Web 2.0 startup docstoc began the public beta of its online document sharing service yesterday. The site is designed for users to share professional documents, including legal forms and court pleadings, with one another, with one another. Sort of like YouTube for documents. In addition, the site offers users personal folders for creating their own document repositories.

If this service really takes off with users, it could be a boon for law libraries serving pro se patrons. The docstoc repository offers at least the promise of an online collection of legal forms that goes beyond whatever local court websites deem worthy of posting online. In fact, librarians might want to use the service to collect and post such forms themselves as a way of expanding their institutions' online presence.

Over at WisBlawg yesterday, Bonnie Shucha posted about Plugoo, a widget you can insert into your website to allow visitors to chat with you directly from the web page. For several months I've been using MeeboMe to accomplish this same feat in an internal clinic website I run. (Attendees of the CALI session I co-presented with UNLV's Megan Chaney back in May saw the MeeboMe widget in action on our site.) With Meebo, however, the only way to make myself available for chat sessions with visitors was to log in to the Meebo website and then constantly monitor that Firefox tab for new messages.

With Plugoo, however, these messages come directly to my AIM screenname, so it integrates completely with the IM client (Adium) I'm already using. Better still, since my AIM account forwards IMs to my cell phone when I'm not online, messages sent from the website also get forwarded to my cell phone. Granted, in many situations it's probably not advisable to use a screenname that forwards (particularly if you enjoy sleep), but it's still very cool to know that the option is available and works -- flawlessly.

Many librarians already know about Plugoo, and the debate between advocates of Plugoo and Meebo has been ongoing for awhile. Until now, however, the major drawback for Plugoo was its inability to handle multiple simultaneous chats. If one user was already chatting with you, other users would have to wait for that conversation to close before they could chat with you. For this reason, I stuck to Meebo.

As Bonnie points out in her post, however, that limitation is now gone. Plugoo now supports multiple chats. With this problem fixed, I saw no reason not to switch from Meebo to Plugoo.

One of my favorite features of Plugoo is the user's ability to detach the conversation from the webpage. By detaching the conversation, the user can navigate away from the web page on which it appears but still maintain the chat session with me. This was a major problem on the internal website. I even posted the Meebo widget on every page of the site, but as soon as the user loaded a new page, the previous chat session was gone, meaning access to previous messages in the conversation was completely lost.

Google has finally introduced it's online slide presentation application to compete with Microsoft's PowerPoint:

Starting today, presentations -- whether imported from existing files or created using the new slide editor -- are listed alongside documents and spreadsheets in the Google Docs document list. They can be edited, shared, and published using the familiar Google Docs interface, with several collaborators working on a slide deck simultaneously, in real time. When it's time to present, participants can simply click a link to follow along as the presenter takes the audience through the slideshow. Participants are connected through Google Talk and can chat about the presentation as they're watching.

[Official Google Blog] Our feature presentation

Back in March I spotlighted GrandCentral, a web startup that offers a single phone number to ring all your phones -- home, office, cell -- simultaneously. The company has gotten a lot of attention from the likes of the New York Times, and now they've gotten some serious attention from Google. According to reports, the two companies have spent the last few days ironing out the details for the search giant to purchase GrandCentral, and some insiders claim a deal has already been reached for $50 million.

What would Google do with the fledgling communications company? TechCrunch offers a logical speculation: a combination of its other communications tools (GMail and GTalk) to create a viable competitor to Skype.

So far both sides are staying mum on the merger.

[TechCrunch] Google To Acquire GrandCentral

Wired has a nice writeup today on the Learning 2.0 project developed by Helene Blowers at the Public Library of Charlotte and Mecklenburg County...

Recognizing that librarians need to know how to participate in the new media mix if libraries are to remain relevant, Blowers challenged her 550 staffers to become more web savvy. Using free web tools, she designed the program and gave staff members three months to do 23 things.

They created blogs and podcasts, tried out Flickr, set up RSS feeds, learned about wikis, uploaded video to YouTube, played with image generators and Rollyo, and explored Technorati, tagging and folksonomies.

If the Learning 2.0 program interests you, be sure to check out Five Weeks to a Social Library also. It's a course developed last fall by Meredith Farkas, Michelle Boule, Karen Coombs, Amanda Etches-Johnson, Ellyssa Kroski, and Dorothea Salo...

Five Weeks to a Social Library is the first free, grassroots, completely online course devoted to teaching librarians about social software and how to use it in their libraries. It was developed to provide a free, comprehensive, and social online learning opportunity for librarians who do not otherwise have access to conferences or continuing education and who would benefit greatly from learning about social software.

The actual course wrapped up earlier this month. Readings and screencasts are available on the site.

[Wired] Public Library Geeks Take Web 2.0 to the Stacks

Several art museums around the country are starting to give users the ability to enhance their websites in a manner similar to that used by flickr, LibraryThing, and del.icio.us...

“Museums have recognized that their online collections are not doing the job — we’re hiding the content away from nonspecialists,” said Jennifer Trant, a partner at Archives and Museum Informatics in Toronto. “We’ve got to provide access on the same level as visual memory.”

Now, after spending millions of dollars and years of effort on their virtual homes — which draw many more visitors than their physical ones — museums are rethinking their online collections. They are experimenting with one of the hottest Web 2.0 trends: tagging, the basis for popular sites like Flickr.com. In social tagging, users of a service provide the tags, or labels, that describe the content (of photos, Web links, art), thus creating a user-generated taxonomy, or folksonomy, as it’s called.

Museums plan to encourage the public to annotate their collections by supplying descriptive tags that could exist alongside professional documentation, creating a new shared vocabulary. Van Gogh’s “Starry Night,” for example, could elicit tags like “stars,” “planets,” “swirls” or “insanity.”

The museums that are experimenting with tags include the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Indianapolis Museum of Art, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Denver Art Museum, the Guggenheim Museum, the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, the Rubin Museum of Art in Manhattan and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

This follows the introduction of tags to several several library catalogs around the country, including those at the University of Pennsylvania and Ann Arbor District Library.

Amazon.com added tags awhile back, but users have yet to warm up to that site's tagging scheme. LibraryThing founder Tim Spalding performed a statistical comparison of the difference in success levels for tags on his site and on Amazon a few weeks ago...

Both LibraryThing and Amazon allow users to tag books. But with a tiny fraction of Amazon's traffic, LibraryThing ahttp://www.librarylaws.org/node/add/blog
Submit Blog entry | Library Lawsppears to have accumulated *ten times* as many book tags as Amazon—13 million tags on LibraryThing to about 1.3 million on Amazon. (See below for the method I used to find this out.)

Something is going on here—something with broad implications for tagging, classification and "Web 2.0" commerce. There are a couple of lessons, but the most important is this: Tagging works well when people tag "their" stuff, but it fails when they're asked to do it to "someone else's" stuff. You can't get your customers to organize your products, unless you give them a very good incentive. We all make our beds, but nobody volunteers to fluff pillows at the local Sheraton.

Read Tim's complete post here.

[New York Times] One Picture, 1,000 Tags

My last post discussed using call forwarding on Skype as a method for having one phone number that rings all your phones (e.g., home, office, and cell) simultaneously (with obvious applications for remote phone reference service). Well, GrandCentral, a Web 2.0 startup, is offering the same convenience, along with a host of other novel features, including centralized voicemail, the ability to switch between phones in the middle of a call, customized outgoing messages for different types of callers, spam filters for telemarketers, and the ability to listen in live as callers leave a voicemail message and the option to pick up the call at anytime during the recording.

GrandCentral got a big boost last Thursday when David Pogue published a story about the service in the New York Times. Pogue does a better job explaining the features of the service than the company's website:

From now on, whenever somebody dials your new uninumber, all of your phones ring simultaneously, like something out of “The Lawnmower Man.”

No longer will anyone have to track you down by dialing each of your numbers in turn. No longer does it matter if you’re home, at work or on the road. Your new GrandCentral phone number will find you.

As a bonus, all messages now land in a single voice mail box. You can listen to them in any of three ways. First, you can dial in from any phone (a text message arrives on your cellphone to let you know when you have voice mail). If you call in from your cellphone, you don’t even have to enter your password first.[...]

All of this, incredibly, is free if you have only two phone numbers to consolidate. A premium plan, at $15 a month, offers more of everything: up to six phone numbers unified, voice messages preserved forever instead of for 30 days, and so on, along with a Web site free of ads.

In my post on Skype, I fretted over the likelihood that my office or cell's voicemail would pick up the call before Skype's centralized message service could kick in. GrandCentral has actually solved that problem. While callers hear the traditional ringing sound, you are met with a menu of choices when you pick up (take call, send to voicemail, send to voicemail and listen, etc.), and your phone is not actually connected to the caller unless you choose to take the call. If you don't select an option within 15 seconds, the caller is automatically forwarded to your GrandCentral voicemail. Even if your cell voicemail picks up, the caller never hears it and no message gets left on your cell.

The biggest problem with GrandCentral? Getting people to actually call your new number, particularly in a work environment with short extensions and in-house phone directories.

Professional golfer Fuzzy Zoeller is going to court to discover the identity of a person who added unsubstantiated information regarding substance abuse and family problems to his biography on Wikipedia...

Zoeller's attorney, Scott D. Sheftall, said he filed the lawsuit against a Miami firm last week because the law won't allow him to sue St. Petersburg-based Wikipedia. The suit alleges someone used a computer at Josef Silny & Associates, a Miami education consulting firm, to add the information to Zoeller's Wikipedia profile.

"Courts have clearly said you have to go after the source of the information," Sheftall said. "The Zoeller family wants to take a stand to put a stop to this. Otherwise, we're all just victims of the Internet vandals out there. They ought not to be able to act with impunity."

The Smoking Gun obtained a copy of Zoeller's complaint and posted it online. The site provides a summary of the alleged defamatory content...

Zoeller (who is identified as "John Doe") notes that his Wikipedia page was altered to include his alleged admission to "polishing off a fifth of Jack (Daniels) after popping a handful of Vicodin pills." The page went on to claim that Zoeller had also acknowledged "the violent nature of his disease" and how he had beaten his wife and four children "while under the influence of alcohol and drugs."

This follows the 2005 controversy surrounding inaccurate content in the Wikipedia biography of writer John Siegenthaler, Sr. Following the addition of text stating his suspected involvement in the John and Robert Kennedy assassinations, Siegenthaler publicly criticized Wikipedia and its content policies. He also criticized Congress for passing the Communications Decency Act which prevented any legal action against the website. Siegenthaler did not, however, take legal action of any kind, and when the identity of the anonymous poster was discovered, he spoke with him on the phone and accepted his apology.

[AP] Golf Champion Zoeller Sues to Identify Author of Wikipedia Post

As I've said before, given the ready availability of online alternatives, libraries no longer need to concern themselves with providing or blocking patron access to office software (e.g., word processors, spreadsheets, etc.). Well, in light of rumors that Google is about to launch a web-based alternative to PowerPoint, The Distant Librarian recently pointed to Kolabora's list of existing online presentation options. And there are plenty.

[Kolabora] Web Presentation Tools And Technologies: A Mini-Guide (via The Distant Librarian)

The company behind the popular online game Second Life announced Friday that servers containing customer data had been compromised:

Linden Lab reported today that it is notifying its community of a database breach, which potentially exposed customer data including the unencrypted names and addresses, and the encrypted passwords and encrypted payment information of all Second Life users. Unencrypted credit card information, which is stored on a separate database, was not compromised.

Second Life is a 3-D virtual world inhabited by over 200,000 users. The game has become extremely popular with librarians over the last several months, due in large part to the creation of the Second Life Library 2.0, a project developed by Alliance Library System and OPAL. The Second Life Library features various library services, book discussions, and other live programming.

Second Life recently made news in the the legal education world with the announcement that Professor Charles Nesson of Harvard Law School and his daughter, Rebecca Nesson of Harvard Extension School, would offer a public course on argument in cyberspace through Second Life. The course, titled "CyberOne: Law in the Court of Public Opinion," begins this week.