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If you’ve spent some time playing around in Google Earth, you’ve probably noticed the 3 Dimensional buildings in major US cities. The 3D buildings are drawn using a free Google program called Google Skechup. It is a very easy to use CAD program that reminded me of my days in grade 8 when I was took my first drafting class. It is a lot of fun to play with.

Google has announced a contest where the team that creates the best 3D version of their university or college campus with sketchup wins a trip to Google headquarters in Mountain View California. Very cool. I just wish I was back in College. I’ll see if my Son wants to do his school, and submit it. As a 9 year old he might be able to impress the judges even if his "campus" is a little smaller then most.

Google is in a unique positions to create “a DNS-like system that would store reusable code, and that would enable developers to write tiny programs that load libraries as needed from the cloud.” As Google is a heavy user of Python, it would make sense for them to be a champion for this. It would be a god send to developers who would not need to worry about library verion of a particular library is installed on end users machines.

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Google has some great tools for facilitating research, and in particular, collaborative research. Google’s web based approach to it’s tool set makes collaboration much simpler, and allows researchers to move from computer to computer, and still allow them to access their research. In particular the Google tools can help in the following areas:

• Collaborative Document Editing, including concurrent editing of a single document, and basic version control
• Capturing, organizing and searching digital documents. And doing this collaboratively with other research partners.
• Easily track the progress and changes to documents of your collaborators via RSS feeds in an online reader.
• Publish quickly and easily via blog software that is integrated with their document editing / collaboration infrastructure.

Where to Start?

All you need to give it a try, is to get a Google account (if you don’t already have one). If you have a Gmail account, then you have all you need to try it out. If you don’t have a Gmail account, then you can go to the following page to sign up for a free account (and you can use your current e-mail address as your account name if you wish). Go to the google home page and click on the "Sign in" link on the top right of the page. From there, click on the "Create an account now" link on the right side of the page. After signing up you’re now ready to go.

Reviewing the Tools

Google Documents and spreadsheets (docs.google.com)

• Create Documents (show them the Google for Students document)
• Collaborative Editing. 45 seconds to 1 minute for changes made by someone else to be reflected in the document (or when you navigate to "insert" for example.
• Revisions & Basic Version Control.
• RSS feed to revisions (under "Collaborate" tab. Must be Published to the public to be viewable)
• Currently no footnotes. End notes are done manually by creating the end note first, inserting a bookmark, and then linking to the bookmark from the reference.
• Can put in links to other web resources.
• Can ad comments to the document that are only viewable in the edit mode.
• Can post directly to your BLOG if you’d like.
• Can tag documents (rather than put into sub-folders - much better way of organizing).

Google Reader (google.com/reader)

• Great general news reader that you can access from anywhere…
• Wonderful in that it allows you to monitor changes made to the document you are collaborating on.

Google Notebook (google.com/notebook)

• Allows you to grab Internet text, and keep citation information, to organize your research.
• Can share notebooks with others so you can collaborate on the research you’re doing! (see KM & Collaboration as an example).
• Browser extension makes it very nice to use (both IE and FireFox).
• No current ability to have RSS feeds for Notebooks… Lots of people asking for it though.
• No current tagging functionality. Lots of people asking for this though.

Delicious (del.icio.us) - a Yahoo , not a Google product, but still important

• Some overlap with Google Notebook.
• Notable differences are: Has RSS feeds for tags. Just keeps link, does not grab and store text on server (i.e. if link dies, you info is lost).

Google Talk (chat and voip)

• Allows you to chat and "Talk" (if you’re on a windows machine).
• No real extra functionality beyond what others offer.

Gmail (gmail.com)

• Very nice to use… Chat capability built in.
• Automatically groups and threads your e-mail.
• Spam filter is excellent.

Blogger (www.blogger.com)

• Everything can be accessed via the blog & or RSS feeds.
• Free, and easy to use.

Conclusions

While not full featured, the Google tool set is powerful becuase of its easy to use on-line interface. All you need is a web browser and an internet connection

If you regularly check two, separate Gmail accounts and you’re a Firefox user, you don’t have to switch between them manually all the time. This is an issue that I have with my home and work account. Simply put you use the IE Tab Firefox extension , open up one IE Tab and one regular Firefox tab, and log into your two Gmail accounts, one in each. No more logging in and out! No perfect, but it works… If you have more than two accounts, this won’t work for you.

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I’ve been doing a bit of research lately for a project I’m working on at my day job. The project is a program to help law students learn how to effectively do legal research. The program is call the "Legal Research Record".  The first version of it was written in Java, and runs on Windows (I haven’t tried it on a mac).  As alpha software it is quite buggy, but it serves a valuable purpose as a proof of concept.  I personally would like to see it moved over to a web interface, and it sounds like I’m not alone in that setiment.  Much easier to maintain and update that way, and for students, they can use it on which ever computer they happen to be using at the moment (in the computer lab, on their laptop, or at home).

The draw back to this is, that any practicing lawyer would not want to host any client research information on a 3rd party web server.  A couple of options I’m exploring to get around this problem are XAMPP, and UniformServer. What both of these software packages allow you to do is to install a LAMP, or WAMP software stack on a computer or even a thumb drive, and run the web application on a desktop PC.  This stores the data on the PC or USB thumb drive, getting around the reluctance of lawyers to use 3rd party services.

From the UniformServer web site:

The Uniform Server is a WAMP package that allows you to run a server on any MS Windows OS based computer. It is small and mobile to download or move around and can also be used or setup as a production/live server. Developers also use The Uniform Server to test their applications made with either PHP, MySQL, Perl, or the Apache HTTPd Server.

It will be interesting to see how well this works in practice. In particular, I’ll be interested to see how easy it is to upgrade the web application, and maintain the data in the database.  For the record, XAMPP will run on Linux, Windows, and Mac OSX computers.

In my role as Systems Administrator at the University of Victoria Faculty of Law, I recently compilted the results of th IT/Computer portion of the annual 1st year student survey. Here is a link to the three page survey. Here are some highlights from the Survey:

• 94% of incoming students own laptops, and 98% of those laptops are wireless.
• 87% have high speed internet at home, and only 1% do not have any form of internet access from home.
• The average purchase price for laptops dropped again to $1358 (down from over $2000 in 2004).
• See the last page of the report for student comments (page 3).

I guess it’s not surprising that wireless capabilities on student laptops is approaching 100% given that you cannot buy a laptop now without a wireless card built in. Anecdotally, I’ve noticed large numbers of students using skype for their long distance calls, rather than land lines, cell phones, and/or calling cards. I wonder if that will change now that the "Skype-out" to regular phones is not free. It is interesting that laptop prices continue to fall at a fairly steady rate, which in part is helping increase the number of students who can afford to arrive at school with a laptop. The only question is what are they doing with their laptops in class