The Yankee Clock Peddler and his travelling companion start out on a sales tip in a rural area, and they stop for the night at a farmer’s house. In the morning before leaving to make sales call in neighbouring communities, the clock peddler asks the farmer if he’d store a clock for him for a couple of weeks, and that he’ll pick the clock up on his way back home. The farmer agreed to this, so the Peddler wound up the clock and placed it on the farmer’s wall before leaving (the farmer does not yet own a clock).  When out of ear shot, the traveling companion asks the clock peddler why he left the clock at the house. Didn’t he want to sell the clock on the trip?  To this the Yankee Clock Peddler replied, “don’t worry, by the time I come back in a couple of weeks, the clock will be sold… the farmer will happily buy it from me.”

The moral of the story is:  “We can do without any article of luxury we have never had, but when once obtained, it is not in human nature to surrender it voluntarily.”

Here are some of the ways my iPhone is an article of luxury that I could not easily do without anymore:

• I consume almost all my news on my iPhone and to a lesser extend on my iPad. I start my day reading the news in bed on my iPhone. This way I can be up to speed on the news before heading out for the day, and I don’t wake my wife before she needs to get up at the same time.  For reading new I use the built-in Safari web browser, Zite and Flipboard. Sports with ESPN sports.
• The other thing I do before getting out of bed (and at other times during the day) is skim through my email in the Gmail app, as well as my to-do list in GoTasks (GoTasks hooks into my Google Task list).
• As I get ready to leave for work in the morning I check out the built-in Weather app so see what I’m facing weather wise before getting on my bike.
• Before leaving campus around 5pm, I download the 6pm CBC news (from an earlier East coast broadcast) and then listen to it on the way home in the Downcast app at double speed.  Why at double speed to you ask?  Because my bike ride home only takes 15 minutes, so at double speed I can listen to the whole 30 minute news cast on my commute home.  I also listen to a lot of technology podcasts for news and continuing education.

My iPhone also comes in handy for:

• Settling bets.  If there is disagreement over any obscure facts over dinner or in a conversation, it’s nice to know that it can settle the argument in 30 seconds with my iPhone and Siri or Google.
• I frequently read books in bed, over lunch, or if I have some idle time. Kindle, iBooks are my favourite readers (Kindle ebooks tend to be less expensive in my experience). The place in the book you’re reading syncs nicely between iPads and iPhones, so you don’t have to keep track of where you are if you read on both devices. I love being able to easily change the font size to match how tired my eyes are at any given time. I think the changeable font size will be a big selling feature for older readers.
• Lastly, I love to be able to share photos with family and friends when I’m out and about, rather than take time to upload them to Facebook from my computer when I get home.

I’d argue that one modern-day incarnation of the Yankee Clock Pedder’s windup wall clock is the iPhone. Once you’ve had a chance to use used an iPhone for a while, you’ll probably end up wondering how you did without it. I’m confident that would be the case for the intrepid retired women I talked to last week.

• Kindle & iBooks – The Kindle and iBooks readers are the only apps you’ll probably need for reading books, and PDF files that people email to you. Both Do are excellent eBook readers, but books typically cost less in the Kindle store. On the other hand, I’ve found it much easier to get PDF files into the iBooks reader, so you’ll want to have both installed on your device. Don’t waste your time on the Kobo reader.
• Zite & Flipboard - Zite is a free personalized magazine for your iPad that automatically learns what you like and gets smarter every time you use it. Flipboard on the other hand had a little bit slicker interface than Zite, but it does not learn your likes and dislikes as you read over time, but stick with the sites and categories you’ve chosen to read. I’d try both out to see which you like better.
• Facebook & Path - Almost everyone is on Facebook now, and if you are, you should install the Facebook app. The user experience using the app is much more responsive and polished than the mobile web browser interface. You might also want to try out Path. Path allows you to post through to Facebook if you choose, or limit your posts to other Path users.  If you try it, I suspect you’ll like it.
• Evernote - An excellent tool for capturing, syncing data between your desktop and cell phone. I love the ability it gives me to take a picture of a white board, and then later do a key word search on the text that Evernote has OCR’ed for me. I like to call it my “external brain”.

• DropBox – DropBox, combined with Document to Go Premium is a great solution for those who want to be able to edit MS Office documents on their mobile device, and have those files automatically sync back to their desktop or laptop computer.  See my previous Blog post for more details.
• Documents To Go Premium ($17) – Open & edit Word, Excel & PowerPoint Documents from all the most popular cloud sources: Google Docs, DropBox, Box.net & SugarSync.
• Notability ($1) – An excellent tool for taking notes, that also allows you to record audio and sync it with your notes as you take them, as well as import and annotate PDF files.
• Gmail – If you use Gmail, you’re punishing yourself by not downloading the Gmail app for your iPhone and/or iPad. The Apple mail app is ok, but you’ll be much more comfortable in the native Gmail app.
• GoTasks – I use the task manager built into Gmail, so this free app has been very helpful in giving me a elegant app interface into those tasks.  I actually prefer GoTasks to the native Google interface.
• TripIt – “Tripit turns all your flight, hotel and rental car confirmation emails into simple, mobile travel itineraries just by hitting forward.”  Once you’ve used TripIt, you’ll never go back to managing your travel itineraries any other way.
• Google Translation & Google App – Google translate let’s you type or speak phrases and give’s you back a translation in the language of your choice. The Google search app allows you to take pictures and traslate the text into another language.  It can also take a picture of a business card and add it to your contacts on your iPhone.
• Flixster – Want to get quick reviews for movies, or find out what time a show is starting locally, Flixster comes to the rescue. Flixster’s critics and audience ratings are usually very helpful.
• Photosynth – A great free tool from Microsoft for taking panoramic photos with your iPhone.
• Downcast ($2) – If you are a podcast listener, I highly recommend you try out Downcast.  Why? 1. you can skip ahead 30 seconds or 2 minutes with a press of a button. 2. You can download your podcasts over the air and not have to plug into your main computer to update your podcasts. 3. You can start listening to a podcast as soon as it starts downloading rather than be forced to wait until it’s finished downloading. 4. Lastly, if you want to seed up your listening experience you have your choice of 1.25, 1.5, 1.75, 2, 2.5 or 3 times faster than normal.
• AirVideo ($3) - If you already have a video on your desktop computer, but you don’t want to have to spend the time and effort into converting it into an iPad friendly format, Air Video allows you to simultaneously trans-code and stream the video to your iPad or iPhone over your wifi network.  This works wonderfully when you’re at home, but will not work when you’re on the road.  Even so, Air Video is a app I use on a weekly basis.
• Navionics ($15) - If you are a sailer or boater with an iPad 3G or iPhone, Navionics Marine software is a must buy! Not only does the software track your cruises, but gives you access to tide and current information.  Once your done on the water, you can upload your cruise track to Facebook, or email it to yourself or to your friends to view in Google Earth.
• ShipFinder - Ship Finder provides a near real time map show the location of commercial shipping in coastal waters. If you are interested in shipping, cruising or sailing in ports and locations across the world, this is an app that you’ll enjoy.
• Marine Conditions for Victoria BC – While this is more of a mobile web app than a true iPhone or iPad app, it is something I wrote myself. It allow you to view up to date weather, current and tide information for the Victoria, BC, Canada area on your mobile device. Enjoy!

1. When collaborating with classmates on a group project, do you get tired of trying to figure out which of the versions that have been emailed to you is the most current?
2. Do you get discouraged when you are faced with the task of merging edits from 2 or more students into a single document near the end of the group project?
3. Do some of your edits get lost in the group collaboration email shuffle?

If you’ve said yes to any one of the questions above, then you should take a serious look at using either Google Docs or Microsoft Word Web App for your next group project.  That said, here are a few things to keep in mind as you being to collaboratively create and edit documents on the web:

• While the look and feel of Microsoft Word Web App is very similar to the desktop version of Word, you cannot add or edit footnotes, end notes, or tables of contents in the online version of Word. You can connect to the file from your desktop version of Word to add and edit those elements in your group document however (on a Mac you’ll need Mac Office 2011 to do this).
• Google Docs supports foot notes, end notes and tables of contents in the web browser, but the editing interface is not as rich as the desktop version of Word.  For some people this is not a problem. For others it is a show stopper.  You can decide for yourself.

Pivot tables are the quickest and easiest way to get useful information out of spreadsheets of data… especially large spreadsheets of data. Google Docs makes using pivot tables quite easy if you’re familiar with spreadsheets. Let’s say you have a spreadsheet of conference attendees with contact information along with the sessions they registered for, and the date that they registered.  Using a pivot table you could quickly find out if there is a correlation between the people who registered for the “how to get organized” workshop, and how early people registered.

You could also quickly determine how many people attending the conference are out of Province (or State).  I’ve just scratched the surface; it’s truly amazing the information you can glean for playing around with a pivot table and a data set. I first used pivot tables over 10 years ago while working at at Westech Building Products, a manufacturing company, and they were invaluable when analyzing production and sales data.

Take a look at the following 1.5 minute video for an excellent overview.  Happy spreadsheeting!

How to sync and edit documents from my desktop computer on my iPad is a question that I’ve had ever since I purchased my iPad in April of 2010.  The good new is that I finally have a good answer, and  ironically the apps that facilitate the editing and syncing are ones that I’ve used for years now, one of which has just recently come to the iPad and iPhone… or at least recently came to my attention.  Here’s the equation:

Dropbox + Documents To Go = iPad Document Nirvana!

Here is what you need to turn your iPad into a document editing & syncing machine:

Step 1: If you don’t have a free Dropbox account already, then now is your excuse to finally download and install it on your desktop computer(s).  Dropbox is a cloud service that synchronizes files between your computers, and keeps them up to date. It runs on Mac’s, Windows & Linux. For example, I have dropbox running on my Mac laptop and Windows desktop computer. So when I save a file to my Dropbox folder on my desktop computer, that file gets save to my account on the dropbox server on the internet. The next time I turn on my laptop, it checks to see if any files have changed, and then if they have, download the changed files to my laptop.  It is a wonderful service if you use more than one computer (or computer & iPad/iPhone).  The use of Dropbox is free for up to 2GB of data, and then $10 per month (for $99 per year) for 50GB of data.  I personally subscribe to the 50GB plan because I store all my family photos there along with all my documents, but I digress.

Step 2: Install the free Dropbox app on your iPad (or iPhone, or Blackberry, or Android phone if you have one) via the Apple App store. Enter the same user name and password that you setup your Dro

pbox account with on your desktop computer.

Step 3: Again via the Apple App store, and install Documents To Go Premium – Office Suite. Make sure you get the “Premium” version for $16.99, as the basic version does not sync files with Dropbox (or Google Docs). Once you’ve installed the app, press the “Online” button on the bottom nav bar, and then the app will ask you what type of account you want to synchronize with. Select Dropbox, enter your account information, and you set.

That’s it!  You’ve now turned your iPad into a legitimate business machine so that you can word process & spreadsheet on the go, and sync everything back to your desktop computer.  Enjoy!

Do YouTube and Facebook distract students?  Of course they do!  On the other hand, can YouTube and Facebook help students with their school work?  Until recently I wasn’t sure, but after my partner’s experience with a professor who wasn’t a good teacher, and seeing how YouTube and Facebook saved her and her classmates from poor grades, I’m convinced that these “digital distractions” can be, if used intelligently, excellent Learning Tools.

Being the father of two teenagers, the husband of a partner that has recently gone back to college, and Systems Administrator at a University Law Library, I have a front row seat  on how technology is used and abused in the service of homework, research and education in general.  When my partner found herself in a college class teaching challenged professor, I was amazed at how she, along with her classmates, used technology to compensate for the poor classroom instruction. Her learning process for each class was as follows:

• She would read the chapter(s) in preparation for class, and usually understand some, but not all of the concepts that she read.
• She and her classmates would go to class and listen to the professor read his power point slides, leaving the chapter’s concepts no clearer than the text book reading.
• Later that evening, my partner would check the facebook group for her class to see if anyone had figured out the main points of the lecture yet.  If no one had yet, she would start doing YouTube searches for the key topics in her readings, and would usually find one or more videos that visually explained the topics much more clearly than either the text book or her professor could.  For example, check out this explanation of Mitosis on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VlN7K1-9QB0
• After finding a clear explanation, she would post a link to the video on her classes Facebook group.  At the same time she would typically find links to other topics from the reading and lecture that classmates had posted.
• She would watch all the videos and make notes from them for later review before exams.

This is how the whole semester went.  In the end, in spite of her ineffective teacher, she received an A- grade in the course.  Then again, maybe it is because of her teacher’s poor instruction that she and her classmates were forced to spend extra time to find quality materials on-line to explain and learn the concepts they needed to master. To sum up, there seem to be two important tools and trends that were very helpful to my partner and her class:

1. The availability of high quality learning resources on YouTube and other websites for college and high school students.
2. Facebook’s collaboration capabilities make it very easy for groups to share information (links to YouTube), and then discuss the quality and merits of each of the videos among themselves. All the students are Facebook users, so it is a natural virtual space for them to collaborate in while they work on homework from home or library.

Serious Tools

• Evernote – Cost: Free or $5 / month – An excellent tool for capturing, syncing data between your desktop and cell phone. I love the ability it gives me to take a picture of a white board, and then later do a key word search on the text that Evernote has OCR’ed for me. – http://evernote.com
• Google Mobile App – Free – The app’s easy-to-use voice or image search feature locates what you are looking for without typing. Try an image search with Book or DVD covers, bar codes or house hold items. Google Goggles is a useful and fun tool. – http://www.google.com/mobile/google-mobile-app/
• Dragon Dictation – Free – Speech to text app that allows you to easily speak and instantly see your text content for everything from email messages, SMS, Facebook or blog posts – http://www.dragonmobileapps.com/
• Read it Later – Cost: Free – Allows you to bookmark interesting news stories on your desktop computer and then read those articles on your iPhone when you have a spare minute or two. It re-formats pages to make them easier to read on a small screen. – http://readitlaterlist.com
• myHomework – Free – Allows you to keep track of you homework, classes, projects and tests. If you need help staying organized this may be a useful tool for you. A great way to get your mom to stop nagging you about your homework. – http://myhomework.rigoneri.com/
• Wunderlist – Free – To Do list for iPhone, iPod Touch, Mac & Windows. An excellent generic GTD or Getting Things Done tool. iPhone/iPod Touch, Mac & Windows applications. – http://www.6wunderkinder.com/wunderlist/
• Mind Maps – Cost: Free or $7 – Turns your iPhone into a brainstorming, idea collection and thought structuring device – http://simpleapps.eu/simplemind
• iBooks – Free – a free ebook reader from Apple that allows you to read PDF files, and free ePub files from the internet. You can also purchase popular copyrighted books from Apple. – http://www.apple.com/ipad/features/ibooks.html
• YouTube – Free – Your teacher can’t explain something to you so that you can understand?  Try searching for the topic on YouTube and see if there is someone who can give you a good explanation. More often that not, you’ll find a master teacher that has taken the time to record a video for you. – http://youtube.com
• Google Docs – Free – Google Docshas real time collaboration capabilities, with built in version control, and all you need is a web browser.  If I was back in school, this would be the only tool I’d use for group projects. – http://docs.google.com

Fun & Useful Tools: They won’t necessarily help you with your school work, but they are cool none the less.

• StarWalk – Cost: $3 – Tilt your iPhone towards the sky to and the image on your screen will correspond to the area of the sky you are pointing your phone towards. A very cool app. – http://vitotechnology.com/star-walk.html
• Urban Spoon – Cost: Free – One of the funnest ways to find restaurants in your home town or on the road. Check out the “scope” to see how we might be finding our way around unfamiliar locations: visiting a new city or unfamiliar shopping mall – http://urbanspoon.com
• Run keeper – Cost: Free or $10 – A great tool that maps your runs for you via GPS. The integration between the mobile app and their website is outstanding. – http://runkeeper.com

Enjoy this 1.5 minute video!

That said, here are my primary and secondary recommendations for collaborative tools, along with some rational for my selections:

1. For Audio, Video Conferencing, along with Computer Desktop Sharing, my first recommendation would be Skype.  In my experience, Skype works well in low bandwidth situations, and it’s desktop sharing feature can be very handy if you need to see what is happening on a colleague’s desktop (talking through last minute document edits for example). My second choice would be Google Talk. It supports built in Video and Audio conferencing, and integrates into Google Docs which can be handy if you’ve setup a custom Google Apps instance for your research project.
2. For collaborative document editing my first choice would be Google Docs (see this post about Google Docs for collaborative book writing). Google Docs has built in tools for version control (which is invaluable when collaboratively editing documents), and has footnoting capabilities that Office Live is currently lacking.  My second choice would be Office Live (office.live.com), because of it’s lack of footnoting.  SharePoint is another tool that is used for collaboration in larger organizations, but at least where I work (the University of Victoria), it is difficult to add people outside of our organization to a SharePoint group, and documents cannot be edited by to people at the same time.
3. If Google Doc’s or Office Live are too big a technological stretch for those involved in the project, I then suggest using Drop Box for synchronizing files between all the participants.  This will sync the word documents automatically between participants, but you aren’t able to have two people editing the same document at the same time like you can with Google Docs, or Office Live.
4. If threaded discussions are part of the project, Google Apps for Domains has a built in tool for doing this.  SharePoint also allows for threaded discussion to be easily setup.
5. As for Email, I think most like to use their current account rather than check multiple inboxes, and the same can be said for calendaring.  If a participant needs an email address & calendaring solution, I typically recommend Gmail, or Google Apps for Domains.

The products in this space are rapidly evolving, so what is top of the class today, could be different six months from now.  Let me know what the “ideal” tool set for your group would look like.

1. Along with creating very compact URL’s, Goo.gl also generates a QR code for every URL that you shorten. If you see a Goo.gl URL you want a QR code for, all you need to do is to add a “.qr” to the end of the URL, like magic a QR code will appear. If you are creating QR Code for a large number of web pages, this is going to be a real time saver.
2. With Google putting it’s weight behind it’s own URL shortener, I have a lot more confidence that it is going to be around 2 or 3 years from now.

Enjoy!

As David Pogue points out, this might be just what the doctor ordered for your tween, who wants a cell phone, but you’re not interested in signing a 2 or 3 year contract.

Another option in Canada is Koodo Mobility. Two of our teenage kids have no contract cell phones through Koodo, and the $20 monthly fee they each pay gives them unlimited texting and 50 talk minutes per month (we had to build our own plan to get the monthly fee down to $20).  Given that they almost exclusively text, this works just fine for them.

If I did not have a year left on my cell phone contract what I would personally do is buy an unlocked iPhone from the Apple Store for $660 (yes we can buy unlocked iPhone in Canada). Get the smallest Data and Voice Plan I can find from a local carrier (about $25 per month with Koodo including 100MB of data), and then use a service like Line2 for $15 per month.  My Monthly phone bill would drop to $40.  For 500MB of data the cost would rise to about $55 per month.  Lower cost, and unlimited voice in North America.

My first preference would be to use Google Voice, but as I mentioned it is not yet available in Canada yet. In any case this sort of competition should benefit all cell phone users as it will put pressure on them to lower their costs or risk loosing customers as their contracts expire.

Not only does collaborative highlighting show you where you classmates are working, but it will also show you when they highlight blocks of text, so you can watch to see if the text get deleted or moved.  I wish I’d been able to use Google Docs when I was a Bachelor of Commerce student continually working on group projects!

Some of the other features that college students will appreciate are:

• Footnotes and Endnotes
• Table of Contents tool
• Inline Thesaurus and Dictionary lookups
• Add new words to a Custom Dictionary
• Auto save every few seconds

Enjoy!

I live in Canada, specifically in the Province of British Columbia, and our government passed a law several years ago requiring that publicly funded institutions store personal data on servers in Canada only.  This makes sense especially in light of the US Patriot act, which allows for American law enforcement agencies to look through private data without necessarily obtaining a search warrant, and without notifying the owner of the data that they have been snooping around.

So Google, when is the Google Apps for Canadian Governments going to be launched? I’m looking forward to the press conference!

Here are my thoughts on Microsoft Word Web App (live.office.com). Before you test drive it yourself, you’ll need an active hotmail.com or live.com account.

Word Web App Pros:

• The look and feel of the Word Web App is very similar to Word 2007.  Similar, but not as many features, which is to be expected at this point in it’s product development. If you use Word 2007 you have a very small learning curve.
• Sharing a document with others is easy to do.  Having the document on the internet makes collaboration simple… no more worrying about whether or not you have the most recent version in your email inbox or not.
• The built in version control looks solid.  It is now a trivial task to revert the document back to an earlier version if necessary, or see what was deleted by accident.
• 25GB of file storage is excellent. I’m not sure what the limit is in Google Docs to be honest.
• You can edit documents in any web browser, not just Internet Explorer.  I’ve been working in Google Chrome on a Mac, and the experience has been good.

Word Web App Cons:

• No footnotes, endnotes or Tables of Contents. For students this is a problem.  You can add footnotes, endnotes and Tables of Contents in the desktop version of Word, but you can’t edit them or even see them in the online version.  Hopefully this will change soon, as this is a big problem for students who need to cite their references.  Google Docs started out without footnotes, but added them in October of 2008.
• While you can edit documents just fine in any web browser, if you want to edit the file in your desktop version of Word you need to be on a Windows computer in Internet Explorer.  Not a huge deal, unless you need to add footnotes, or are on a Mac.

Whether you end up using Microsoft Office Web Apps, or Google Docs, we’re all going to benefit from Microsoft getting into this market.  Overall this is a good first effort from Microsoft.  Hopefully they’ll quickly add footnotes to their otherwise excellent product.

Here’s a short Google Apps video that shows how useful real time collaboration on a document can be… no more emailing a document back and forth between collaborators:

At the time of my diagnosis I was inundated with suggestions from friends about different supplements that I should try that would hopefully help my condition.  I’m happy to say that I’m still here to write this blog post!  I’m also here to tell you that I didn’t follow any of the suggestions.  It would have taken me a year or more to throughly research the dozens of “suggestions” I received (some of them plausible, and some outright crazy sounding – “wheat grass cures most cancers”?).  A visualization of supplements with an indication of the quality of the science backing up their claims, would have been an invaluable tool in helping to quickly sort out quackery from the truly helpful.

I am even more skeptical now than I was back then, so I would not accept this as the final word on any of the supplements they list, but would use it as a good starting point for doing some research if a particular supplement looked helpful.  One thing I really like is that they included a link to the underlying data was used to generate the visualization, including links to the studies they relied on, so you can do your own analysis if you wish.

Have fun researching!

Step 1: Open Firefox, and download the Video Download Helper plug-in.  This plugin will allow you to save Flash Files to your desktop.  If that is allow you want to do, then you should be able to view the video using a video player like VLC Player.  If you want to convert the flash video into something playable on your iPhone or iPod, then on to the next step.

Step 2: If you are running Windows and want to convert the flash video to an iPhone compatible format, or Windows media format, then I’d suggest you download and install Format Factory.  If you are running Mac OSX, then I’d download Handbrake, to do the conversion job.

DVD Conversion: If all you want to do convert some DVD’s to iPhone or iPod Touch format for the road trip, then install Handbrake on your computer and rip the DVD’s into MP4 files.  This will take a while to convert the videos (almost as long as it would take to watch the video itself), but can be worth while if everyone is able to keep their sanity on the trip.

Have fun converting YouTube videos for your kids iPods for that next long family road trip!

In addition to the technology questions we’ve been asking UVic law students over the past seven years, we decided to ask some extra questions about the increasing important mobile technology that students are arriving at Law School equipped with.  One major change to the methodology of this survey compared to past years is that we sent the survey to all students at the law school, not just first year students.  The response rate was 25% this year rather than close to 100% in previous years.

[Note: if you have problems seeing any graphs on this page, please look at the underlying Google Doc's page for this blog post]

Executive Summary:

• 30% of students own “Smart Phones” that can browse the internet.
• 97% of students own laptops, and over 60% own both a laptop and a desktop computer.
• 39% of student laptops are Mac’s.
• The average laptop price dropped to $1,200 from $1400 in 2007, and from $2,100 in 2004.
• All students now report having high speed internet in their homes.
• 82% of students bring their laptops to school almost every day.
• 86% of students own MP3 players capable of listening to recorded lectures.
• 54% of students use Gmail as their primary email account, 18% use UVic email and 15% Hotmail.
• 58% of students identified MS Word as their favorite tool for collaborative document editing.  27% chose Google Docs, 5% OpenOffice Writer & 10% “Other”.
• 100% of students now have access to high speed internet at their homes.
• 86% of students use Facebook and 65% of those students would like to see law school events and activities published on Facebook as well as through the online faculty calendar of events.

Smart Phone / Cell Phone Ownership

4. I do not own a cell phone  - 11%
3. Regular cell phone  -  59%
2. Smart phone - iPhone –  9%
1. Smart phone - Blackberry –  16%
0. Smart phone – Other  -  5%

30% of students own “Smart Phones” or phones with built in web browsers that allow them to surf the internet on their cell phones.

From the library’s perspective this will be an important area to watch, as there are a number of interesting new technologies (like QR Codes) that could potentially enhance the library’s services that depend on library patrons having access to the internet on their cell phones.

On the other end of the spectrum, surprisingly 11% of students do not own a cell phone at all.  Given how ubiquitous cell phones are becoming, I suspect that this number will drop over time. The high cost of cell phone plans in Canada relative to other countries probably contributes to the number of students with out cell phones.

Laptop Ownership

For the first time, all respondents to the survey report having either a laptop, a desktop computer, or both.

Laptop ownership has plateaued at 97% after years of steady increases. Currently 39% of all laptops are Mac’s, 3% are Linux, and the remaining 58% are running Windows.

The average price paid for student laptops has dropped again to just over $1,200 this year from $1400 in 2007, and $2,100 in 2004.

Desktop computer ownership has been increasing over the past two surveys, with over 60% of students owning both a laptop and a desktop computer.  All students now have access to high speed internet in their homes.

How often do students bring their laptops to school

Almost every day  -  82%
More than once a week  -  10%
Occasionally  -  8%
Never  -  0%

One only has to look in Law Faculty class in session to realize that at least 82% of students bring their laptops to school almost every day.  Does this open up pedagogical opportunities, or is it just a thorn in the side of faculty members?

MP3 Player Ownership

4. No  -  14%
3. iPod (audio only)  -  61%
2. iPod Touch  -  21%
1. iPhone  -  8%
0. Other  -  10%

86% of students own an MP3 Player of some kind.  Of those students, 88% own Apple products. For any instructors wishing to do podcasts of their lectures, there is no need to hold back any longer as the 14% of students with out PM3 players can review class lecture podcasts on their laptops.  Campus Systems is considering setting up a UVic iTunes site (like other universites have done) which would make distributing the mp3′s of class lectures very simple to do.

Primary Email Account

7. UVic  -  18%
6. Previous University  -  3%
5. Hotmail  -  15%
4. Gmail  -  54%
3. Yahoo  -  4%
2. Shaw  -  6%
1. Telus  -  0%
0. Other  -  1%

Currently only 18% of students use their UVic email account as their primary email account.  The rest – 82% – forward their UVic email to a 3rd party email provider.  52% use Gmail as their primary account, and 15% use Hotmail.

Favorite Collaborative Document Editing Software

Microsoft Word  -  58%
WordPerfect  -  0%
OpenOffice Writer  -  5%
Google Docs  -  27%
Other  -  10%

Microsoft Word is currently the most popular tools for collaborative document editing at 58%.  Interestingly, Google Docs is preferred by 27% of students. The strong showing of Google Docs is probably due to it’s real time collaboration features that allow multiple authors to work on a document at the same time with built in version control.

High Speed Internet

This is probably the last year that we will mention this question in the survey summary, because after coming close to 100% in previous years, this year, 100% of students responded that they now have access to high speed internet at their homes.

Facekook Usage

Currently 86% of students use Facebook. This is up marginally from 79% two years ago.  Of the Facebook users, 69% connected with other incoming students via Facebook, and another 3% did not, but would have liked to.

65% of Facebook users would like to see Law School events and activities published on Facebook as well as in the online Faculty calendar.

Some students voiced strong reservations about mixing their “business” and “personal” lives on Facebook.  It was also mentioned that many Law School and LSS events are already on Facebook via “organic” groups.  What might be interesting to pursue is to ask the LSS to post all Law Faculty events on their group, so that those who use Facebook can have the option of subscribing to a complete list of Law Faculty and LSS events with out Law Faculty or Staff being involved on Facebook. This would address the primary privacy concern of students.  We would also continue to provide our in house Calendar for those who do not use Facebook, or who do not want to use Facebook in this manner.

Student Comments:

• Beyond the issue of direct interactions with staff and professors, I have concerns about the encroachment of other law school activities into the Facebook world. How long will it be until law firms begin using the law school networks to interact with students? This would raise serious issues of personal information being revealed to a prospective employer which, by law, may not be released to them (marital status, sexual orientation, age, religion and other personal attributes are often easily ascertained when viewing a person’s profile).
• Many of the law school events are already published to facebook – i.e. LSS events, guest speakers brought in by clubs, etc. However, it would be helpful to have all events on Facebook, for example the LCO events.
• There is already a great deal of law school activity on facebook. I’m not sure if it would be worth it for the faculty to consider implimenting facebook into social networking as there is already a very organic and active network there. almost every student or club-organized.  event is already on facebook.  Don’t get too excited about it.
• Ban it from classrooms. just one thing i notice missing from the survey: lots of students have a powerful laptop that they keep at home for the most part, except maybe for exam writing at school. then they also have a netbook which they keep at school for note taking, web, email etc. this is a growing trend I think.
• Personally, I don’t like to receive multiple notifications of the same event via different media. Since everybody doesn’t have facebook, it probably wouldn’t make sense to use it as the primary communciation tool. However, having a calendar or other pages available to access as desired could potentially be helpful.
• Very invasive.
• Facebook is a social tool, not a professional one. For many people, embarrassing and awkward situations have arisen due to forgetting this distinction. I intentionally segregate my personal Facebook from my professional activities and formal acquaintances.
• For better or for worse, the Faculty of Law at UVic is a formal, professional acquaintance for students in the program.
• Let the Business students across Ring Road “network” and self-promote. As future lawyers, we have an obligation to professional and respectful dealings with each other. Please help maintain and perpetuate this atmosphere rather than moving law school activities onto Facebook and contributing to a downward slide into informality and familiarity.
  This is the second time the law school has asked this about facebook.
• I know you guys are old but please… use your head. Facebook = social tool. Law school = career tool. NEVER THE TWAIN SHALL MEET.
• Would the law school phone me at home to invite me to a social event? No. If they did I would be annoyed. Similarly, I don’t want Facebook invites from the law school inviting me to social events.
• I already get MEGA SPAMMED by the law school by email. This is irritating. I do not want Facebook spam too. If nobody comes to the events it’s not because nobody knows about them, it’s probably because they are boring.
• Sorry, but someone’s gotta say it.  Facebook is a social tool and is not professional enough to be used as a tool for official university messages. I have considered deleting my Facebook account because of concerns about future employers looking at personal social information out of context. There may be other social networking tools that the school could appropriately use, but I strongly believe that Facebook is not one of them.
  Facebook should not be used in relation to law school, especially in publishing law school events.
• set up a facebook block in the classrooms so students cannot access f/b during classes.
  I would like to see events made available via a general RSS feed. I would like those events to include student events.
• I dislike Facebook but joined because I found it was a necessary tool for staying in contact with other law students re study groups, etc.
• I hesitate to encourage widespread Facebook use. Many career-related CBA speakers have told us that in fact social networking can be detrimental to both privacy and career. It is also–from what I can see around me in class every day–a huge time-waster and almost an addiction.
• The more things that are put on facebook, the more it becomes close to compulsory in use, even to those of us who are consciously eschewing its use for good reasons.
• Facebook can be alienating for certain demographics. Using it is kinda like mandating gym class or sororities: i.e. it’s great for athletes and rich kids; less so for others.
• Facebook is a massive waste of time. It is also a huge distraction in class where classmates are constantly “facebooking” in front/beside us.
• Rarely use it, and not for organizing my schedule.
• I would prefer not to have law school events on facebook, but it just seems to be the only forum that connects most law students in a way that is efficient for informing students and promoting events for clubs. I sincerely hope that the faculty and administration doesn’t start using facebook…

We know that their motto is “Do no Evil”, but now that they are a public company, their only real duty as a corporation is to enhance shareholder value.  If down the road Google falls on leaner times, and they have to choose between enhancing shareholder value and protecting the public’s privacy, I’m not sure how well our privacy will be protected.  I hope that they’ll do the right thing, but without strong regulation and threat of serious penalties, I’m not sure that who ever is in charge of running Google at that point in time will do the right thing.

Here’s a couple of great lines from the article:

Responding to recent public outcries over its handling of private data, search giant Google offered a wide-ranging and eerily well-informed apology to its millions of users Monday.

“We would like to extend our deepest apologies to each and every one of you,” announced CEO Eric Schmidt, speaking from the company’s Googleplex headquarters. “Clearly there have been some privacy concerns as of late, and judging by some of the search terms we’ve seen, along with the tens of thousands of personal e-mail exchanges and Google Chat conversations we’ve carefully examined, it looks as though it might be a while before we regain your trust.”

Google expressed regret to some of its third-generation Irish-American users on Smithwood between Barlow and Lake.

Added Schmidt, “Whether you’re Michael Paulson who lives at 3425 Longview Terrace and makes $86,400 a year, or Jessica Goldblatt from Lynnwood, WA, who already has well-established trust issues, we at Google would just like to say how very, truly sorry we are.”

-http://www.theonion.com/content/news/google_responds_to_privacy

Yes, Google and the internet (specifically Wikipedia) have already put libraries out of the business of providing basic reference material.

No, Google and the internet will not put libraries out of the business of lending books in the short run.  More importantly, Libraries for the foreseeable future will the the primary conduit for most people to access high quality and expensive research databases like Pub Med and other walled off online journals.

One interesting factoid from the presentation: The Encyclopedia Britannica contains about 100,000 articles and costs over $1,000 for a set of books. Wikipedia has over 3,000,000 articles and is completely free.  Wikipedia is 30 times larger than Britannica, and is widening it’s lead on a daily basis.

For now the Goliath vs. David battle is a draw

Tagged: education, Google, libraries, OpenSource, publishing, research ]]> http://richmccue.com/2010/03/04/google-vs-the-library-goliath-vs-david/feed/ 2 48.483174 -123.319451 48.483174 -123.319451 richmccue Wikipedia http://richmccue.com/2010/02/20/google-voice-a-phone-voicemail-revolution/ http://richmccue.com/2010/02/20/google-voice-a-phone-voicemail-revolution/#comments Sat, 20 Feb 2010 16:39:42 +0000 Rich McCue http://richmccue.com/?p=342 ]]> Do you want the good news or the bad news first?  I’ll start with the good news: Google Voice is the best thing that has happened to phones (including cell phones) and voice mail in decades… and it’s another free Google service!  The bad news: It is only available if you live in the United States.  So that means I cannot use it here in Canada where I live.

So for those of you living in the US, feel free to go to the Google Voice “Invite” website, and request an invite.  If not, take a seat on the bench beside me and wait for Google to roll out the service here in Canada.  Google has publicly stated that they will make Google Voice available in other countries, but have not given a time-table. So what are we missing?

Here are a couple more videos that talk more about specific benefits, and I’ll copy some text from the Google website outlining the features of Google Voice that explain why I think it is so revolutionary:

Use Google Voice with your existing number and get:

• Google voicemail: voicemail like email
• Voicemail transcription: read what your voicemail says
• Custom greetings: vary voicemail greetings by caller
• International calling: low-cost calls to the world
• Notifications: read voicemail messages via email or SMS
• Share voicemails: forward, embed, or download voicemails

Add a Google number to get these additional features:

• One number: a single phone number that rings all your phones
• Free SMS: send, receive & store text messages online
• Block calls: send unwanted callers straight to voicemail
• Record calls: record phone calls and store them online
• Conference calls: join several people into a single call
• Screen callers: hear who is calling before you pick up

I’m glad that the Google stats for your site are looking up.  There is one thing that I tried to explain to you on the phone before Christmas that I don’t think I explained very well.  Let me try explaining Google Page Rank again:

Q1. What determines which websites are put on the 1st page of Google search results?

• The relevancy of the title and text on your web page to the search query.
• The number and quality of other people’s websites linking to your website.  You can think of other websites linking to your site as a vote… The more votes your site has, the higher your websites ranking will be.
• The best way to influence your page rank is to make sure you have good key words in the title of your page, the URL, and in the text on your page.  The other thing is to encourage quality websites to link to your site… These are the key things in your control (more info from Google).

Q2. What else can you do to monitor your website and find ways to improve it?

• Update you  website with current relevant content.
• Get a Gmail account so that you can access other Google resources to help your website.  http://gmail.com
• You can use Google Webmaster Tools to see how your site is viewed by Google, so you can modify it to make it more “Googlefriendly”.
• Use Google Analytics to see how much traffic is coming to your site, where the traffic is coming from geographically, and what other sites are forwarding users to your site.

I hope this helps!

1. NetBooks typically have a small screen than a laptop: typically 10″ diagonally rather than 13″ or 15″.
2. Netbooks also usually have slightly smaller keyboards, although the Dell Netbook I have been using has a keyboard almost the same size as my MacBook Air keyboard.
3. Netbooks typically have slower processors and less memory than laptops (Photo Shop and video editing won’t work well on them).
4. On the plus side, Netbooks usualy weigh less than laptops, and in some cases (as is with my Dell NetBook) have a longer battery life than most Laptops.
5. Netbooks also cost a lot less than light weight laptops, but are close in price to lower end bulky laptops. My Dell Mini 10 cost $329 CDN.

Admittedly the CALI conference attracts a pretty geeky crowd of law school technical staff, law librarians and law professors, even so, going from 0% to 20% in one year is impressive.

So what do I think?  I agree with Michael Dell’s assessment that for most people a NetBook makes an excellent companion to a desktop computer.  If you need to travel, or take a laptop to a meeting, a Netbook will do an excellent job.  After a couple days of use, I started to get claustrophobic in the very small screen space that the NetBook provides (in my case 1024 x 600 as opposed to 1200 x 800 on my laptop, and 1920 x 1200 on my desktop computer).

My recommendation for students, staff and faculty would be to get a full size desktop computer for your home or office, and then use a NetBook for classes, travelling and meetings.  If you use Google Documents, or DropBox for synchronizing files, you’ll have everything you need to work on no matter which machine you are using.

• =GoogleTranslate(“Oi, como está?”,”pt”,”en”) gives “Hi, how are you”
• =DetectLanguage(“Oi, como está?”) gives “pt”

I saw this in a Google Docs blog post.

Here’s a link to the Go0gle Docs blog post, with a number of different uses for Google Docs as a student… including:

• Text documents with double spacing, endnotes, footnotes and bibliographies.
• Track exercise progress with spread sheet templates.
• Collaborate on outlines for classes, as well as group project documents.
• Use google sites for club and student organization websites.  Google sites is very easy to use, and is a browser based website editing web application.
• Use equation editor for math and science classes.
• Collaborate on power point like presentations in Google Docs.

Here’s part of the Fast Flip Announcement from Google:

Today we’re adding a new experiment to Google Labs: Google Fast Flip, accessible at fastflip.googlelabs.com. Fast Flip is a new reading experience that combines the best elements of print and online articles. Like a print magazine, Fast Flip lets you browse sequentially through bundles of recent news, headlines and popular topics, as well as feeds from individual top publishers. As the name suggests, flipping through content is very fast, so you can quickly look through a lot of pages until you find something interesting. At the same time, we provide aggregation and search over many top newspapers and magazines, and the ability to share content with your friends and community. Fast Flip also personalizes the experience for you, by taking cues from selections you make to show you more content from sources, topics and journalists that you seem to like. In short, you get fast browsing, natural magazine-style navigation, recommendations from friends and other members of the community and a selection of content that is serendipitous and personalized.

To build Google Fast Flip, we partnered with three dozen top publishers, including the New York Times, the Atlantic, the Washington Post, Salon, Fast Company, ProPublica andNewsweek. These partners will share the revenue earned from contextually relevant ads. This gives publishers an opportunity to introduce new readers to their content. It also tests our theory that being able to read articles faster means people will read more of them, driving more ad revenue to publishers.

Google reader is a web based application, so you can access from any computer or smart phone, including the iPhone.  Once you’ve read and article on your iPhone, it will show up as read on your desktop computer.

Read It Later also integrates nicely with Google Reader on the iPhone, so that you can easily add items to your to your “Read It Later” list to read on your iPhone or Desktop computer.  If a website is not formatted for the iPhone, often it is easer to read the web page in “Read It Later” than in the iPhone web browser.

Cost: Free

URL: http://google.com/reader

Before this week I suggested that students working on group projects, use Google documents for collaborating on creating and editing, and then once the majority of the collaboration work was done, export the document to Word or OpenOffice and add footnotes there.  Now the footnoting can be done as the document is created.  Google Docs is capable of editing a University level paper, end to end.  For groups especially I will be recommending Google Docs at the editing tool of choice.

Here is a list of other features that have recently been added to Google Docs.

Google Calendar Sync is a new Google utility that synchronizes your Google Calendar with your Outlook Calendar. You have to install and run the synchronization software on the windows computer where Outlook is installed, and then you can specify how frequently you want the syncs to occur, and in which direction.

Here’s how to get started:

• Download & install the executable (663 KB).
• In the settings window that appears after installation, enter your email and password and select from the sync options (like frequency and information flow), and hit Save.
• You will now find an icon in your Windows system tray; when events are syncing, you’ll see two green arrows.

It may be a case of more style over substance, but for people switching from Microsoft Office to Google Docs, the change to the editing tool bar will help smooth the transition. No major new features have been added in the update (at least none that I’ve noticed), but the new tool bar does feel more comfortable, and brings the task of editing text in Google Documents closer to what I’m used to when editing blog posts, and posting on modern bulletin boards.

This follows an update last week that allows you to crate a form to fill out to enter data into a spread sheet rather than entering it in field by field. Google has a long way to go to match the feature set that Microsoft Office offers, but they are slowly adding the features that most people use. It won’t belong before average people will be able to move to Google Docs and not miss much of anything… and gain collaboration features that you don’t get with Office, unless you have an enterprise IT department behind you.

All users need to do is go to the Google Apps “Team Edition” page, and sign up with their corporate email address. A confirmation email is then sent back to the person’s email address and then they are on the system. Once registered you can see who else from the organization has signed up, and you can begin collaborating right away (apparently I am the first UVic.ca individual to sign up). It looks like Google is hoping that pressure from users will encourage organizations to adopt Google Apps officially, and from Google’s perspective, hopefully adopt the premium paid version.

This Google screen cast gives a few more details.

So I started looking for the file. Sure enough, she had deleted it from the file server, so it didn’t go into her recycle bin. I tried doing a windows search (she’s running Vista Business Edition), and could only find a link to it in favorites, but not the file or a temporary file. Lastly I tried doing a Google Desktop search as we have it indexing her computer and her file share. It thought it found the file, but the link was dead (because the file had been deleted), but we could look at the full unformatted text of the file with the preview option. So we copied the text from the preview, and pasted it into a new Word document. I had one relieved customer. She had to reformat the document, but it saved her hours of work writing it from scratch.

So… Google Desktop is not only a great desktop search tool, but it can also help restore deleted files that have not yet been backed up!

You can just have fun playing around with the maps, or possibly do something more useful:

• You can send people directions to a party or event.
• Give conference attendees directions to hotels, restaurants, or other places of interest.
• Want to create a Sight seeing tour? Now’s your chance.
• Plot Crime rate statistics.
• Identify Neighborhood watch homes.
• Paper Route delivery (or non-delivery) map.
• Cool photo album, with pins put in where the pictures were taken.

Some of the features that could come in handy depending how how you want to use the system:

• Maps can be made public or private.
• You can draw lines on the map (sometimes the routes it suggests, just aren’t right!).
• You can embed pictures or videos in the pop-outs from pins.
• Email your maps to friends.
• Embed maps in a web page.

Lastly, here is a map of my neighborhood in Victoria, BC., complete with all the important locations to our family. Enjoy!

1. Get a Blog! But don’t just just do product posts. Blog about interesting things related to your products and industry you’re in. Put links to Digg & Delicious on your blog.
2. Use YouTube to your advantage. Sponsor a contest for the "best" or "funniest" video related to your product or service, and offer a prize or two. Let other people be creative. Then let people vote on them. If the videos are good enough, viral marketing will kick in and you’ll get more than your money’s worth in advertising and web traffic.
3. Use press releases to announce things your company is doing. Make sure each press release has a web link back to your web site (PRWeb is recommended by the author of the article).
4. Be worthy of other people linking to you. If you have nothing interesting or good to offer, who will want to link to you? "It is only by being worthy that you’ll get to the top of Google."

• 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

• 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).

• 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.

• 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.

• 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).

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

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

• 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

The increasing volume of digital information with which researchers’ work is making the task of finding, capturing, organizing and eventually collaborating with digital data more difficult.  Electronic information in multiple formats sitting in multiple silos of data present a challenge to researchers who have difficulty finding a specific piece of information in a timely fashion.

The two major benefits that come from effective knowledge management and knowledge sharing are an increase in the speed and quality of the research being performed. Less time is spent looking for information that has already been identified or created, so that more time can be spent in analyzing and associating disparate pieces of information. Modern electronic tools make possible collaboration between colleagues that in the past would have been difficult, expensive, or impossible.  Voice and video conferencing over high speed research networks can facilitate real time collaboration at a fraction of the cost in time and money of flying members of a research team to a central location. On line collaboration tools can greatly facilitate group document creation and editing, and when it comes time to polish the final product, real time document editing makes it possible for groups scattered around the world to review a document together and make edits together.

Once researchers have the appropriate software to manage their data and help them collaborate, they need to make sure that they also have the appropriate hardware and infrastructure to take full advantage of the benefits the new software will give them. Access to high speed research networks is a must for video and voice conferencing, as well as real time document editing. An average desktop computer with two monitors, instead of the traditional single monitor, will give researchers a 10% + boost in productivity. Finally a web camera and good quality head phone/microphone rounds out a well equipped research workstation.

Whether they realize it or not, most researchers are struggling with the mountains of digital data that they have accumulated during their careers. If shown the tools available to them to find, capture and collaborate,  many, if not most, will start to use some of these knowledge management tools to increase their productivity and effectively manage and collaborate with their data.

Currently the Google Desktop will search for key words in the following documents and programs: 

  Gmail

  Outlook contacts

  Outlook appointments

  Outlook tasks

  Outlook notes

  Outlook journal

  Outlook Email

  Outlook Express

  Word

  Excel

  Powerpoint

  Internet Explorer

  AOL Instant Messenger

  Netscape Mail/Thunderbird

  Netscape / Firefox / Mozilla

  PDF

  Music

  Video

  Images

A fairly complete list of applications and file types. This got me thinking… for an individual or small office, why pay thousands, or tens of thousands of dollars for a Knowledge Management system, when you will probably be using it primarily for key word searches to find documents?  Google Desktop will do 90% of what you need it to do for your knowledge management needs.  So unless that 10% is really important you can save yourself a lot of cash.

You may be concerned about privacy, and the ability of Google, or anyone else, accessing the data on your computer. Google takes pains to point out that none of your indexed information ever leaves your computer. You can read more about Google Desktop’s privacy policy on the Web site.

I highly recommend Google Desktop.  Now we just need to see the linux version of Google Desktop and I’ll be really happy!