wondering how far they are from combining these items into a centralized screen and if they will allow users to create faceted displays.

There may also be a way to combine these items into one Personalized Google page using widgets, but I am most interested in the ability to set up separate displays. For example, if someone had an interest in computers, libraries, chess, Superman, Chuck Berry, and the Baltimore Ravens, they could have separate pages for each that would display blog entries, wikis, photos, document collections, calendar entries, and so on. The entries would be made from a unified page, and the author would select the display pages by choosing the corresponding tag.

Hopefully, JotSpot will be able to consolidate these functions effectively, but at this moment, the application is less than intuitive. They've done a pretty good job on the other issues, though, so I'm hopeful that they will be able to streamline the package and add some more functionality to what they already have.

If anyone has discovered a free application that is more powerful and easier to use, let me know.

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