The first, and probably most in depth section is the Friend’s Manager. This area allows you to talk with friends in the form of “Gabs”. You can assign Gabs to your friends and enable whether or not you wish to allow them to invite others to the Gab. It’s more or less of a simple flash messaging system. There’s also a “Email Alerts” option which will automatically inform you by email if: you get a new friend request, someone accepts your friend invitation, you’re included in a Gab, or if someone replies to an existing Gab. You get your usual User Profile to edit; name, birthday, picture, hobbies, location, etc. Additionally, they have added a section called “Exchange” which categorizes all types of hobbies and interests: Auto, Finance, Books, Games, Jobs and many others. In these categories, you can create mini threads so that you can share all your favorites interests with your friends. A five star rating system has been implemented so that you and your friends can vote on what things are cool, and what things are not. You can sort them by name, date, friend or rating, as well as add “Opinions”, which are just comments on your Exchange items. If you want to, they’ve also added a print feature for the User Opinions. It reminded me of Delicious Library, a simple application for Mac users to categorize their interests in their own libraries.

SnapPages also includes a Photo Manager application allowing you to organize your screen shots and miscellaneous pictures. To start, you can create an “Album” to import your photos and other pictures. Each album can be set to public, private, secure, or friend-only. Secure requires for you to input a password to access it, the others have permission according to their name. You can add tags to the photos to help organize them for later use. While in your albums area, you can enlarge your photos by using the slider found in the upper right corner. They have included a mild photo editing section in the Photo Manager where you can rotate, crop, and/or adjust brightness. They have a few others setting to revise the lighting and other effects, but there isn’t many option currently right now. If you’re looking for some more in-depth online flash photo editing, head over to Picnik. You able to share your photo galleries with friends by selecting the particular album that you want to share and adding recipients along with an optional message. Lastly, there’s the download feature that simply let’s you download any of the photos you have in any of your albums.

The last section of SnapPages is the Calendar Manager. Each calendar that you create acts identical to the Photo Manager’s Albums in regards to their property settings: private, public, secure, and friends-only. You can color coordinate new calendars when you create them as well as changing their format from the normal month calendar, to a weekly or daily calendar format. You can add events to your calendars which will require you to specify a time, a place, and any further details you need for the events. They also give you the option to input a URL to an online map if you find it necessary for the event. You also can define whether your event is a repeating affair. If so, you can input the time span it repeats: day, week, month, or year. You can also add notifications to each event, which sends you a reminder prior to the actual event. They also give you the ability to add tasks to your calendars and set exact due dates for each project. Like I mentioned, they have the Share option just like the Photo Manager if you desire to collaborate or share certain calendars with friends. They’ve included a nice RSS feature which allows you to subscribe to your friend’s calendars and see their past and upcoming events. Overall, the Calendar Manager is a nice simple way of helping to keep yourself on track for things you need to get done. It’s not nearly as in-depth as something like Google’s Calendar, however for the average person, it’ll suffice just fine.

To be honest, I liked SnapPages. Though it didn’t bring anything incredibly new to the table, it laid out all the old stuff neatly and thoroughly. Since it was created in Flash, the animation helped give it a nice touch of fluency. Give it a try, it was fun to play around in it. They plan on continuously adding new features to SnapPages, so we can only hope for the best.

Coventi also offers Page Roles, which consists of three ranks. First, there is the owner of a page, who obviously has all privileges and rights within the page. Next there are the authors, who are capable of commenting and revising the actual page document. Last are the reviewers, who can only comment on the document and not change any of the contents of the page. Once you have invited people to collaborate and share on a page you’ll see the “People” tab appears in the interface. The People tab tells you who has and who hasn’t read your page(s). Additionally, you also can view and change the rank of your users in this section. You’ll also notice that when you start sharing your pages, a count of revisions done to that pertaining document will appear. You’re able to compare revisions via drop down menus, making it easy to look back and/or find lost information.

Authors and Reviewers are able to comments on certain sections of a page by simply highlighting the desired word, phrase, even paragraph and selecting “Create Comment” from the pop-up menu that will appear once something has been highlighted. The user can then type out their comment in the panel to the right of the interface along with a subject. Each comment that is submitted to the page is logged as a separate “conversation” and becomes its own discussion area where other users can reply to comment that was created. When there are multiple users viewing the same document, this feature can prove very handy for narrowing down areas of the page where you might have had difficulty in, and receiving direct, valuable input from your invited group members. You are also able to filter through conversations to quickly find comments that might be currently in discussion. They also separate the conversation by “open” and “closed” to help organize comments that have be discussed already. Even though it is a group oriented applications, I thought it would’ve been nice to have the ability to highlight and comment on your own page, without inviting people.

You are able to download each of your writing pages as a Word document as well as, adversely, upload Word documents to be used in Coventi. They offer Review Options such as setting a review deadline, or asking for approval on a page. Setting a deadline is as simple as choosing the exact time you’d like your collaborators to have their reviews in by, attached with any necessary comments. Asking for approval of a page works similarly. Once you feel that you’ve finalized your draft, you can send out an approval notification to receive confirmation on your work by fellow collaborators. After getting the notification email, each user will then be able to view the page and then check off whether or not they believe it is ready or if it still needs further revisions. After each user submits their approval, all authors and the owner will be sent an email reporting their confirmation. Owners of a page are able to withdraw an approval request, if necessary. Owners, authors, and reviewers also are given the option to have any page updates email to them to keep them up-to-date with the progress of the page.

I enjoy Coventi and I plan on trying and use it for some of my future writing en devours. It functions very nicely and has some of the features that we all wished our Writeboards would have. The only picky thing I can say about Coventi, being that I’m a designer, is the design of the interface. While there is nothing exceedingly wrong with how it was laid out, I think they could have made the top navigation, main tabs, and button areas less busy. I like how the interface options and selections work, but spacing out some things couldn’t hurt to help clarify things. Nonetheless, this shouldn’t hinder anyone from trying out Coventi and what it has to offer. I’m always looking for new innovating ideas from writing applications and Coventi helped fulfilled some of mine.

Let’s start with the main sections of the site. They have separated their sections in five major categories: Music, Video, Art, Photography, and Word (Writing). Each section displays the latest and greatest pertaining to its topic. Every section’s main page contains recent and popular profiles. For instance the Music section has a side column that displays the Newest Artists, Most Played Songs of the Day, and Most Played Artists. Featured Uploads, along with the most recently uploaded are there as well. Naturally, for each artist you’re able to go into their profile and listen to their work via the Humble Voice media player. Also you’ll find more information and biographies of the band and its members, along with upcoming shows and pictures, if any.

Next is the community section; this section features a point ticker that keeps and up-to-date track of the active user base on Humble Voice. Powered by Flash, it presents a scrolling list of members on Humble Voice and the points that each member has accumulated according to recent activity on the site. So, the more browsing and participation you do will affect whether or not you’re seen on the ticker. Furthermore, they have an area to recognize the members who currently are the leaders in points within the community. Additionally, they have outfitted the section with their very own Humble Voice TV player. The TV has “channels” that show user submitted videos that you can watch at your own leisure. Lists of the newest members and the friendliest members can be located on this page, along with a link to the Humble Voice store. The community section is also where you’re able to cash in all those points that you earn on Humble Voice. You’ll also find a online chat on the community page where you can openly share messages with others logged in to Humble Voice.

Moving onto an area where I believe Humble Voice executes exceedingly well at. Their profile and user account area is very thorough. They’ve implemented a small control panel that lets you freely edit any and all of the things you wish. They give you layout choices for each content area of your profile. You can choose one, two, or three column formation for each content area. You can then mix and match the different layout settings to satisfy what you vision your Humble Voice page to look like. The content areas include: Profile Photo, Featured Text, Actions, Artist Profile, Bulletin Board, Word Gallery, Friends, Blog, and Comments. You’re also allowed to add new pages to your profile. You can then, in turn, add and remove any of the contents areas on the first page. Users can then sort out which content they want on each particular page. This allows for more expansive user profiles and helps diversify your profile from others. So say, for instance, I wanted to make a section for each of my individual interests. I could make a separate page for Writing, Music Composition, and Design. I could add all the content categories that are associated with each of those topics in those specific pages. For example, in my Design page you’d find the Art Gallery and Photo Album content areas, in comparison to say, my Writing page which you’d find content areas such as the Blog, Word Galleries, and Notepad. This feature helps to easily maintain and organize your information so your viewer can easily browse your profile.

The Music section’s streaming audio player is similar to PureVolume, in functionality. You can add songs from artist profiles to your Library so that you can easily find them at a later date. Additionally, you can also add the actual bands to your library as well. Their Video section mimics the Music section design-wise, but in a more simplified way. You’re able to tag, add comments, bookmark, and rate all the uploaded videos to sort out the bad from the good. Their rating systems compares with many standard five star rating systems, but instead of stars it’s, of course, their logo’s bird. Obviously, you can bookmark videos for future viewing as well. The Photography and Art section are almost identical. Featured work is on the front page, along with lists of a selection of the popular pieces and recent submissions. Naturally, you acquire points from rating and commenting on people’s work. The comments that members submit to each other aren’t moderated, so it could be hard to find thorough reviews of your work, if that’s what you’re seeking.

However in the long run, you get the best of both worlds with Humble Voice. They have nicely designed their website while keeping a wide variety of usability for the members. Topics are organized well, they have a plethora of content for your surfing pleasure, and heck, you can win prizes. What’s not to like? It’s easy enough for the timid online user and diverse enough for the more competent. So if you’re looking to get your work out their and hopefully positively criticized, then Humble Voice is one of your best bets. They have a notable amount of active users for how new their community is to the social network scene, so input on your work shouldn’t be too hard to acquire. Personally, I’m not a hardcore MySpace person, but browsing through MySpace after being on Humble Voice is like drinking orange juice after brushing your teeth. (Yeah, that bad.)

With the seemingly never-ending amount of social networking websites emerging online these days, it’s getting tough to distinctly categorize the good, the bad, and the ugly. So let’s begin. Urbis’ foundation and backbone is, of course, its society and users. The more users there are, the more interaction there is, the more chances there are for your pieces of writings to be found. In turn, this results in more opportunities for people to critique your writing. However, here lies the main dilemma I have with the web application.

Urbis is focused around credits. Credits are their type of currency within the network and also, coincidently, is the only way that you’re able to pursue getting any feedback on your writing from others. Basically, the method behind their madness is this: The way to help your writing become more well-known within the community is to participate. While I have no problem with openly participating, it comforts me to know that I have the choice of whether to participate or not. Participation is the golden rule to Urbis, and by rule I mean necessity. You’re dependent on credits to reveal any reviews that have been made about your work, however to gain additional credits you’ll be obligated to review other people’s writing.

Before you even enter a page containing an author’s work, a default amount of credits that can be earned is specified. This number is calculated simply by the amount of words in that particular piece of writing. The amount of words that your review consists of is also put into the equation. The sum of these two variables equal the amount of credits you’ll earn for the review you give the writer. Pretty much what I’m getting at is: the more time and effort you put into it, the more you’ll get out of it. (fancy that) The only other way to gain some credits is to invite other people to join Urbis. (go figure) So the endless (and essential) cycle of: uploading your work, reviewing other people’s work, and spending credits to see what others have said about your writing will have to become somewhat of a routine for you if you plan on frequently using Urbis.

Also, the reviews that you construct have to follow a set of standards. To make it so people get the most out of Urbis, (and also so they don’t cheat the system) Urbis’ management has come up with a set of guidelines for when someone reviews someone else’s work. To summarize the rules briefly, no short: “Great post!” reviews, no bashing an author within reviews, and you’re not allowed to use exceedingly, unnecessary large quotes from the context of the author’s writing just to gain more credits.

Following in the footsteps of the plethora of social networking websites already populating the online world, you also have the ability to invite other members of Urbis to become your friends. This helps congregate people who might have similar interests in certain types of writing as you. You’re able to check up on your friends and see if they have any new pieces of writing. Also, if you prefer to keep some of your writing more private, you can specify it to only be viewable by your friends. Along with that, Urbis offers the normal features such as simple statistics which track the amount of reviews you’ve completed, comments that were made, credits earned, credits spent, etc. They have also implemented a simple goal system in which you can obviously create and keep track of goals for your writing, nothing overly extensive in this department though.

I actually enjoyed the time I spent on the network. I’m a writer myself and I believe they did a nice job thoroughly thinking out the website. So, to give my general impression on Urbis, it goes as follows: Urbis provides a great way for anyone from novice to experienced writers to share their writing while additionally helping others by criticizing their writing through reviews. The only thing is, is that it doesn’t bring anything notably new to the table. With the traffic jam of social networking websites being released all over the internet, finding new innovating features is a rare gem. However overall, yes, it’s a great network and I encourage people to sign up and at least give it a fair shot. Who knows, it may just be your cup of tea. Authors of all ages have signed up to Urbis so you will find a variety of depth and style between each author, but if you’re just there for a quick glance, I can’t promise you that you’ll come across the next James Patterson.

To start things off, Squirl provides you with a free account and a public address. The free account allows up to 200 items and three collections, and if you need more, you may upgrade to a plus plan providing 5,000 items with unlimited collections at $10 per year (price recently changed and used to be $24.95/yr). Once you’ve got an account setup, login to access your Squirl Home where you can view recent messages and comments from collectors, keep up with friends, and look at featured collections from other collectors in the Squirl community. You can also browse your collections on the right side of the site where you will find recent collections, additions, and tags that you have added.

Before I go on to creating collections and adding to a collection, let’s take a look at a collections so you have an idea of what can be accomplished. You will find basic information about the collection and collector on the left and see a list of items in the collection on the right. Collection items are nicely presented and can be viewed either as a list or matrix of images. You will also find that when in the list view, hovering over an item will popup a box, using Ajax, allowing you to learn more about the item. One thing I did not see when viewing a collection though is a list or cloud of tags. I feel this is an important feature to add as it makes it easier to find what you are looking for. We organize our collection items with tags, so why not use them? It would also be beneficial to list tags in the item popups helping viewers find related items.

One of Squirl’s strong points is with creating and managing collections. The way it works is simple and makes for a very flexible system. You start by creating your collection filling in a name and description as well as basic view and privacy options. Then select “Add Item” and pick one of Squirl’s 30 item categories from the list. Here is where the flexibility of the system kicks in. Depending on the category selected for your item, Squirl will bring up a page customized to fit your items needs. For example, selecting the category, “Movie,” will show that you can either search Amazon and instantly add the movie or manually enter the details in a form relating to movies requesting title, director, cast, and so on. Or say you selected the category, “Stamps.” Squirl will show a page allowing you to manually enter the stamp details asking for its name, catalog number, date issued, and more. I feel this is a great concept and it really makes adding items to your collections quick and painless.

On the social end, Squirl allows collectors to find and interact with other collectors and invite friends and family to view their profiles. I don’t feel Squirl’s aim was to become the next best social networking site, but it provides some basic functionality including adding of friends, sending messages to collectors, and commenting on collections. I can also browse through all collections, find a collector with similar interests, and add them as a friend so we can connect and discuss our hobby.

Overall, I had fun using Squirl and found it to be a great service for bringing collections to the web. Its system is quite flexible allowing collectors to add items of any kind to their account and being able to network with other collectors is a great way for friends and family to share. I felt the interface was a little confusing at times and lacked some features, such as tag clouds in collections, but nothing major. Also, Squirl is just a fun site to browse. I had a great time searching through all of the collections looking at rare stamps, autographs from famous people, and things of that nature.

If you’re interested, check out my Squirl profile where you can find my DVD collection that I’m working on (I know… boring, but that’s all I’ve got). I’d love to see your collections too if you have any.

More on Squirl at CNET and Postbubble.

At start, the collection of products and websites that you are saving in your organizer will be saved locally on your hardrive, but if you create an adaptiveblue account, your collection will be stored online so you may easily access it from anywhere. Adaptiveblue takes advantage of Amazon’s S3 storage service allowing you to save your data online giving you possibilities with Blueoganizer including RSS feeds for your collection and website badges. That’s not all though. Blueorganizer is also a tool that allows you to easily buy, compare, and search about any product that you save in your organizer.

To get started, head over to Adaptiveblue and download the extension. Once installing and restarting your browser, you will see two new buttons in your Firefox navigation toolbar that look like what you see to the right. The left button allows you to bookmark, or “bluemark” as Blueorganizer calls it, and the right button lets you open up your collection. Let’s begin with opening your collection.

When you open your collection for the first time, you will notice that Blueorganizer has gone ahead and added some preset bluemarks for you to look through. This is to give you an idea of what you can bookmark and how searching and sorting is handled. You will see that bluemarked books, movies, electronics, music, and even toys will contain images along with extra options to claim if you own the item, buy, search, and compare.

On the top right of every bluemark is a wrench. This wrench is what Blueorganizer calls a context action tool which enables you to instantly find, shop, compare things on the web. This is a very handy feature. Picture this: There is a book that you have been wanting to buy, but you aren’t sure about purchasing it yet. So you bluemark it and use the search and tag options to search about the book and the author with Google, Technorati, or even Odeo for podcasts. You then look for related books that you may like as well and use the tags search tool. After reading more on the book and related, you decide to buy it. You go back to the wrench and click on the compare option to find the best deal on the web for the book and order it.

Let’s now take a look at the search and sorting functionality of Blueorganizer which you see on the top of the organizer. The searching is very basic where you can select the type of bluemark or collection (bookmarks, books, electronics, movies, music, toys, and video games – soon to be more), filter by tags, or search by text with results appearing as you type. The search is pretty standard but what I found to be more interesting was the sorting options, or what I like to call, “Smart Sort.” Depending on the collection type you select from the list, the sort button (on the right of the collection drop down box) will have different options to sort by. For example, selecting the book collection allows you to sort your bluemarks by author, history, popularity, rating, title, and even the year of the book. Or another example, selecting the Video Games collection will allow you to sort by manufacturer, platform type, popularity, and more. The sorting options are flexible to the collection and that really helps you narrow down on items. Although one sorting option that I did not see was sort by date added to the collection, which I would love to see because like normal website bookmarks, I like to view what I most recently bookmarked.

I think we’ve got the basics of using the organizer covered. Now lets look at actually saving bluemarks to your organizer. To bluemark websites and products, simply click the browser bluemark button for Blueorganizer which will then bring up a popup to enter details for the bluemark. But before I continue onto actually saving the bluemark, I want to point out one small but helpful feature with the bluemark button and the Blueorganizer engine. The neat thing with the bluemark button is that when you come across a page that Blueorganizer detects and can successfully grab specific information from (using Microformats – Supported Sites), like a book title and image or music album, it will add a dark blue dot in the middle of the button to notify you. Otherwise, bluemarking a site when the button doesn’t have the dark blue dot will just act as a normal website bookmark.

When the popup appears when adding a bluemark, you will see that if Blueorganizer was able to parse the website and it detected it being a collection type (books, movies, electronics, etc.), the title, image, and tags will automatically be filled in for you. Blueorganizer makes it to the point where the only thing you have to do is… nothing but click “Ok.” The only thing that won’t be filled in for you is the rating and buttons stating that you own the product or not. Any data, including images, that Blueorganizer can recognize out of its supported sites will automatically be added to your bluemark so you don’t have to worry about it.

Last feature I want to talk about is registering an account for your Blueorganizer (completely optional). There are three benefits that I see when you signup. First, creating an account will automatically store all of your bluemarks online securely (using Amazon S3 Storage) in turn letting you automatically synchronize your collections between multiple computers by simply logging in to your account. Secondly, you can publish RSS feeds for your collections so friends and family can easily track what products you are thinking of getting or what products you recommend. Lastly, when publishing your collections, Blueorganizer allows you to add widgets, or Bluebadges, to your website so anyone can see the latest bluemarks you have saved – great for product specific websites. All these features with screenshots can be found in the features overview at Blueorganizer.

Overall, Blueorganizer, is probably one of the best Firefox extensions I have used because of how feature rich it is, although it’s not for everyone. It’s target is more toward users who like to organize books, music, and other things rather then the average web surfer, even though it does support normal bookmarks. My opinion would be to simply give it a try and see how you like it. As for problems, I only ran into one while using the extension and that was when bluemarking a normal website that has a very long address (ie: MapQuest or some blog posts), Blueorganizer would go ahead and add “%20″ (which means a space) in the address at certain points of the URL, in turn making the link broken. Other than that, no problems really. Another issue to Blueorganizer is that it is a Firefox only extension which leads me to agree with Mashable’s idea of having a public website that users can showcase and share their collections, like Kaboodle. But overall, Blueorganizer is a great extension that certainly helps with organizing products and websites online that anyone into keeping collecting should try.

For more, read Sid Yadav’s review of Blueorganizer.

TitleZ main functionality exist in a section dedicated to the research of top selling books on Amazon. Getting stated is as simple as typing in a keyword to return a list of books. In my case, I searched using the term, “Ajax.” I was presented with a list of books, sorted by current sales rank, along with some basic information like the title, author, publisher, price, and more importantly, its current rank. I looked for a book that I owned and found the book, Ajax in Action. I personally found the book to be an excellent read and noticed that I am not alone because it was ranked 181 at the top of the list. Now that I found a book of interest, I clicked on the arrow to the left which will drop down and show me more statistics about the book. This is where things get more interesting and a lot more useful – also information beyond what Amazon provides. You can see the books best or worst sales rank, averages (7 day, 30 day, 90 day, and Lifetime), and also a very nice line graph. The line graph plots rankings for everyday so you can get an easy to see visual on the progress of the book and when hovering over a point, it will show you the date, time, and rank of the book at that point.

Lets say your an author or a publisher. What could you do to make it easier for you to track only books that you want to track? Next to each book that TitleZ tracks, you will see a button that says, “Save.” This will save the book a place it in your own personalized page, “My TitleZ.” This way, you can easily view only the statistics for books that you need to track. I can find this very useful for publishers so they can track all the books under their name and I also find it useful for authors so they can easily see how well their books are selling. I also want to note that you may come across some books that are not showing statistics because TitleZ has not began recording ranks for the book. If this is the case, TitleZ allows you to easily start tracking the information by simply clicking on the “Start Tracking” button.

TitleZ also provides a nice comparison feature that lets you pull up multiple books and compare their statistics side by side. In the results page after making a search, I selected 5 books that I wanted to compare. All books are then placed side by side showing all the information on the main results page along with colors assigned to them. Then below the books will be a bar graph that shows the monthly sales rank averages for each book. Each book has its own bar that is in the color that the book was associated with. The comparison page is great, but the month labels at the bottom of the graph needs some work because they overlap eachother. The comparison page is also great because it gives you a figure on how well your book is doing compared to your competition.

I know that when the time comes that I publish my own book (right!), I know that I will definitely remember to checkout TitleZ because the information provided seems to be very helpful. It is very beneficial and has a ton of uses for publishers, authors, editors, agents, marketers, and so on. As I have said, TitleZ is currently in beta and is free for the beta testing period only and expect to pay for the statistics once it’s released.

If you have written a book before, let me know how useful TitleZ has been for you and how valuable you find the statistics to be. I am interested in hearing from actual authors and/or publishers.

View TitleZ – Book Trends for Publishers (via ComputerZen.com).

You will now see something similar to the above. The page will see options on the top, your writeboard below, and on the right a link to invite people and some help text. The top options allow you to edit, mark or unmark the current writeboard version (will get to this later), export to a text file, or send the writeboard as an email. On the right, when clicking, “Invite people,” it will slide down a form that allows you to send an email to all the people that you want to collaboratively write with.

Make sure to read the first line as it is important! “If you’d like others to work on this writeboard with you, enter their email addresses below. They will receive a link to this writeboard along with the password” (Note: I added the emphasis to the quote). If you are like me, you would have completely skimmed this text and just sent it… which I did and thankfully only to myself. Why did I get worried? Well, I signed up using the password I usually use to protect sites, such as this. A password I do not give out to anyone. Writeboard will send the invite along with the password you used so the people you invite can login. If this is a password you do not want to share, go to the bottom and change the password before inviting anyone!

Now, lets talk about editing versions of the writeboard. Click on the “Edit” option and you will see a page like the above. You can change the title of your writeboard and obviously, the content. You get your basic bold, italic, list, and heading formatting codes. I do not know if I would have prefered this to be using code or a WYSIWYG editor. Either way, it works. So, I ran my tests through writeboard using all kinds of formatting, HTML, and even PHP for you! The results. Some HTML is accepted, such as bold, italic, and hyperlinks. PHP definitely did not show. When adding code, you notice that if it does ignore it on the writeboard page itself, it doesn’t when you go to edit it. So, my PHP did not show up on the writeboard, but still does in the edit area.

After submitting your changes, you will now see a list on the right hand side. It will list all of your writeboards past versions and the current version along with checkboxes, name of the person who changed it, how long ago the change was made, and also a circle that is supposed to show how big the change was in comparison to the others. When clicking on a version you will see the writeboard as it was at that time. It’s a great way to jump back and view differences.

Now, you will notice that I have a two versions checked and it says, “You’re comparing” above the versions. This is the cool part about writeboard. When you select the one new version and one old version and click on the “Compare” button, it will then show you a highlighted page with all the changes that have been made. Any change that has been made will be shown. You will see something like the following:

Any change that has been made between the two versions that you selected will be shown. This is extremely helpful for when it comes to writing with others. You will see new text in green highlights, removed text with a strike through it, and any text that looks normal had no changes made. This is very helpful and the best thing about writeboard, in my opinion. When you are done comparing, you can just click on, “I’m done comparing,” or just go back to the main page of your writeboard.

Now, some things that are worth mentioning. This is not a real-time collaborative environment like JotSpot Live. If you are working on a document at the same time as someone else and a change is made, you will not be notified about it and the page will not automatically update. You will need to be notified by someone with the project or just keep hitting that refresh button. Another thing is that you can mark any version that you wish. Marking it will highlight the version number black so you can easily spot the versions you feel are important. Also, when making a large change to a version, it is said that the sizes of the circles will change depending on the size of the change in comparison to the other versions. Well, for me, they all look the same still and I did some big changes. I even popped an essay in to see if that would do it, but they all still look the same.

You can have as many writeboard’s as you would like, but make note of them because you do not receive email notifications about the accounts. If you forget what boards you have, you can find your writeboard’s and get an email sent with each writeboard you have made along with their passwords. Also, when deleting a writeboard, you will have 7 days to restore it. After those 7 days, it will permanently be deleted.

Something else came to my attention when sending the writeboard as an email to myself. Remember when I said that I was trying to add PHP and HTML? Well, when sending it as an email, it will showup. Images will show, other HTML will show, and some of the PHP did show. I feel that if the writeboard does not show the images and other formatting, then the email shouldn’t either.

Conclusion. Writeboard is definitely useful for any kind of writing. But, it certainly is no JotSpot Live when it comes to collaboration. Say you are working on an essay, chapter of a book, a blog post, section of your site, a paper for work, anything that involves writing, this will come in handy. You know what would be great? The next essay I have to write for college, I will send it to my professor through writeboard. This way, instead of them scribbling on my paper, they can now do it nice and organized through the writeboard and I can easily see the changes my professor has made.

Writeboard is fast, effective, simple, and a good way to collaboratively write.

View 37signals Writeboard for collaborative writing.

Update: Dave, from 37signals, has commented and mentioned that they have added notifications for when creating a writeboard and also fixed the issue with the dots on the sides of each version. The sizes now show you how big a change was depending on its size. Thanks, Dave!

Update: More formatting is now available! You now can add images by using !http://yoursite.com/image.gif! and you can also add links using “37signals”:http://www.37signals.com

Brent has also pointed out the use of the at symbol (@) between code. I tried and it didn’t seem to work too well. But I found that using < pre>< /pre> (without the spacing) does work great. Even stands up fairly to comparison (which isn’t writeboards goal though, its for writing, not coding!)

Thanks everyone.

To begin is very simple. You signup to make your account and then login. When you enter, it will let you know that you do not have anything in your collection yet and asks you to add items. To add a book, you can simply use the search on the top of the page to return results and select an item. So, say I want to search for a book. I would type in the title of the book and then choose, “Books,” in the selection box. It will then return results in a nicely presented page. Select a book or multiple books by checking the check boxes. Now, their are two options when adding the item. You can either add a book to your collection by clicking “Add to collection”, or you can add the item to a list of wanted items, meaning you don’t own them but you want to own them. You can add to your wanted list by selecting, “Add to wanted list.”

When you first signup, you notice that there are no tabs on the tob for books, music, DVD’s, or games. That is because there are no items in them at first. Once you add an item to one, it will then show the tab so you can view your collection. Sticking to the book example: In the screenshot above, you see the Book area (All collection areas are pretty similar). This area will present you with a tag cloud of what you have used to tag books and a cloud for authors of the books. One the left of the page, there is an area for your Custom Lists which allows you to create a list of items and name the list. So, for example, I made the list, “I am still reading…” And now when someone goes to view my collection, they can see my list of books I am still reading.

Lets take it a step farther now. In a collection area, you have the choice or selecting a tag or author to look at your collection, or you can view them all by selecting “Owned” or “Wanted” on the top bar. This will then bring a page up much like what you see above. A beautifully displayed page that gives you basic information and the ability to view more information of an item, add an item to a list, rate items, or manage them. While we are on this page, I will tell you how to rate a book. Simply go to the Rating column and you will see a list of numbers in the row of an item. Select a low number to give a lower rating, a higher number to give a higher rating.

The next area I want to mention is the details area. When you select an item in your collection, it will bring you to a page that gives you more details about the item (if any). You can also assign tags to the item by selecting “Add Tags” and add your tags seperated by commas (multiple word tagging). You can also change the information you added about the book by clicking on “Edit Personal Information.” In this area, you can add more details such as the condition of the item and your own description of it. If you look at the right toward the bottom, you will see an area for comments. You can add comments and your own reviews about the product there for people to see on your page.

Every Listal account has the option of making their collection public for everyone to see, or private so no one can view it (currently, the beta release does not allow for private collections). If anyone wanted to see what is in my collection so far, you can view mine here: Benzinger’s Collection. Rember, this service is still in Beta so it may have some issues. If you make a collection and want to share, pass along an email to me!

View Listal, Web Based Collection Manager.

So here is what you can do. Signup to Lulu.com and publish a real book with no setup fees, minimum orders, and you can keep complete control over everything, including the design, copyright, and even the price. These are good quality books too and I have seen some in stores. Well, at least the ones that pay for retail distribution, which can allow them to appear in stores such as Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

So, now your probably thinking, how do I actually create the book? This is great. It is as simple as taking a Microsft Word Document and uploading it to Lulu. Lulu will then convert it to a PDF and turn it into a printable book. Now, if you are like me, you want more then just the use of a Word Document and Lulu has this covered too for the more “advanced” users. You can create any page and book covers in a PDF file so you can easily create just about any book design. Below is a screenshot in the area were you can upload the front and back covers of the book. Very simple and there are more options than just what you see below.

Want to see books created with Lulu? Then just browse through their listing of books created by other Lulu members. You can also preview a good amount of pages in the books in the browsing area by clicking on “Preview Book.” This will open up the PDF they created for the content and allow you to see how it all looks. Here is one of my favorites: Pyrothesis by Trenton Clayne Wilcox.

Heres an idea for you that want to impress your clients. Make a book of all your work in your portfolio and hand them that! I would be very impressed to receive a book full of ones work. Hired! Heres another idea: You know all those photos that you have? Why not make a book with them and share them to friends and family? Of course, you can also write a text book or even a book that teaches people things. Like a tutorial book for Web Development or Photoshop. How cool is that? Pretty cool.

This is on my todo list now. Hopefully I will one day sit down and make a book and publish it. Oh, by the way. You can even make the books free for download if you wish. I think that would be a good idea if its a portfolio book too.

View Lulu.com: So, you want to make a book?