Netvibes (http://www.netvibes.com/) is one of a growing number of Online Desktops. These services are meant to aggregate as much of your online life as possible onto one private page. You can link (and sometimes view) your email, create notes, to do lists, and calendars, read blogs and other RSS feeds, and link to other Web 2.0 services, like Flickr (photo sharing), Writely (word processors), Box.net (file storage), and del.icio.us (links).
Update: Here’s a great example of using an online desktop for teaching: Owen James’ HigherEdBlogCon presentation and his SuperGlu site. (more…)
Wow, talk about “thin client”. Ajaxwrite (http://www.ajaxwrite.com) runs strictly in the Firefox web browser on any operating system, imports and exports MS Word, PDF, Open/Star Office, RTF, and text (.txt) files. It handles tables, graphics, bulleted and numbered lists, over a dozen common fonts and styles (including strike-through, super and subscripts). The only things it doesn’t do is store your files–you’ll need an online storage or portable drive for this one–and allow you collaborate with others–it’s back to sending the docs back and forth. I don’t see any language support, so my guess is that English style fonts are all that is available.
There is no sign up or registration, so this is a great one to start exploring online word processors. Just go to the site and click on Americas or Europe, and you’ll go directly to the sample document, which you can edit, or load a new or imported document. AjaxLaunch promises new applications and they also have some good implementations springing up. They are also working on a protocol to call Ajaxwrite when you click on a Word document link in a webpage. (They also say that traffic has been very heavy, so there may be delays despite the new servers they’ve put up. I had no trouble this morning.)
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