The iPad Wrap Up

I needed a little bit of time to collect my thoughts on this and restrain my fanboy-ism. Let me start out by saying that I think it has the potential to be a great device and to be a category killer. The category in question is netbooks. Small, low powered notebook-like devices designed primarily towards web browsing and basic office tasks. These typically have a long battery life. The only place the iPad doesn't beat a netbook is on price, and price competition has typically not been a part of Apple's marketing strategy.

I think iBooks looks very interesting indeed. It is in ePub format, which makes it a game changer. ePub is supported by a lot of different devices - Sony's entire ebook reader line, iPhone OS (using Stanza), Barnes & Noble's Nook reader, in addition to the software available for Mac, Windows and Linux that will handle ePub. I suspect iPhone OS devices are the only ones that will directly sync with iBook, but it should be possible to use other devices by copying the file as you would to a thumb drive. How all of this works out will depend upon how digital rights management is handled with the ePub file, there is no standard for it at the moment which means Publisher A may use a very sensible set of rules, while Publisher B may use DRM that is overly restrictive or hampers the operation of the reading software.

Another nice feature of ePub is that it has been around for a while, and there are plenty of people who are knowledgeable in working with these files. Tools for creating ePub files are abundant and available across all platforms (Windows, OS X, Linux). The barriers to being a published author are dropping fast.

When I was in high school, and dinosaurs roamed the Earth, I had the opportunity to attend a writers workshop as part of my junior year English class. Nothing in the entirety of my academic or professional career did as much to turn me off towards writing as a profession as that workshop. It wasn't criticism that steered me away from writing, it was the business model.

The focus of the workshop really had nothing to do with writing as a craft, it was focused on how to get your work published. They showed off the writers guide and taught us how to read the entries, how to decipher what each publisher required from their submissions, etc. They had published authors describe how they got their book published. Send in your manuscript to somewhere between ten and thirty publishers per day, wait for a response, continue submitting. The average time until publication seemed to be about three years. They also talked a little bit about intellectual property law as it applies to publishing. It is baroque in the extreme. First rights, anthology rights, magazine rights, audio rights, and on and on. It doesn't surprise me that piracy is so rampant. Professional authors and lawyers have difficulty with the subject, how is a layman that has no interest in anything but reading content supposed to know or care about this? I'll save my rights rants for another essay though, you're welcome.

Electronic publishing is by no means a new thing, nor is the ease of access new. In the late 80s I downloaded my first electronic book. This was a few years before I had my first internet account - I got it from a BBS in Clearwater, FL. It was huge, weighing in somewhere around 1.2 megabytes. I think it took about three hours to download. It was the Jargon File, a dictionary of computer terms and geek folklore. These days you can find it here if you're interested. It was created as an ascii text file, browsing through it was slow and ponderous.

The real trouble with eBooks has always been formats. Because no single format has managed to emerge as the standard, there is always the question of "will my device or program read this?", "can I port this to a new device?", "what format should I publish in as an author?" The web itself is a great platform for publication, easy, simple to update, cross platform and available to a wide audience. The two problems with the web as a publication platform are 1) how do I make sure my customers can find my content? and 2) how do I monetize it? The iBook store solves both problems handily.

The iBook store has a large existing customer base on two of the three platforms (sadly, iTunes is not available for linux and I doubt the iBook store will be either), it has search and is organized as customers would expect. A striking difference between it and Apple's App store - but I won't get off on that rant.

The dollar and cents part is still an open question at this point, and a place where publishers can really trip this up. The customer expectation is that eBooks should be less expensive than their physical counterparts. This is not an unreasonable expectation. While eBooks do provide additional utility such as search and annotation, these features are not a selling point for most readers - they are attractive primarily to students and academic professionals. On the value negative side, you do not own a physical thing when you own an ebook, you own a license to use the content. This license if full of incomprehensible legal jargon, but usually the gist of it comes down to the fact that the retailer or the publisher may pull (or deauthorize) the content at any time, and without providing reason or recompense. This is well illustrated by the 1984 debacle on Amazon's Kindle eBook reader, see this New York Times article for details. While I believe the resolution provided by Amazon (replacement with a legal edition of 1984 or a refund of the purchase price) was ethical, the readers who had annotated the book lost their work. Additionally, readers are smart enough to know that electronic editions of a book cost a fraction of what a printed edition does to produce. Far too often, the pricing on the ebook edition in Amazon's store is very close or on occasion exceeds the MSRP of the printed edition. Additionally readers know ebooks cannot be loaned, resold or traded. B & N Nook does have a very limited and largely worthless loaning feature. I do not expect to see a similar feature in iBook.

I want to point out this article from A Newbies Guide to Publishing (which I just subscribed to) on the monetary differences between traditional publishing and self-publishing in eBook format. I would like to particularly draw attention to the pricing differences between his works published with Hyperion books (an arm of the Disney media empire) and his self-published works on the Kindle eBook platform. Hyperion is coming in at traditional paperback retail pricing, which runs from $5.99 - $9.99. Looking at it from a retailer's perspective, the numbers on his Hyperion books are not exceptional. No offense intended. Now look at his self-published work. It is sold very cheaply, but the numbers are considerably higher. Simple business 1000 level stuff, but publishers seem to have forgotten it. You can see the same process repeat itself on the iTunes app store. Software priced at the $9.99 or greater mark has few sales, at the $.99 to $1.99 level, lots of sales.

I've wandered a bit from my original topic, and there is a lot more that I want to say about this issue, but I think it is time to wrap this up. I think the iPad will be very successful based on what I've seen. I think the iBook Store will be good for publishers if they can put aside their experiences with more traditional publishing models. I think it will be a boon to small publishers and authors interested in self-publishing. Most importantly of all, I think it will be great for readers.

Live from the Fortress of Ultimate Dorkness

11:40-ish: So I made it back under the wire, and I'm ready to write about the launch. Whatever my theories about the publishing industry, I'm an Apple fan, so this is a pretty exciting day. I'll be updating this post throughout the day. Fair warning, my mouth is still numb and my dentist released mad dogs, crazed wolverines and badgers that flew about with the wings of bats into my mouth less than an hour ago - so I feel that should be taken into account when you read this post. Seriously, he did a great job and I'm thrilled to back in time to write this.

1:00: Getting ready for the start of the event.

1:03: Here we go - Steve Jobs is discussing sales to date on iPods, the Apple retail store, the App store and other miscellany. Make with the sexy tablet already!

1:12: It's called the iPad, is rather pretty (imagine a greatly oversized iPod Touch with a little different UI. It has a dock!

1:42-ish: Yep, The New York Times will have custom app ready for the tablet. Surprise? I guess? Looks the the Times reader will do flash based movies as well. No word on whether iPad Safari will support Flash, but I suspect it won't just like the rest of the iPhone OS family.

1:54-ish: Yep, now we're looking at iBook. Time to perk up your ears and have a shot of coffee. The bookshelf interface looks a great deal like aNobii.

1:58-ish: Introduces the iBook store which has a lot of big publishers behind it: Harper Collins, Hachette, Pengin, Simon Schuster and MacMillan. Works like iTunes and look like it may be ePub based (Apple supports the ePub format) - this is possibly good news. If true it means you can buy product from other stores on the web (so long as they support ePub), or import your own content.

2:00-ish: They've moved on to iWork, Apple's Office suite. Which is pretty nifty - I want to talk more about the book stuff in my wrap up though. I do like the fact that there will be an honest to the Big Whatever word processor available for this thing. That's great, and it's something I miss on my iPod Touch. Now if somebody would just create a port for iPod Touch and maybe a decent text editor - maybe one as good as Text Wrangler . . .


Mostly they've been focusing on presentation type work though, I can see this as being a good device for that.

Steve Jobs is going over the 3g (cellular internet) service available for the iPad. $14.99/mo prepaid for 250mb/month plan or $29.99 for unlimited data through AT&T. Free use of AT&T wi-fi hotspots, no contract required. That's pretty reasonable. The units with 3g capabilities cost $130.00 more though. Pricing without 3g $499.99 for 16gb, $599.99 for 32gb, $699.99 for 64gb. Not bad at all.

Wi-fi only models will be available in sixty days, 3g models will be available in 90 days.

Annnnnnd that's the show, folks. I'll do my wrap up in a separate post later on. See you then.

The Apple Tablet - Publishing's Savior?

So here we are, on the eve of the launch of Apple's tablet. I suspect I'll be missing the launch, and I'm a little bit cross about that. I'll probably be spending some quality time (and a lot of money) at the dentist.

So instead of rejoicing in what will likely be a fine product, let's do a little speculation. The publishing industry seems to betting all in on this product being their saving grace. The paper of record is putting its paywall back up. Yep, as of tomorrow, no more free content for you! Magazines are just as anxious. But I'm wondering if they've really thought this through.

As the industry seems to be committed to making all the mistakes that the music industry made in their struggle with the internet, I believe the best case scenario is that this is what will happen. That Apple's product is successful beyond their wildest dreams, people forget all those silly ideas they had about creating their own content and go back to reading, listening to and consuming someone else's. Worked out alright for the music industry with iTunes, right?

Not so fast. iTunes did do a lot to put the music industry's marker online, but not in the way that they wanted. They went from a very tightly structured oligopoly, an industry where a few large companies dominated the landscape, to having the industry dominated by one man - in the computer industry. Steve Jobs. Last I checked, iTunes was second only to Wal-Mart as a music retailer, so Mr. Jobs could and did get pretty much anything he wanted. Including $.99 per track for a very long time indeed. He also got rid of the publisher's DRM, which was a net good thing. In addition to putting Apple as a huge player in music retail, a lot of artists - major artists got the idea that maybe they didn't need a label. That they could make a lot more money by using the tools available on the internet to bring their work to their fans. Not a short list by any means, it included Nine Inch Nails, David Byrne, and Radiohead.

But let's look at the alternative to a successful Apple tablet. What if it's another Newton - which oddly enough helped pave the way for iPhone OS, Apple TV or G4 Cube? I think it's unlikely, but anything is possible. I think iPhone OS is pretty solid, great for people who aren't very computer savvy and has a nice wide range of potential applications even if it's a flop as an eReader. But what if it does turn out to be a dud, what does that mean for Apple and the publishing industry? Apple will shake it off, as it has in the past. We'll see it in the store for a few years and then it will quietly disappear. The consequences for the publishing industry are another matter. Many, like The New York Times have already assumed its success. If it fails, even if they tear the paywall back down, how many customers will have decided that they can find their news and commentary elsewhere?

In either case, how long will it be before authors realize what musicians figured out a long time ago? That publishers need them a great deal more than they need publishers?

Kicking Ideas Around

So I've been away for a little bit, there have been a few things I've been working on for the blog, but mostly I've been hammering away on stuff for another class - a class that forces me to use Windows. But I won't get off on that rant.

Mostly, I want to use this blog for its intended purpose for once and kick around some ideas for research paper topics. The restrictions that have been placed upon us aren't overly burdensome, the only troubling one for me is: Must be related to your major. Technically, I don't have a major yet. The only thing that is computer-ish that immediately comes to mind is the recent security breach in China, but frankly I'd rather puke blood for ten years than try to tell people to get rid of Internet Explorer. I've talked myself hoarse on the subject. Yeah, I know, and there was much rejoicing. Just don't come crying to me when you get infected - I'm not reinstalling your OS. Again.

So let's talk ideas.

• Portrayals of technical persons (scientists, engineers, programmers, etc) in twentieth century media - perhaps compared to real technical wonks or compared to portrayals today.
• Hoaxes, with an emphasis on the really odd ones. One thing that's always bothered me is where the pull can tabs hoax (or similar hoaxes) got started. See the Snopes article for the pull can hoax. I'm fascinated as to how these hoaxes start, but I'm not sure there is a paper there. The collective wisdom of Snopes can't find the origin of the pull can one.
  
  
  

  Another one that I recall vividly was told at my former workplace. It was an email forward (grrr! use your forward button for good, not evil) that spread around the office saying that a guy up in Tallahassee, FL in a white SUV was strapping syringes of aids infected blood to gas pump handles. Of course, it was false. So I did a little research and sent the woman who sent me it a link to the front page of the Florida State Police site (which declared it a hoax), and Snopes which listed a whole litany of similar hoaxes - almost to the letter like the email she forwarded. I also pointed out that our very hot Florida summers aren't good for a virus, or even blood for that matter. Also, consider the mechanics of taping a syringe - even a very small one like those used for insulin shots by diabetics - to a gas pump handle.

  
  

  Of course, she was convinced that the State Police, Snopes, Biology and simple mechanics were all trying to cover it up. I think this kind of cognitive dissonance is fascinating. I suspect that could be a whole paper in and of itself.

  
  

  Better still is how hoaxes like these disseminate like a virus through our mental environment, and sometimes even persist (see above, Craig Shergold, etc.) I think with well structured research (not just cites, experiments, interviews and testing) this could make for a really great paper on how information is accepted as true or false and distributes in a complex system like the internet. There are plenty of good print and electronic sources for this as well. I'll need to think about methodology for this one.

  
  
• A study on "phishing." The act of using a message (such as an email) to get the target user to disclose sensitive information, usually a password. My thesis would be that it's pretty easy to succeed, and I would include original research in the form of simulated phishing attempts against a users in a range of sophistication.
  
  
• An analysis of online scams versus classic (IE the Big Store, the Spanish Prisoner, etc) con games.
  
  
• It looks like I could do a paper on the Spanish Prisoner (and modern variations of it) alone.
  
  
• Privacy - how willing are different age groups to share information online? What kinds of information are they willing to share and under what circumstances?
  
  
• Media Piracy & Copyright Law - How informed are people on copyright? Is piracy really as common as it is portrayed by the media? Is it really that damaging to media companies? What alternatives might media companies pursue to lessen the impact of piracy?
  
  

I think that's going to be it for tonight. More is on the burner for tomorrow.

Modern Myths and Legends - Jean Shepherd

So this morning I'm chasing my textbook for LAN Concepts again. I have one of two, and I've been searching for the other, LabSim for Network+ for some time. I've been to the Clearwater bookstore, where a clerk assured me they had it in stock. Nada. I went to the library over the weekend, where my instructor told me they had a copy on reserve. Nope. So now I'm off to Gibbs campus, to once again attempt to purchase it. Wish me luck.

But my text book puts me in mind of another book. I, Libertine by Fredrick R. Ewing, a book on nineteenth century erotica which was published in 1956. It was a runaway bestseller, bookstores couldn't keep it on the shelf.

The only problem with that, is that of all the facts presented above, only the publication date is true. Even that is only true because the hoax gained so much momentum. I, Libertine was a hoax born out of frustration. It was created by Jean Shepherd, best known as the co-writer and narrator for the film A Christmas Story. At the time though, he was a radio disc jockey in New York. He was annoyed that New Yorkers would only patronize art that somebody else had vetted first. A city run by lists.

Shepherd was working the graveyard shift show at the time, and on this particular show he discussed these lists. The ten best dressed list was a big deal in New York at the time. "Top 40 music" had just arrived. The Top 40 music format was born in 1949 and was the dominate broadcast industry until the late 1980s. The New York Times bestseller list came into being only a little more than ten years earlier on August 9, 1942. Jean Shepherd had doubts about this system. Rightly so.

His theory was that were two kinds of people in the world. Day people and night people. Day people led a very orderly and uncomplicated existence. All the lists acted as the teeth in their clockwork. They told them what plays, books and songs were worthwhile. They never considered for a moment that these lists were not the truth-with-a-capital tee handed down from on high. As Mr. Shepherd put it: "They believed in file cabinets, they believed in luncheons, they believed in meetings . . ." By contrast, night people had some doubts. Doubts about whether any of this was worth taking seriously.

He decided to test out his theory with the help of his radio audience. He asked them to go into a bookstore the next morning and ask for a book that did not exist. Together, Mr. Shepherd and his audience ironed out the details. The title, the author's life story, and the publishing house. Soon enough, people all over New York were talking about this fantastic book, many claimed to have read it. The archdiocese of the Catholic church in Boston put it on proscribed works list. In the end, Ian Ballantine, head of Ballantine Publishing after a desperate search for the author of I, Libertine, he wanted to secure the paperback rights. He met with Shepherd and author Theodore Sturgeon over lunch and they revealed the truth, after which Mr. Sturgeon was hired to write the book under the pen name of Frederick R. Ewing. When it was published it sold quite well, even making the bestseller list. All of the proceeds were given

I think this might be the greatest hoax of the twentieth century. But don't listen to me, take it from the horse's mouth. You can listen to an interview with Jean Shepherd on Long John Nebel's radio program from 1968.

Publisher's note: I originally intended to cite this up properly as practice, but I am far too tired after several days of catching up for another class. I apologize for the lateness of this post, I really do want to try to produce something interesting every day. Rather than delaying this post further still, I want to move on to the next item in the series. My primary source for this article is the interview with the author linked above. I'll be back soon with a remarkable set of coincidences that happened while researching this post, and another interesting character that writers ought to know about. Coincidentally, it involves a hoax too.

It's All In Who You Know, Old Boy

This is the rare case of something people say all the time which is actually true. I think that it goes double for people with an eye towards writing fiction.

Tonight I want to talk to you about a subject near and dear to my heart. Eccentrics. Cranks. Weirdos. Kooks. I'm particularly partial to that last adjective. As a writer you should know these people. A simple conversation with a kook can produce enough ideas to launch a thousand novels. But you must be careful. Everybody is weird in some way, and while that's interesting in and of itself, what you need as a writer are olympic grade weirdos.

Britain, is of course far ahead of the Americas in eccentricity. To be fair they had a bit of a head start. The Protein Man is an excellent example. He walked the street in London town, advising couples against eating too much protein as he felt it promoted lust. See his complete pamphlet here on Flickr. The Protein Man is referenced in Robert Rankin's The Da-Da-De-Da-Da Code, in which the Protein Man's printing press which is housed in the Gunnersbury Museum provides a vital clue. Rankin also frequently mentions Count Dante, the deadliest man alive in many of his novels. Count Dante's old advertisements may be seen here and here.

I'll concede that Count Dante may not qualify as a kook per se, but he is certainly a notable character. Being knowledgeable about these subjects gives Mr. Rankin a ready supply of good characters, artifacts and settings. I think the author himself is a bit strange, or an excellent showman . Perhaps both. The videos below are excellent evidence.

Robert Rankin's works are also fun to ask for at American bookshops. With titles like The Sprout Mask Replica, Armageddon the Musical and Nostradamus Ate My Hamster. I say ask because they are incredibly difficult to find in America. Barnes and Noble has his work sporadically though. You can find out more about Robert Rankin here.

When people think of Joshua Abraham Norton, they think of him as an American. However this is incorrect, he was born an Englishman though the exact date and location of his birth have been lost. Joshua Norton has been written about by quite a few people, but the ones I am most familiar with include:

• Neil Gaiman in The Sandman comic book series, specifically in Three Septembers and a January
  
• Mark Twain in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Norton inspired the King.
  
• Tim Powers in Earthquake Weather.
  
• Robert Anton Wilson in The Illuminatus Trilogy
  
• Kerry Thornley in The Principia Discordia
  
• Kenneth Hite wrote a column in Steve Jackson Games Pyramid magazine 1/29/99 dedicated to Norton and the symbolism surrounding his life.
  

More properly known as Emperor Joshua A. Norton I, Emperor of the United States and Protector of Mexico started out as a mere successful businessman in nineteenth century San Francisco. He cornered the market on rice just in time for a large shipment from South America to wipe out his fortunes. He was wiped out. After disappearing for a time, he returned to the city and crowned himself Emperor. Though a mad man, he was humored by an entire city. He demanded and received a suit of royal finery from the Presidio army base, which he is usually portrayed wearing. He ate free in area restaurants. He minted his own currency and his proclamations were printed free of charge in the city's newspapers. The newspapers even created a few of their own. Upon his death over three thousand people attended his full masonic funeral.

I believe I can even see the Emperor's features in Uncle Sam from John Kessel's Good News from Outer Space. This scene takes place in a bus station in an economically devastated America.

"The only person left out there was a man dressed in a navy blue swallowtail coat over red and white striped trousers that were too long for him. Their soggy cuffs bunched around his ankles. He wore a top hat painted like an American flag. With his white beard and hawk nose he looked like a run-down Uncle Sam (125)."

Uncle Sam goes on to describe his fall from academia to his present career selling genuine American made calculators in a bus station and his misadventures with his university employers, his family and the law on the way(125-130).

Kessel shows the power of using an eccentric person as a model, much as an artist or painter uses a model for their work. History is rife with odd characters that can be used as a canvas for an author to create their own "characters." Of course, it doesn't hurt to be a bit of kook yourself. Takes one to know one.

Works Cited:

• Kessel, John. Good News from Outer Space. New York: Tor Books, 1990.
  

Tools for Writers - The Word Processing Edition

Good afternoon everyone, sorry for not posting yesterday, I'm still trying to get comfortable with my new school schedule. In my last post, we talked about text editors and how versatile they are. In terms of this course though, you'll be using a word processor. I love trying new software, seeing how different developers decided to handle my problems as a writer. We are mostly focusing on free apps, but I want to talk about a couple commercial products, so that's where we'll start.

Commercial products

Microsoft Office: You currently have two options for Microsoft Office, Office 2007 or the beta version of Office 2010. What is a beta? A beta is a public software test. Beta software is usually free to use, so if you really like MS Office. There is an upside and a downside to beta software. The good news is that you get to test drive some very expensive software, you'll have an opportunity to see if you like it, and because the company will ask you about what you like and what you don't, you have a chance to make it into a better product. The downside is that beta software is buggy. It crashes, it'll eat your work, or maybe just do strange things to it. If you're interested in the beta you can find it on the Office Online Homepage

Being a student is awesome. No really, everybody wants to sell you something and they often offer you truly absurd discounts. Microsoft does this with MS Office 2007. This is what we use in the classroom, and if you like it, then this is a great thing for you. You can get it for just $59.99 at Microsoft's Student promotion page compare that to the list price of almost $700.00.

This offer can also be found on your MySPC page under student discounts. While certain terms apply, usually the big one for any software purchase is that you have a student email address. So make sure yours is set up.

One thing that is great about MS Word is that it is well suited to doing MLA formatted papers, which we will be doing for class. It has a template for the paper itself and a tool for formatting citations in MLA format. You'll hear this in class when we do our section on MLA but it bears repeating. Don't trust that Word is going to format your citation correctly. Check it and double check it. I'm not putting the onus on Word here, yes I'm a Mac user, but I feel Office is a pretty good product even though it doesn't meet my needs. This goes for any software - whether we're talking about Word or something web based like this.

I think one of the biggest problems that office suites, whether we're talking about Microsoft's product or Open Office.org is that they try to be all things to all people. That's great if you need an application that combines text, graphs and presentation software in one package because you use those things together in your job. But it also adds another layer of complication that you may not need.

A reminder about using Word in class. SPC uses Deep Freeze. That means every night, the machine resets and if you save a document to your computer at school, your work just got deleted. Some classes don't use Deep Freeze, but I would err on the side of caution and expect that they do unless the instructor specifically says otherwise. Even then, backing up your work in a lot of places is a good thing. Put it on your thumb drive, email it to yourself, save it in ANGEL's file storage area. It only takes a few minutes to do that, and if you do it this way your work is safe and available to you from any computer.

iWork: Apple's Office suite. I used this in Comp I for my MLA formatted papers and it did a pretty good job, though if I had to print the paper I had to send it to Word and Word sometimes did odd things to the formatting. You can get a trial of this, which is what I did for Comp I. If you want to own it, you can get it for $40.00 as a student, the list is $80.00. Apple's store page on iWork is here, and you can get to the education store through your MySPC page. iWork is OS X only. I think it is a very good package, when I used it for my papers it was easy to work with the template they provided, and generally easier than Microsoft's version in Word. It did not have the citation tool, but that's not really something that interests me.

I hate spending all this time on OS X software when there are what, three of us Mac users in class including the instructor? But I really want to talk for a moment about something I've used everyday in class since I've started back to school. It was some of the best money I've spent on software since I moved over to OS X.

Circus Ponies Notebook: This is my go to software for note taking, both in class and in real life. Yes, you still have to take notes when you're all grown up. Sorry about that. First, a notebook is something that just about everybody gets, it's a physical artifact that we're all familiar with. The nice thing about notebook is how flexible it is. You can do note taking in pretty much any manner you choose. You can link to sources, include photos, graphs, tables and most anything you could possibly need. I suspect you could do an MLA paper in notebook, though I haven't tried it - I might this term, and if I do, I'll let you know how it works out. As I said, this software is OS X only. You can get it as a download from Circus Ponies and they offer both a trial and a student discount.

Free Software

So that's it for the paid apps. Let's look at the free stuff.

Google Docs: I love Google Docs. I'll admit, I'm a bit of a Google fan boy. Google Docs does word processing, spreadsheets and presentations. So think of it as an on the web version of MS Office, with some of the cruft swept away. Docs has a lot of advantages because it doesn't live on your computer, it lives on the internet. First, you can access your docs from any internet connected computer. In addition to being able to type up documents, you can also store documents you've already done and access them on the web. Of course, you can download them in a variety of formats and put the document on whatever computer you happen to be using. This is great if you have a desktop, laptop and a machine you use at school. You can also share them with other people, and let them edit the document or restrict them to viewing it. Multiple people can edit a document at the same time. Obviously, there's potential for abuse here, so I want to be clear - every student needs to do their own work, I'm not suggesting collaboration as a feature in that sense. But there are legitimate uses for this feature.

For instance, one great thing to do with a paper is after you've been through it yourself several times and you're absolutely convinced it is perfect, is to show it to somebody who isn't afraid to bruise your pride a little bit. Because I guarantee you that no matter how good you think it is, there are at least a dozen things you need to correct. Then show it to a few more people. Incidentally, that's why I ask people to comment on this blog. I want to make it better. So please do. The silence is unnerving. So using docs you can share this document with someone you know, even if they're halfway around the world and let them read it. If you let them edit it, they can highlight the parts they feel need changes and comment on why you ought to do that.

It's great for group projects. One problem I have with ANGEL at SPC is that it does not allow collaboration. So what typically happens in a group project is this: you have three or four people and one guy doing the typing or writing. This guy is the one who typically does the lion's share of the work. It shouldn't be this way, everyone should contribute more or less equally. If everybody types, and you can see who typed (or deleted, edited, highlighted what) you don't have to even consider this as a problem. You know who was working and who was slacking. That's a great feature, and one of many that ANGEL should have but doesn't.

Which brings me to another cool word processing trick that can help you when you're doing a paper, whether alone or as part of a group. Revisions. Most word processors track revisions, which are a record of changes to a document. Word can do this. iWork does, and so does Google docs. The nice thing with docs is that you can see who made the changes, as I said above. This allows you to play around with a different wording, or seeing what your paper would look like without this or that paragraph before you make a final decision to keep or cut it.

You can also publish a document to the web. It is indexed by Google and it will come up in a search. This is neat, but I can't see an immediate application for Comp 2, but I figured I would mention it.

You can also choose from a wide variety of user created templates for Docs, which is true of most word processors, but the nice thing with docs is that you aren't downloading anything. Why is that good? Anything you download is a security risk. Any file could be malware or a virus, so if you can avoid putting something on your computer, that's a good thing. Word processing templates are frequently used as a vehicle for virus delivery, so if you aren't using docs, then be cautious about where you get your templates from. Another nice feature that templates has is a rating system. You can see how useful other people found the template, which might save you some time in deciding what to use. They do have an MLA template, and I will make a point to check it out and let you know what I think.

Google docs is free and works in most web browsers, I've used it in IE 7, Safari, Opera, Firefox, Flock and Chrome for Mac. Mobile browsers are a little more troublesome, forget about Mobile IE, but Safari on the iPhone/iPod Touch works well.

Open Office.org: A free and open source product that runs on Windows, OS X and Linux. There are system specific versions of it, like NeoOffice for OS X, that are designed around a particular operating system. It is an office suite containing a word processor, a database, a spreadsheet and a drawing program. I love Open Office, but I do not consider it well suited towards Comp 2. There is no MLA template, though I may look into creating one if I have time. You can get Open Office.org here

Abiword: Abiword is a word processor and nothing else. Like Open Office it is free and open source, and will work on Windows, OS X and Linux. You'll usually find this bundled in lightweight Linux distributions as the default word processor. I've never tried it, but I'll probably take it for a spin and let you know how I like if for Comp 2. You can get Abiword here.

Why do I talk at such lengths about tools? It isn't just because I'm a geek, it is about the nature of work. A student is like any other worker, your work is only going to be as good as the tools you use to produce it. That doesn't mean you have to spend a lot of money, but you do need to select tools that are appropriate to the job you need to do and that you are comfortable using.

In future installments of this series the tools are going to be a bit more "one off" than what I've talked about so far. Things like scheduling, notebooks (made of dead trees), pencils and pens. Things like that. I hope you'll find it useful and will take a moment to comment. Thank you!