Welcome to Googleholic, your bi-weekly fix of everything Google!

In this edition:

• Live blog with Google Docs
• Google Mobile App for iPhone
• App Engine Hack-a-thon in Chicago
• Google Sites domain mapping
• Google Notebook bookmarklet
• Google News new design

Welcome to Googleholic - your bi-weekly fix of everything Google!

This edition covers:

• Google Reader adds support for Google Presentations
• Picasa for Mac coming sometime later this year
• Google Notebook adds hAtom support
• An overview of the other Google stories we covered earlier this week

The folks at lifehack.org, (not LifeHacker.com) have cooked up the 17 best Firefox extensions that will make blogging easy. I'm sure you've seen some of these before, but just in case you haven't seen them all, they are:

1. Google Notebook
2. Session Manager
3. coComment
4. Speak It
5. DocuFarm
6. ScribeFire (formerly performancing)
7. Deepest Sender
8. Resizable Text Area
9. Spellbound
   
10. Google toolbar
11. Tabinta
12. Split Browser
13. Copy Plain Text
    
14. Copy As HTML Link
15. Web Developer
16. SnagIt
17. Picnik

There are some widely-used extensions on the list, such as ScribeFire (formerly performancing), Split Browser, Session Manager and Google Notebook, but there are some that aren't so well known, like Picnik, DocuFarm, Deepest Sender, and Tabinta. Once installed, these extensions greatly help the organization and communication of information.

Are there other extensions that should have made this list from lifehack.org? What are the best extensions that make blogging easier, fun, or enjoyable for you?

The Google Notebook extension for Firefox is a pretty handy tool for quickly bookmarking web pages you might want to save or come back to later in the day. But the extension opens in a rather small window and generally just gets in the way. But there's a solution: Make Google Notebook your Firefox sidebar.

Here's what you do:

1. Bookmark the page Google Persnolized Homepage uses for Google Notebook.
2. Right click on our bookmark and open properties
3. Click the box that says "Load this bookmark in sidebar"

Voila! Now you have a sidebar filled with your web clippings and personal notes.
[via lifehacker]

Zoho announced a new product called Zoho Notebook at this week's DEMO conference. Pimped as "the online application for gathering and creating multiple types of content that can easily be shared with others," Zoho Notebook is a little bit of Google Notebook with some Microsoft OneNote sprinkled on top, and finally brought to a simmer with some innovative and powerful web 2.0 collaborative goodness. Read/WriteWeb got to sit down with Raju Vegesna, one of Zoho's developers, to ask a few questions, and indeed found that collaboration is indeed one of the most compelling aspects of Zoho Notebook. Users can choose to share an entire notebook, a single page or even a specific piece of content on a page. Sound complicated? Then check out the demo video Raju put together to strut Zoho Notebook's stuff.

Of course, if you're already salivating, you're going to have to pick up a self-control book or two. While Zoho Notebook was announced today, it won't be out in public beta until March. Still, if it's as handy and powerful as the video makes it out to be, we'll be sure to get our hands on it for you as soon as possible.

You remember the video, right?

I got my wish. Eleven days ago I posted about a new online productivity suite that I was dying to try. Well it's late on Halloween evening, and I've just spent the last hour playing with the various features in Scrybe that enticed me when I first saw the demo video. And so far, I think we have a winner on our hands.

After playing around with the user interface for a bit, which is sort of fun in and of itself, I decided to test the killer feature that puts Scrybe in a league of its own when it comes to online calendars and productivity applications: offline use and synchronization.

What can I say? It just works. I turned off my wireless adapter, put my browser into offline mode, logged in, and proceeded to add and change data in my Scrybe account. Everything worked as you'd expect - it felt like being online. Then I turned my wireless back on, put my browser back into online mode, logged into my account, and everything was there, as expected. Okay, so far, so good. So then, I moved over to another computer, and logged in to Scrybe. And, as expected, everything was there, as well. Perfect!

So what is there to complain about with the beta release? So far, surprisingly little. My one peeve is that the Scrybe window defaults to a specific size, which is slightly too long for my laptop's native resolution of 1280x800, and awkwardly short for my two available external monitor's resolutions at 1440x900 and 1280x1024. Given that Scrybe is written in Flash, as TechCrunch notes, it seems strange that they would have chosen not to make the interface fluid like, for example, Google Calendar. Certainly it should be possible. Let's hope this is on Scrybe's radar for future enhancements. For more thoughts on what it means that Scrybe is written in Flash, check out Ryan Stewart's thoughts at ZDNet.

I'm sure as time goes on bugs will be found, and fixed (oh, the beauty of online apps), but for now Scrybe is giving us a seriously strong first draft to play with. In terms of functionality, this beta release of Scrybe is almost feature complete, based on what they showed in the demonstration video. The only feature that did not make the cut for this version is the bookmarking / web clipping functionality. According to Scrybe this will be added in a few weeks, to be followed by the mysterious sharing functionality that is alluded to at the end of the first video.

Although I could take this time to walk through the functionality in Scrybe again, it's really no different than what we saw in the demo video, and I described in our first post about the system. That is to say that so far, everything works as I'd hoped it would.

Right now the only way to get a beta account is to sign up at Scrybe on their main page. Unfortunately for all of us excited users, Scrybe is doing a phased rollout of their beta program. Although this is frustrating for those of us that would like accounts and can't get them immediately, I think they deserve credit for deciding to do things right. Faizan, CEO and co-founder of Scrybe tells us "We could have launched with a bang and gotten another mega spike on Alexaholic, but the purpose is to control the hype and improve the product with focused users." That's a very refreshing perspective. For more information about the beta rollout, check out the Launch Details page on the Scrybe site.

In this era of worshipping at the temple of "The David" (Getting Things Done), there is no shortage of offline and online productivity suites. With that in mind, I rarely get all that excited about the new Web 2.0 offerings that get a bit of buzz here and there. But Scrybe appears to be different.

Way different.

Like wow different. Here, just watch:

Scrybe is an online organizer that is grounded in one word: context. The user interface is designed to always give the user context relating to the data they are dealing with. So if you're working in your calendar, you can fly up to a year view, or dig down all the way to a day view, and all of the related information is intelligently displayed so that you never lose track of where you are. Watching the video on their site, you immediately get a feeling of "that just makes sense". Google Calendar is good, but doesn't appear to be as good as this.