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September 11th, 2008 at 9:32 am

Another day, another set of updates for another Google product. This time, it’s Google Docs that’s been updated with three fancy options, all three hinting at certain advantages Google Docs can have over desktop office applications.

Dictionary & Thesaurus enable you to look up a definition or synonyms for any word in your document from Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary. It’s located in the tools menu, and it works for English only. Similarly, Encyclopedia lets you check out the description of any word from Encyclopedia Britannica.

Another new options lets you search for images from within Google Docs. Highlight a word, click Tools -> Search… using Image Search, and you’ll get the results from Google Image Search. Find an image you like? Just drag an drop it into you’re document, and you’re set.

All this can, of course, be done in a desktop application, but it shows how easily Google can take advantage of its many online applications and services and integrate them into their products. Now, if only Google Docs weren’t as buggy when it comes to formatting…

Source:Mashable!

You like Digg, but you’re sick of all those stories that don’t have anything to do with extraterrestrial sentient beings? Try out Alien Ufo Believers, a very young (and still somewhat buggy) site that’s all about UFOs and little else.

The site offers UFO-related pictures, videos, accounts and theories, and it’s up to the visitors to decide whether they’re real or fake. Unfortunately, using Firefox, I was unable to vote for items on the front page, I had to actually click on every individual item to vote, which is an annoying bug that needs fixing.

Other than that, there’s also some news and merchandise there, but the fact is that the site sorely lacks content. However, I somehow think that Digg’s concept of upvoting/downvoting would work really well with the UFO theme. In any case, the truth is out there, and it’s up to you to vote for or against it.

Source:Mashable!

Before Disqus, Intense Debate and SezWho entered the social commenting arena, there was coComment. When it first started, coComment used a bookmarklet to aggregate your comments across the Web into one stream, and later tried to make the process even easier by adding plugins. It didn’t offer too many extra features at first, so upstarts like Disqus and SezWho were able to get ahead quickly by integrating more social functionality and other features right out of the starting gate.

I must admit that I have never understood the growing popularity of the social commenting systems. Having comments hosted on someone else’s server where they could be lost forever has never appealed to me. Disqus recently added importing and exporting of comments to address the issue. It seems coComment is still hosting your comments for you in spite of a recent backlash by blog owners requesting comment ownership .

After checking out the beta site for coComment’s face lift, I was left with mixed feelings. Is it a better service than it was before? Yes, absolutely. The new and improved coComment offers many more social tracking features, social networking features and personalization options like a profile page. The company has also teamed up with Retaggr to give you a way to make a “comment business card” you can use to draw other people toward your comments in coComment.

One of the items touted by the coComment team when discussing the beta was a revamped design. The team is right, the new look and feel of coComment is much less crowded and more streamlined than the old version. Even so, I give Disqus a win here if you are looking for “pretty,” especially if you use the coComment sidebar. Once you open up the sidebar, it loses that nice sleek look altogether, and seems crowded and disjointed again.

A plus for the sidebar feature is having a way to follow comments in coComment in real time as you move around the Internet. I’d rather have this feature as something I could integrate into an existing toolbar, personally, but overall it is a nice feature. It just takes up a lot of room on my laptop screen as a sidebar, and makes it harder to follow my tabs.

Speaking of tabs, I am an avid Tab Mix Plus Dev Beta and FireFox 3.x for Mac user, who often has over 200 tabs open as I research articles and generally try things out. coComment’s beta did not play well with Tab Mix Plus or Colorful Tabs. Having the sidebar open caused some serious lag time and several freezes. Turning off Tab Mix Plus and Colorful Tabs seemed to help, but that is a deal breaker for me - any new toy has to work with the old toys as well or I can’t justify using it.

In the end I think coComment has made strides in the right direction. Adding rankings, groups, tags, profile pages, portable comment cards, notification via your MycoComment page and ways to explore the comments of others are all good things. Even so, the buggy behavior with my existing plug-ins is a deal breaker for me, and using any of these social comment services is something I do sparingly.

As for installing social commenting systems on my blogs, well, Disqus has taken a much needed step forward for me with its new import/export feature (and a step backward with reblogging). I’ll be really impressed at the first company that gives us a way to track comments from all of the social commenting systems (to some degree) in one place so we don’t have to maintain all the different profiles at each one.