Working via a browser with iGoogle

Hi All,

welcome back after the summer break. The semester has kicked off with a particularly busy week for staff, Freshers and returning second and third years. As everyone gets sorted out I was thinking about detailing the use of iGoogle . IGoogle is your personalized Google page. You can add news, photos, weather, and stuff from across the web to your page. It works as a launch pad for all the various strands of your online life. As part of the course I am course leader (FD Broadcast Media) on the students have to write and maintain a blog. We use blogger for this. Blogger is owned by Google. When you get a gmail account you effectively get a Google ID. So that its easy to set up a blogger blog. And then, if you want to take it further you can set up your own iGoogle page. Once you have logged into it you can access your mail and blogger account from within iGoogle. You can also add a number of other panes onto our iGoogle page. Naturally all will be there whenever and where ever you log in.

For example on my iGoogle page I track postings via the Google reader , my bookmarks via my delicious account, my google bookmarks, my facebook account, and my gmail account inbox. From the interface I can access google maps, Picasa (my photos - uploaded with the Picasa Mac uploader direct from iPhoto), Google video (my videos - uploaded with the google video uploader). Then there are google docs - presentations, spreadsheets and text (word) documents. These are stored online and therefore editable and via the browser and iGoogle. All these services use the Gmail 2 gig of storage. (Except google video - I think)

Are there alternatives? Yep few are so integrated. But there are sometimes outages on some of the services and I think the interface clunky. I use Firefox as my preferred browser - having moved to version 3 I can no longer use google sync. This was a Google facility accessed via a firefox extension that saved all the changes i made to the browser. This meant that I could synchronise my copies of Firefox. So all the bookmarks and toolbars home and away were the same. Google have discontinued this service so that it no longer works with Firefox 3. However it will still work with version 2. Sadly I found version 2 slow and buggy - 3 is a marked improvement.

Some other alternatives that are worth a look are buzzwords and Photoshop express . Both from Adobe with 2 gig of storage - each one! Beautifully designed these word processor and photo editor and storage are better than both Google Docs and Picassa. But iGoogle is probably handier at the moment. Will Adobe add more features and intergrate the lot?

Radiohead push the technology

Having upset the apple cart by releasing their last album (Rainbows) for as much as you want to pay - or not. Radiohead have set up a competition for anyone to storyboard a video for them. Hosted on anibom.com . You can upload an animated storyboard (or just a storyboard) to the site. The 10 "semi-finalists" will be selected by audience ranking. Each semi-finalist
will be given $1,000 to create a one minute video clip based on their storyboard. The winning video selected by Radiohead will receive $10,000 provided by aniBoom to create the full music video within a time period to be determined by aniBoom. The final video will receive web-wide distribution with marketing support by aniBoom. Great idea. Take a look at the entries.

Useful FREE Apple seminars

Apple offers a range of seminars with are delivered online. Here are some that might appeal to you:

The Podcast Recipe: Producing a successful show. Find out what it takes to perform a great-sounding podcast, produce a professional show, and promote a podcast to reach as many people as possible.

Enhancing Video Podcasts with Final Cut Studio. Add chapter markers, titles, images, and URLs to your podcast and produce video and sound with Final Cut Pro, Soundtrack Pro, QuickTime Pro and Compressor.

Making Music on the Mac with GarageBand . Tune in to this free online seminar and learn how to transform your Mac into a musical instrument and record new and inspiring masterpieces.

Creating a Rich Media Podcast with Final Cut Pro . Brian Storm shows news professionals how to use Final Cut Pro to take digital storytelling to a whole new level with rich media podcasting.

the second semester

Well its very nearly the start of the second semester. We'll be tackling writing for the Media and starting to work with images and video. Find the instructions for your mobile phone's camera function - you are going to need it.

regards, Mike J