After considerable delay in posting.  I have a field report from my three paperless classrooms.  The three classes are Database classes in a computer lab.  All of their work is posted as PDF files on my wikispace, their work is turned in via email.   I use PDF995 for making my files, and it works very well for free.

We are required to do goals with our students (NYDOE’s new idea to give ownership to the students), I was able to setup a GoogleDoc Survey to manage their goals without to much trouble.

The schedule is tracked on a 30Boxes calendar, this is an amazingly easy to use calendar that’s very easy to share, I don’t know why I haven’t heard of this sooner.  I stumbled on it, and it’s great, fast and simple.

So far, the only papers I have given them are two sheets that needed to be signed by parents.  I would like to find a way to have permission slips submitted to parents via email and returned. I did look into EchoSign, but it was cost prohibative.  They do offer free services for small numbers, but I have to use it once or twice a year for  150 students.  They also weren’t very interested in making arrangements to try it in a school setting.  I’m still looking for options.

Overall I haven’t had any issues, the students seem to like it, and I don’t have to carry any papers for those classes.

Scheduling Smorgasbord: Google Calendar and Key Contenders by Sara Davidson
Article found in ‘Google scholar and more: new Google applications and tools for libraries and library users.

This journal article focuses on looking at the different calendars provided by the many internet organisations.

The four calendar applications that are being discussed are Google Calendar, Yahoo! Calendar, Windows Live and 30 Boxes. These applications are then rated against each other based on the adding of events and extending invites; sharing; notifying; importing, exporting and syncing; and embedding.

After each section the author lists the strongest competitor for the section. While sometimes there is a clear winning, other times there are some that do it better than the others.

At the end, Google Calendar and 30 Boxes are the best online calendar applications out there by far.

This post was on the Health Literacy Listserv in May — posted by Susan Centner, Director; MAHEC Digital Library.

“Check out Amazon’s readability calculations

Go to a book in Amazon & click on text stats:

http://www.amazon.com/New-Eating-Right-Bad-Gut/dp/sitb-next/0452279763/ref=

sbx txt#textstats - it includes Fog index, Flesch Index, and

Flesch-Kincaid Index.

Susan Centner, Director

MAHEC Digital Library

1110 West Eleventh Street

Rolla, MO 65401

www.maheclibrary.org

scentner@rollanet.org

Traffic Marketplace, a Los Angeles-based ad network, has acquired fbExchange, an ad network focusing on Facebook and social media applications, for an undisclosed amount of money. TMP is going to use fbExchange to diversify its online advertising business to social networks. I first wrote about fbExchange back in 2007. It’s the brainchild of 83Degrees, a San Francisco-based idea factory started by Narendra Rocherolle, Julie Davidson and Nick Wilder. The trio are also co-founders of Webshots and 30Boxes.

“For us, our business is about exploring new ideas and growing them until they find a good home,” said Rocherolle when I reached him for a comment. Another Facebook-oriented advertising network, Lookery, which launched during the early days of the Facebook App Mania, sold off its advertising network and has refocused its business, too.

I stumbled across another fun Twitter tool this evening called PowerTwitter.  If you are using Twitter in Firefox, this add-on allows you and others to see your Flickr photo stream embedded in your profile and a link to your 30 Boxes account.    You will need to set up an account with 30 Boxes for PowerTwitter to work.

Here are the basic steps to install this fun tool:

1.  Go to http://30boxes.com/blog/index.php/2007/04/09/power-twitter-by-30-boxes/. 
2.  Right click on the link for the add-on and save it to your desktop.
3.  Literally drag the installation icon you have downloaded into the middle of your Firefox browser.  Firefox will automatically install it for you.
4.  Restart your Firefox browser.
5.  Once you go to your Twitter account, click on your profile, and your Flickr photostream will pop up!

30 boxes is (another) online calendar, content manager, lifestreaming application.

I find the calendar overly large and not as aesthetically pleasing as some of the other calendar applications I’ve looked at.

On the plus side you can add it to facebook, myspace, blogs etc, and share it with friends.

The fine folks at LifeHacker have forced me to tip my hand with their post on using Web Runner as a distraction free browser. Web Runner is a tiny site-specific web application that runs using less resources than Firefox or Internet Explorer.

The whole idea behind a site specific web browser is that you want to access a web application without being tempted to access other sites. You want to access a site without being distracted by the rest of the Internet. A good example is an online todo list or GTD application. You want to be able to quickly access your todo list to add or checkoff items without getting caught in an Internet black-hole.

(via Coding Horror)

To make things easier for everyone I’ve created a huge bundle of Web Runner web applications centered around accessing ToDo/GTD web sites. This is a list of the supported sites.

• Vitalist, https://vitalist.com
• Treedolist, http://treedolist.com/
• Toodledo, https://toodledo.com
• Ta-DaLists, https://tadalist.com
• RememberTheMilk, http://rememberthemilk.com
• Nozbe, http://nozbe.com
• Hiveminder, https://hiveminder.com
• doOh, http://dopointoh.com/
• WebToDo, http://webtodo.wndmll.com/
• SimpleGTD, http://www.simplegtd.com/
• TracksTrain, https://tracks.tra.in
• 30Boxes, http://30boxes.com
• stikkit, https://stikkit.com/
• GTDTracks, http://www.gtdtracks.com
• TaskToy, https://tasktoy.com/
• gubb, https://www.gubb.net/
• Todoist, https://todoist.com/
• JoesGoals, http://www.joesgoals.com/
• Tedium, http://www.mcqn.com/tedium
• iCommit, http://icommitonrails.de/GTDV2/
• Neptune, https://www.neptunehq.com/
• Nutshell, https://www.gonutshell.com/
• OnlineCEO, http://roughunderbelly.com/
• BlaBlaList, http://www.blablalist.com/
• TuduLists, https://app.ess.ch/tudu/welcome.action
• Voo2Do, http://www.voo2do.com/
• Zirr.Us, https://www.zirr.us/
• SproutLiner, http://sproutliner.com/
• Jjot, http://jjot.com/
• MojoNote, http://mojonote.com/
• Backpack, https://www.backpackit.com/
• TaskFreak, http://www.taskfreak.com/
• ZohoPlanner, http://planner.zoho.com/
• Basecamp, http://basecamphq.com/
• YahooCalendar, http://calendar.yahoo.com/
• GoogleCalendar, http://calendar.google.com/

Want more sites added? Leave a comment.

Step #1: Install Web Runner

1. Go to this page on the Mozilla Wiki
2. Choose the Windows, Linux, or Mac installer
   • Here’s a quick link to Web Runner 0.7 for Windows (latest as of 2007/10/05)
3. Run the installer

Step #2: Download My “Distraction Free GTD” Web Bundle

1. Download this zip file (Update 2007/10/10)
2. Unzip the contents to a folder
3. Click on a .webapp file to launch the web application you want

Every web app has hotkey history navigation (ALT+LEFT, ALT+RIGHT and ALT+HOME).

Leave a comment if you have any problems.

Up until recently, I have been a huge fan of Microsoft Outlook(yeah yeah…I know, whatever). I liked how it let me keep pretty much my entire life in one spot: my schedule, email, contacts, notes, todo, etc. However, the other day I stumbled upon a little website called 30 Boxes. At its innermost core, 30 Boxes is a calendaring application, but in reality, it is so much more. It has a pseudo desktop view where you can access your email, todo list, facebook, flickr account, and pretty much whatever else you want to put on there. All of this would be crap however if the basic calendar sucked. Good news: it doesn’t. It has a smart entry system where I could type something like “lunch tomorrow at 1pm” and it would recognize where tomorrow is and how to place it onto the calendar correctly. It can also give you the weather forecast for several days in advance on the actual calendar itself, which is much better than having a separate widget. Needless to say, I’ve started using 30 Boxes instead of outlook and I just get all of my mail through my gmail account. I have to admit it’s pretty cool to be able to access all of this information from any computer, but now things are different. Before on outlook, I could access my calendar, todo list, and notes without being connected to the internet. Now however, I need a connection to able to access my schedule and tasks. I have always joked with my friends that I couldn’t live without the internet, but now, more than ever, I am literally in a state of absolute dependence on the internet in order to access a lot of my most important information. I know what some of you are thinking, “just start using your browser in offline mode,”which would work if it weren’t for the fact that then I can’t access my information from anywhere until I connect once again to the internet from my home computer and allow my information to update itself. Is it just me, or is anyone else bothered that the internet is no longer becoming a past time, but rather a necessity? I realize this is kind of a ridiculous question, but what if for some reason the internet ceased to exist. Millions of people would lose friends, family, jobs, even their lives(metaphorically speaking of course, as far as I know nobody’s life support is hooked into the internet…yet). There wasn’t really a point to this post, I just felt like ranting and was curious if anyone agreed with me. As always, feel free to comment!

So, what more could I possibly say about 30 Boxes? This fun and useful online calendar is getting better all the time. Now you can embed your schedule in blogs and websites and share your calendar via RSS, event lists, hCard, vCard, and create a “web presence” like no other I’ve seen. With the recent feature, 30 Boxed Calendar Mashup Machine, you don’t have to be a member to build a widget that you can embed in your blog or website.

For more insight on 30 Boxes, read my previous post!!

But don’t just take my word for it, search for others who have blogged about 30 Boxes. Try a Technorati tag search here.

There’re a bunch of sites that I’ve been using to keep myself organized in different ways; 30 boxes keeps my dates and appointments in check, I use backpack to keep track of mostly random thoughts, to-dos, lists of books to read, movies to see and other junk that I would most likely forget within a few seconds of thinking it. I’ve started using del.icio.us to store links that I come across. Flickr (which I have to log in to through my Yahoo account) stores and makes it easy to share my photos. I get mail through gmail, free file storage through box.net, this blog uses wordpress, I still haven’t found a manageable way to keep track of RSS feeds, itunes keeps my podcasts up to date (which I never have time to listen to either), and Pandora finds new music for me to listen to.

There may be a couple more that I’m forgetting, but counting those above, that’s 9 different acccounts that I need to keep track of.

I just want it all in one place. The perfect start page would have a mailbox, a calendar, to-do list, bookmarks, drag and drop photo uploading to flickr or whichever photo service you use, blogging tools, file storage (there should be a feature in gmail that lets you choose whether or not you like to allocate part of your 2gb to file storage) and a feed manager.

Flock comes close to the idea, but it’s a browser. I’m thinking I want everything that Flock does, but in a website.

Is that already possible? Could be I’m just dumb and don’t know how to do it.

Сооснователь 30 Boxes, Narendra Rocherolle, объявила о том, что они запустили новый сервис под названием Webtop – Ajax-овская десктоп-страница в стиле Mac OS-X, с помощью которой можно получить мгновенный доступ к своим аккаунтам на 30 Boxes Calendar, Gmail, Flickr и других сервисах, с которыми вообще возможна интеграция. Пользователи также могут изменять картинку на заднем фоне. Адрес проекта – http://30boxes.com/webtop
Это явно выстрел в сторону толпы Ajax'овских домашних страниц, таких как профинансированных недавно Netvibes и PageFlakes, впрочем как и для Flash-евского сайта Goowy.

У календаря 30 Boxes очень хорошо продуманный пользовательский интерфейс, что по достоинству оценят пользователи Интернета, сразу же как только они узнают об этом сервисе. Webtop даст этим пользователям ещё одну причину попробовать 30 Boxes.

Источник: Techcrunch

30 Boxes has added a Flickr Group!

Here is my contribution:

Also, Flickr has geotags…thought I would give it a whirl: click here

That seems like a bold statement, huh? But I have been so won-over since the release of the public beta, that one of the reasons I got this wordpress.com blog in the first place, is simple: 30 Boxes has made me a more educated consumer, a more organized person, a better communicator, and more interested in where the World Wide Web is going.

I’m not sure how it all started, actually. I remember randomly clicking on links at the bottom of Webshots.com, I believe.

SideNote: For all you desktop tweakers out there, the first thing you remember doing when you bought your 1st computer was changing the background image on your monitor to something a little more interesting, or, perhaps, a little more personal. All of a sudden, you’re downloading Webshots and the revelation that follows is nothing short of immediate…this is my computer! [now, how can I change the way the toolbar looks?...haha]

Something I read about the co-founders of Webshots leaving and forming a new outlet for their expressions, 83 Degrees, lead me to research and dig more on the subject. One link followed another, and before I knew it, I had read blogs, interviews, perused Narendra Rocherolle’s personal website, and, in general, found out more about the preview of this new online calendar event. I was so curious that I did something I had never done before…I signed-up for a beta testing. I haven’t looked back since…..

As a result of my research, many things happened to me all at once. Probably more than I can explain in the course of this post [which is going to turn into a novella, I'm sure of it...], but let me assure you, patient reader, the effects have been life-altering! I learned about many new and wondrous things. RSS feeds, for one. I had already had a small taste with the new features in the personalized version of My Yahoo! And who woulda thunk it…subscribing to a feed that updated itself whenever the poster made a new entry. It was mind-blowing…my favorite magazines, my local newspaper, world events, from soup to nuts, blogs that number the stars in the sky…anyone and everyone was typing out their daily lives, whether informative or personal for the whole world to read. Not to mention the browser integration of such, or feed readers, how will I choose? And podcasts. What the hell was that?! I didn’t have an iPod, but I knew it was time for me to take my mp3s on the go…but video as well…WOW! How-tos, corporate development, travel info…lions and tigers and bears, oh my. I had already delved into my own blog at Yahoo! 360, but I’ve been somewhat timid in making friends there…it was more of a personal outlet, a trial and error sort of thing…the www can be a pretty impersonal place when you’re a newbie, or at least, when you feel like one. I had already posted photos on Flickr [just before Yahoo! acquired them] and was experienced with Yahoo! Photos as well, but I just didn’t realize the full potential there until I happened across Thomas Hawk’s blog. Guess what? He has written up 30 Boxes also. I’ve had a website for awhile now, the free Yahoo! Geocities one, and I keep coming back to the same conclusions…less is more. Less clutter, less photos, less pages, less bandwidth…lol. This comglomeration of awakening was happening at a crucial time when I was trying to find applications that worked for me. Things that didn’t waste my time, things that I could use on a daily basis, things that I could access anywhere in the world I went, things I could make shortcuts on my desktop for [can you say Widgets, boys and girls...haha], things that were user-friendly, and last, but not least, things I could interest my daughters in, as well.

Did I mention that 30 Boxes was an online calendar? Did I mention that you can share as much or as little of your schedule as you want? Let’s finally get down to some brass tacks. [finally...whew]

My first thought after test-driving 30 Boxes was this: this is so simple, even my mom could use it [sorry, Mom]. So, after much hinting and subliminal messaging, Mom agreed to sign up and now we have a way of knowing each other’s schedules. Eureka! I could tell you why this was so important to me, but it would take another hour of typing. Another very important aspect, and perhaps the most unique, to this calendar is your Buddy Page. This is more like your “web presense” page. Flickr, My Space, Webshots, your blogs, any RSS feed can be assembled here. Your iCal subscriptions, Yahoo! calendar, Outlook, can all be integrated into your 30 Boxes calendar. SMS reminders, it’s there. Maps for directions to events, yup, that too. Forwarding your e-mail to add as an event…done. Taggable events and todo list, AJAXy, open-source API, Web 2.0 and more innovation on the way…and, introducing a One Box add event entry. I could go on and on, but you really need to check it out for yourself. Did I mention that I can see my Mom’s schedule…:)?

So, perhaps I’m a slow late-bloomer, as far as web technology goes. I know there have been online calendars out there and I know there are up-and-coming calendars popping up all the time. Social networking…been around awhile. The Blogosphere, sure, that too. But 30 Boxes and I were ripe for each other…we were on the same page, so to speak. My eldest daughter would tell you how glad she is that it comes up in Outlook. My youngest would tell you how cools it is that Grandma can read my newest blogpost from the dayview. I would tell you that many people just like me were ready for a user-friendly, online, calendar-sharing application.

This post, more than likely, will be one of the longest posts I write. I’m sure you can tell how passionate I am about 30 Boxes and I hope that you click over there right now. But, better yet, do what I did…research it. Maybe you will have a Web 2.0 epiphany like I did. Knowledge is change. Knowledge is power.