blog review--bad title came from zoho file name, better title: 2.0 for people who are sick of social networking

Finally, something I can rave instead of rant about. I mean, I truly haven't hated everything--RSS and del.icio.us are quite handy and podcasts are good to listen to when I have no audiobook--but this really makes sense to me for students and other folks. What, you may ask is she actually impressed by? Why Zoho, of course.

I am in fact typing this is Zoho Writer at this moment and anticipate figuring out how to post it directly to the blog with little trouble. I think I would be almost as thrilled by OpenOffice (which I have actually heard of--years ago, being so 2.0 myself--as a casual follower/appreciator of the open source movement), except for the whole need to download issue.

Since I didn't have the ability or wherewithal to download I proceeded to zoho.com, signed my big, bad, fake self up and plunged in.

Unfortunately, right after that paragraph I had typed several more things but then lost touch with zoho and clicked a button I shouldn't have while Explorer was doing the spinning wheel 'please come back' with zoho. The good news is that zoho did manage to hold onto that much of what I wrote, so it's got some kind of internal backup/draft saving thing going on. I'm still paranoid enough that I would definitely practice and preach further back up--hard drive, thumb drive, disc, printed hard copy, carved stone tablet (a bit heavy but the technology doesn't need upgrading or tech support)--some sort of back up, I'm not paranoid enough to need all of those listed.

I do think this so solves the many problems encountered when completing or attempting to turn in papers--ink runs out, attachment goes wrong, file incompatibility, platform incompatibility (mac vs the evil M-pire), having to run with disc to computer lab to try to print only to find out disc is trashed--if it were online you just log on (provided zoho writer isn't on furlough). There are offline capabilities that I haven't tried and I'm sure you could paste stuff in from another word processing program to save online time.

Here's a picture of some early December storm damage just to test my image importing.

Yep, this works. It still has all the downsides of needing internet and needing it to stay stable but if those hold it's pretty good. Non-students could use it for resumes and personal or professional writing. If the other applications are as easy as the writer any reasonably computer-literate person will have no trouble working with it. For someone like me who has to use borrowed technology to get anything accomplished online it might be handy. If you put something up into it, anytime you can get access to a computer (say, at the library, for instance) there it is.

I don't even mind that if you look at the sharing options one could be so bold as to use those dirty words SOCIAL NETWORKING (OK, I mind a little but I'm trying to pretend...maybe I just see the anti-social possibilities clearly enough that I can stand it--plus that's not the entire point of it anyway).

One funny note--zoho's spell check considers zoho OK, but errors OpenOffice...competition? Not that I always behave the way spell check tells me to.

So, now to flop this onto the blog and be one step closer to completion...then back in the hole.