New This Week: Microsoft Office Live Workspace and IE8 and LibraryThing Local
Microsoft has had a big week what with Microsoft Office Live Workspace rising up to compete with the likes of Google Docs and with IE8 Beta coming out with new features to help it stay on the cutting edge of web browsers (and to finally make inroads with standards compliance).
Microsoft Office Live Workspace
On Monday, Microsoft announced its Office Live Workspace. The Office Live Workspace tagline is “An online extension of Microsoft Office.” So far, I’m rather enjoying the large storage and multiple workspaces the product has built in. To begin to understand what Micosoft Live Workspace has to offer, read the ReadWriteWeb post Office Live Workspace vs. Google Docs: Feature-by-Feature Comparison.
Internet Explorer 8 Beta
You can check out IE8 New and Exciting Features (not just new, but also exciting…). Particularly exciting, I think, are the WebSlices. Webslices enable users to subscribe to a web page such as Facebook or ebay and to be notified through the browser’s webslice when those sites are updated.
At any rate, you could download IE8 Beta right now. It does have an Emulate IE7 button built into the Command Bar, so that you can switch back and forth when browsing. But you could also just wait, because, as Microsoft says: “This beta release is available to everyone, but is primarily for Web developers and designers to test the new tools, layout engine, and programming enhancements”. It’s always good to have options :).
ReadWriteWeb’s post Internet Explorer 8 Has Arrived provides a more detailed look into IE8’s new features.
Okay, enough Microsoft for today, moving on…
LibraryThing Local
LibraryThing as a social cataloging site continues to expand its offerings. For instance, I just learned the other day that instead of having to tag books “currently reading” or “to read” you can now designate this using the Status field on the Book Edit page. Also, the recommendations and anti-recommendations for read-alikes continue to improve.
But LibraryThing has gone beyond social cataloging by adding LibraryThing Local into its offerings. LibraryThing Local seeks to provide information about local book-related events and venues. LibraryThing Local seeks members help in gathering location and other details about local libraries, bookstores, author readings/signings, and book festivals.
As yet, the majority of the data gathered relates more to bookstore locales than to book events, so it’s usefulness will depend on where you live and what you’re looking for, but, if it continues to collect data, it could become a useful resource.
As of this post, LibraryThing Local’s Stats are as follows:
8,651 total venues
3495 Bookstores
4883 Libraries
109 Fair/Festivals
164 Others
948 total events
posted in miscellany, technology, web 2.0 | 0 Comments
