More googly things

The other day, I spent a very pleasant evening visiting old friends on the way back from Wonersh. The husband is a local authority IT advisor and so for a while, we got to discussing various nerdy matters. He is keen on the use of Google Docs as a means of distributing content within an organisation so that it does not matter what platform the user's computer is tied to. As long as you have an internet browser, you can see the documents from a Windows box, an Apple, or a Linux machine.

Just by way of experiment, I have published the notes from my talk a thte 2004 Faith Summer Session on Contraception, Abortion and IVF - the Destruction of Life and Love. In its present form, you should be able to see the document but not edit it. (If you find you can edit it, do please let me know!) The alternative is to publish a document that can be edited by others, offering a quick and easy route to co-operative projects.

Then there is Google pages - a quick and easy way to get several web pages going with a minimum of effort. I have always done my own html and am proud of the tightly-written, standards-compliant, fast-loading website for Our Lady of the Rosary. However this takes time and it will be interesting to see whether Google's new foray into content management will prove to be a "great leap forward" for web publishing. (Google pages is still in beta and you need to have a gmail address to get it.)

So far, I have put up a "finigan pages" homepage, a paste of my CV, and a "dump" of my bookmarks from Firefox. These were all done quite quickly and if I were to use this stuff more extensively, I would probably play around with the html rather more and make it as much like the style of the blog as possible.

The nagging doubt with all of this is the placing of all one's stuff into the hands of google. I'd be interested in comments on this, especially from anyone who has used these new things.

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