I want a great shared white board and annotation
Robin Good speaks for me in his recent overview of 3-D (and other) live collaboration spaces when he writes: "But what was already badly done in the 'mainstream' world of web conferencing and collaboration tools has been simply replicated once again, without any critical questioning into this truly innovative new interaction dimension.
Amen! Time and again my distributed collaboration needs have focused on real time shared editing and annotation, and the freedom to visually brainstorm on a really good white board. I am enjoying Writely as a shared editing space - about as close as I've seen to what I imagine so far. Too bad it is in temporary limbo as it moves to Google, as I'd like to recommend it to a number of folks who have the need NOW (and little to no budget. Yes, my NGO world!)
To make a more specific example: if today we still have for the greatest part whiteboard and live annotation tools that are truly shameful for the way they have been designed, these highly supposedly 'innovative' 3D collaboration tools have taken on those approaches and existing styles and have blindly integrated them into their tools.
It's like having a rocket, taking off on rubber tires."
Elluminate's white board is one of the better ones I've played with, but I want to be able to just point my group to a browser page (open or password protected) and just get it going on. I want it to be able to be opened as far as my monitor lets it. I want to be able to save the image as a .jpg (or other forms) and email it to the participants with a click or two.
I know. I want a lot. But I am noticing a STRONG movement towards instant, synchronous meetings with all my clients, projects and volunteer jobs. The ability to send an email invite or a URL via an instant messenger and poof, get started, is of high value. (As in, yes, I'd pay for it!)
Categories: techreport, technologyforcommunity, virtualmeetings
posted by Nancy White at 1:45 PM
6 Comments:
Have you tried persony? A friend of mine will host it for you for 15 or 25 a month. Bob O'Haver, Ohaverco.com. App sharing, whiteboard, powerpoints, launch from skype or an e-mail link for participants.
Nancy
One complaint I have about Web 2.0 is that blips in scale mean that you can't rely on the applications to be there whey your organization grows.
I'd love to show people how to use Writely to collaborate on documents, but, yeah, no more new users. I'm happy I'd not made the mistake of telling anyone to adopt it.
I want to teach people to use Google Reader. Until someone uses a feed reader, they really don't get blogging. I'm worried that I might run out of invitations however.
You get what you pay for, I suppose. If you're not willing to pay for the hardware...
Bob, thanks for the lead on persony. I'll look into it.
Alan, I share the frustration of reliability. But the flip side of it is that I think we are seeing less loyalty to a tool - maybe we are becoming migratory in our tool use. There are pros and cons, but if a tool is easy to pick up, use as long as it is useful, it is probably just as easy to put it down and move on.
Now that does not AT ALL address the issue of the portability of content we put in these things. That may be the next frontier!
Portability. My thoughts turn to XSLT. We are talking about aggregation a lot. If I look at the way a nicely decorated blog looks, it is an amalgam of sidebar widgets pulling information from different online services. It doesn't seem like it is too far fetched to simply draw XML from one service transform and store it in another.
This is the realm of search engine optimization. If you look at GoogleBase entries for people, they are mostly exports of profiles from Hot or Not and other dating sites. Whether that is on the part of the sites, or on the part of affiliate marketers, getting paid for the referral or the click, their is already a push to push data from one web service to the next.
Us community oriented folks simply don't have the $$$ incentive to implement the transformations.
I recently wrote a small Java Applet, which permits different people to edit simultaniously a same picture. I thought that this might be usefull when calling someone over the telephone when there is the need to explain things with a drawing. I hope that this shared white board is easy to use. Is this the kind of application you were thinking about?
Christoph, forgive me for taking forever to check out your white board. http://www.lix.polytechnique.fr/~durr/Attic/WhiteBoard/ It looks very cool. The one thing I missed was a free form line. A lot of what I sketch out needs that flexibility. I'm not sure what programming that entails.
Having a really good shared white board is also the first step. We need to figure out how to use it effectively, as not everyone feels comfortable "sketching" on it, eh?
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