Blogging

You love this story and you want to Digg it. Or maybe you want to put it on Reddit. Or maybe you’re just in love with Delicious and feel like saving it there. We’re open to anything, but we don’t always know your tastes.

The same goes for a lot of sites, which is where Add to Any has created a really smart sharing tool that will read your browser’s mind instead. Well, actually it will just give your history a once over to do the heavy lifting. Based on where you’ve been the most, relevant sites for sharing will come up in the very top of the menu. If none are there you can also expand the menu downwards to choose from one of the 200 other sharing and bookmarking sites.

It’s not unlike other competing services that do the same thing (ShareThis and Add This), although it’s the only one of the three giving people targeted sharing options based on what they’re probably using. In case you’re wondering what happens if you’ve got your browser history turned off, or are working off a public computer the top of the list will just revert to the dozen most popular sites by use.

I’ve embedded the widget below below. Feel free to give it a spin.

a2a_linkname=”Webware”;a2a_linkurl=”http://www.Webware.com”;

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Add to Any makes bookmarking a lot smarter

There’s a new game in town for online productivity applications. It hails from Adobe and if you like the look and feel of flash, you will like this suite of applications. The suite is called Acrobat.com and contains three applications that are required for almost all business needs. But does it compare to Zoho or Google Docs? We played around a little to see.

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Adobe Acrobat Swings into Online Productivity

Buzzword offers the usual word processing tools, such as a spelling checker and keyboard shortcuts.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Adobe’s beta release of the free Acrobat.com suite Monday should appeal to small-business users. In our early tests, the stand-outs are tools for Web conferencing and directly sharing text and PDF documents.

Acrobat.com includes a Web-based word processor, conferencing and remote access, PDF creation, and 5 gigabytes of file storage.

I like the services’ uncomplicated, charcoal-background interfaces. Like other online word processors, Buzzword is no Microsoft Word killer, but speedy enough to serve as a go-anywhere text editor. Documents can be exported as Microsoft Word DOC or DOCX; PDF; rich text; HTML; or XML.

Inviting someone else to edit a file takes one step, although Josh Lowensohn, on the other end, had problems initially logging in for access. I’m hoping that Adobe removes the login speed bumps.

Once you’re in, conferencing capabilities shine in Acrobat.com. In addition to one-off invitations to view and edit a Buzzword document, it’s easy to launch an impromptu meeting. The Meet button in Buzzword opens Acrobat ConnectNow, a lightweight cousin of Acrobat Connect Pro, announced earlier this month.

ConnectNow enables screen sharing, chatting with a headset and Webcam, whiteboarding, and phone conferencing. Once I accepted the ConnectNow add-in, it switched from the browser to its own window, which then appeared in front of other windows to display chatting and Webcam views. You can allow a user to control your desktop remotely, and cut them off just as quickly. Other than the login glitch, the ease of use might bring a frown to the folks at WebEx, owned by Cisco.

You can invite people to edit and comment on Buzzword documents.

(Credit: Elsa Wenzel/CNET Networks)

Makers of online office suites like Zoho and ThinkFree, on the other hand, needn’t worry, for now at least. Buzzword as a standalone word processor is pretty, though unremarkable. It offers only 7 fonts alongside basic text choices such as bold and strikethrough, with some more color choices than Google Docs and other online word processors. By contrast, Google Docs allows 10 fonts and ThinkFree provides more than five dozen. I’d like more formatting options if I were using Buzzword as a starting point to make interactive and print-ready PDFs.

Keyboard shortcuts work, such as CTRL-Z on a PC to undo the last action. Still, some annoyances to typing withiin a Flash environment include disabled options, such as Copy and Paste, that otherwise appear when you click the right mouse key in Windows. And CTRL-F to search for text sometimes failed.

Buzzword does let you draw tables and bullet points, and insert images. Special characters for typing accent marks in other languages are easy to find. Red squiggles underline potentially misspelled words and suggest alternatives. There’s a running word count and link to a history of edits at the bottom of the screen.

Uh oh, really?

(Credit: CNET Networks)

That’s not enough to make me ditch more than two years of relying upon Google Docs & Spreadsheets. Nevertheless, the Adobe online suite should lure business users who already make a lot of PDFs and may not bother to jump to another brand for online conferencing.

Acrobat 9 software, due for stores in July, will stand out for being able to bundle video and animation within PDFs, enriching the online life of a format originally focused around the printed page.

But Buzzword doesn’t appear to embed videos. Nor can you use Acrobat.com beta’s PDF creator to bundle MOV or other video and animation file types into Portable Document Format.

ConnectNow appears in front of other windows so you can chat via text and Webcam with another user.

(Credit: Elsa Wenzel/CNET Networks)

Doing so would require Acrobat 9, but its starting price of $299 will deter people on a budget from exploring its rich features. They may already turn to free, third-party apps or online converters to make flat PDFs for printing.

Adobe should make even more goodies available for free or at a lower price if it aims for PDFs to get rich quickly with Flash videos, PowerPoint files, and even applications and games. Such creation capabilities remain in the hands of those who can spend hundreds of dollars on Acrobat 9. Google gave away Maps, Earth and SketchUp, after all.

For example, PDF geospatial mapping, a plus for architects or city planners, will only be available in the $699 Acrobat Pro Extended 9.

Adobe already offered the online Photoshop Express and is hinting that the desktop app may become extensible within widgets. It remains to be seen how the company will integrate its new online services with the next, hulking Creative Suite, expected this fall.

ConnectNow enables conference calling, handy for business meetings.

(Credit: Elsa Wenzel/CNET Networks)

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Sharing shines in Acrobat.com

It’s been a little while since Nuxeo released the last version of its Enterprise Content Management Platform: Nuxeo Enterprise Platform 5.1, but they haven’t been sitting idle since then.

They have just announced the release of Nuxeo Rich Client Platform (RCP) 2.0, a rich client platform for developing ECM applications.

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Nuxeo Launches Newest Version of Rich Client ECM

Google upgraded its Reader product yesterday with a handful of important new features that let people share content with anyone from any Web site.

Previously its sharing features were confined to whatever RSS feeds you were subscribed to. As a solution to this problem, Google has created a small bookmarklet users can add to their browser’s toolbar to simply share whatever page they’re looking at to their shared items feed. Users can also attach personal notes on these, or any other shared items in a similar fashion to Facebook’s share or Tumblr’s ReBlog implementation, which lets you add your own take on a link then post it to your blog with about two clicks.

Click to try it.

The company has also significantly improved personalization of people’s share pages, letting them choose from one of four themes. Each theme gives the share page a different header while the rest of the design stays the same. I’m assuming the company will add more extensive customizations later on considering people’s gReader share pages are becoming a modified version of Blogger.com pages.

Speaking of blogging, one of the more interesting side effects of the new changes is that Google is now offering some Twitter-like functionality to people’s reader pages. From the notes page in Google Reader you can simply type in whatever text you want and hit publish. The note will then go out to your shared items blog with a little quote bubble. However, unlike microblogging services there are no limits on length, and you can even drop in full HTML to add links, photos and page formatting. It’s certainly a poor-man’s blogging solution compared with a service like Wordpress or Blogger, but if you were so inclined you could use it as lightweight platform to reshare content you discover while checking your feeds.

Want to use Google Reader as a blogging platform? Go for it. You can write little notes or drop in full HTML.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

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Google Reader gets universal sharing and microblogging features