Freedbacking

WebWorkerDaily (which I read and love for the inspiration it gives to tech nomads) has an article today about how Zoho is offering an offline mode for document editing and how this is great and how it’s lame that Google docs doesn’t have this feature.

I started to leave a comment for them but 1) their comment system ate my comment and 2) I wanted to make a picture to explain my point which I can’t insert into their comments.

Complexity of Medium and Value in Editing On The Web

This feels pretty intuitive to me, but apparently it’s not that intuitive since Zoho didn’t figure it out (and they’re smart).

The Enthusiast Group is an exciting company built around providing social networking and citizen media platforms for passionate folks. For nearly 2 years now they’ve been building sites to support communities around adrenaline sports (YourMtb.com, YourClimbing.com, YourHorseSports.com, YourCycling.com, YourRunning.com). This has given them great experience in the world of social networks and user-generated-content (citizen journalism) including some relatively novel uses like Grassroots coverage of major events.

According to their blog, Google Reader now searches. Brilliant idea!

Note that I had this idea almost a year ago (my post on searching google reader). More great tips are available for a variety of companies on the old freedbacking link. Ideas like improvements for Google Documents for example.

Note to my readers: give this a shot yourself and be sure to use the freedbacking tag as suggested by Chris Pirillo.

Michael Gray has already schooled you once, and this is largely a re-hash of that idea, with an update for your ninjopoly fun.

I just tabulated (and published) our history of bills from Xcel Energy for the last 12 months. I used google spreadsheets just to try it out and it’s pretty neat. The “publish” feature makes it easy to share the thing, the I wish it would also give a “download in ODS, XLS, RTF, CSV format” link.

A couple interesting things to note:

1. We have a gas meter in our basement and Xcel checks it every year (or so) and then makes estimates based upon previous usage and current weather. So, we moved into this house 2.8 years ago. In that time they only came to read the meter once. Our usage is a bit less than the previous tenants (we use a schedule on our thermostat and don’t have any kids) so this usage reflects a mix of their habits and our habits and the estimate.
2. Electricity is under a similar deal in terms of usage and estimates
3. Xcel offers a program called wind source (linked to my previous posts) that costs a little more (about $5/month for us) so our rates are a little different than most

Dear Google,

I’m writing to remind you that you are a search company. You make the computer do stuff for me because my time is more valuable than the time of your server-farm-borg. I was looking for this which I get in my feed of cvs commits but I couldn’t find it. Finding stuff is your job, ok. So, please start keep doing it in all of your products.

Thanks, you’re the bestest!
Greg

Recently there was a test comparing the Mozilla-Google phishing protection to the MicrosoftIE phishing protection. You can see the detailed results.

This is pretty interesting, but what about Lijit and the Netcraft Toolbar?

There are more than two service providers here, folks, and their different systems for marking the data make them all interesting and potentially valuable. So, how about it. Let’s see a larger battle between all of these security data providers.