Wednesday, November 16, 2005

Viewing OpenDocument Files in FireFox OSNews posts an exclusive article, *Why Browsers Should Be Able to Display OpenDocument*. "OpenDocument got a lot of publicity lately. StarOffice 8 and OpenOffice.org 2.0 finally arrived, and all the other makers of office suites (with the notable exception of Microsoft) have started implementing the new standard into their programs. Massachusetts recently decided to use OpenDocument as the standard file format, effectively locking out MS Office as soon as January 1st, 2007. Other countries are on their way to do the same. Also, OpenDocument recently got submitted to become an ISO standard." An interesting tidbit I picked up from the article: you can view OpenDocument files in FireFox! If you have both FireFox and OpenOffice.org 2 installed on your machine, start OpenOffice.org and navigate the usual menu/dialog/treeview to Tools | Options, Internet, Mozilla Plug-In, and check the Enable checkbox. Shut down and restart Firefox. Now, you can open OpenDocument documents for viewing in the browser! A toolbar appears that allows editing (opening the doc in OpenOffice.org), direct printing, direct export to PDF, searching and more. Pretty cool stuff. 5:32:36 PM    comment []

Doc: Saving the Net Doc's at it again. Years ago, he pointed out that the ClueTrain was leaving the station, this time he posts a call to arms in Saving the Net. Required Reading. Saving the Net from the pipeholders. I've spent much of the last two weeks writing an essay that just went up at Linux Journal: Saving the Net: How to Keep the Carriers from Flushing the Net Down the Tubes. It's probably the longest post I've ever put up on the Web. It's certainly the most important. And not just to me. I started writing it after a recent surprise visit by David Isenberg to Santa Barbara. He's the one who got me [~] and, I hope, us [~] going. I finished writing it yesterday after David Berlind published three excellent pieces, which I highly recommend reading, and acting upon. For guidance during the rest of this thing (whether they knew it or not), I also want to thank David Weinberger, Dave Winer, Steve Gillmor, Kevin Werbach, Cory Doctorow, Don Marti, Richard M. Stallman, Eric S. Raymond, Susan Crawford, Larry Lessig, John Palfrey, Chris Nolan, Jeff Jarvis, Craig Burton, Andrew Sullivan, Dean Landsman, Matt Welch, George Lakoff, Om Malik, J.D. Lasica, Virginia Postrel, Esther Dyson, Micah Sifry, John Perry Barlow, The EFF, the Berkman Center, the Personal Democracy Forum and others I'm overlooking but will fill in later when I have the time. [The Doc Searls Weblog] 3:35:33 PM    comment []

Bricklin's WikiCalc: Very Cool Andrew MacNeill - AKSEL Solutions posts "Just saw this over on zdNet but then wanted to try it out. I think David may be right when he talks about the potential of what this could do. Wikis aren't just for group blogging or information - now you've got a live application for it as well." Wikis are a great way for collaborative effort at building up knowledge online. Witness the mother-of-all wikis at WikiPedia. But each of the hundreds of wiki software packages out there has its own markup language, or worse, no language at all. With Dan Bricklin's WikiCalc, we have a demonstration of a rich client app that can lock, read, edit and write formatted material and then publish it to a web site. The software is at version zero-point-one alpha stage, but the concepts are cool. Check it out. 10:57:55 AM    comment []

All Your Base Are Belong To... Google? The ever calm, fair and balanced Slashdot reports Google Base Launches. An anonymous reader writes "As announced on the Google Blog, Google Base has finally launched. According to Google, Google Base enables content owners to easily make their information searchable online. Anyone, from large companies to website owners and individuals, can use it to submit their content in the form of data items. We'll host the items and make them searchable for free." 10:34:38 AM    comment []

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