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.

Google Notebook, the Ajaxy bookmarking app I praised when it launched back in May, has taken a cue from Writely and Google Spreadsheets and added collaboration features. Whereas previously sharing was limited to letting others view your Notebook, it is now possible to invite other people to add to and modify your Notebook. This could be ideal for group research projects, trip planning--basically any situation in which several people are all collecting information online for a single purpose.

In addition to collaboration, Google Notebook has a couple other minor new features, including improved drag and drop support, Trash and undo (so when you accidentally delete something, it's not actually gone), and a Notebook gadget for Google Personalized Home. As always, I'm relieved to see Google is still developing this project instead of leaving it to gather dust.

[Via Lifehacker]

Google Notebook, the new product Google was being a bit coy about last week, is now up and running, and I have to say I'm pleasantly surprised. When some screenshots surfaced last week it wasn't clear just how Google Notebook would work, but luckily my initial suspicions were confirmed: Google Notebook is powered by a Firefox extension an addon for Firefox and IE. Basically, Google Notebook is similar to the ScrapBook extension, but combined with an Ajaxy web service. It lets you grab web pages, text excerpts, and images and save them to Notebooks. The extension's main interface is a box that pops up in the lower-right corner when you click on "Open Notebook" in your status bar or right-click on something and click on "Note this." When you do so, an editing field pops up where you can type anything you want or drag-and-drop text and images to it. If you've made a selection on a web page when the box pops up, it will automatically be added to your new note. From this interface you can also see the contents of all of your notebooks, create new notebooks and sections heading, and edit previous notes. The little box also links to Google Notebook's "full page view," i.e. the full-fledged Ajaxy web service I mentioned. Anyone who has spent some time with Gmail, Google Calendar, or Google Reader will feel right at home with the interface. The web interface is like a bigger version of the extension's interface, allowing you to delete notes, do more editing (the extension only has buttons for bold and italic, but the web interface has full-fledged rich text support), rearrange notes, and even entire sections by drag-and-drop, and change your sharing preferences (here's an example of a somewhat eclectic shared notebook). You can also select multiple notes using the familiar Shift and Ctrl keys to do batch deletes or moves.

I think that people will find a lot of different uses for Google Notebook. It could, of course, be used as its name suggests, for taking notes and doing research. Others will use it to make collections of links to share, e.g. teachers who want to give their students an annotated list of resources. It might also make a nice way to keep a wishlist. Some will use it to keep track of bookmarks, but it really isn't suited (and doesn't aim) to replace the likes of del.icio.us. Google Notebook lets you search your notes, and having separate notebooks and sub-headings will be enough organization for some people, but the lack of any kind of tagging make it poorly suited for managing a hodge-podge of a few bookmarks. Google Notebook does have a social aspect, though, in the form of a not-yet-implemented global search for searching everyone's publicly-shared notes, but it is primarily a personal tool like Google Calendar. Currently Google Notebook is missing a couple of things that I believe are crucial for its success, namely RSS feeds and an open API, but given Google's track record, I think it's fair to assume that these are on the way and I can't wait to see what people can accomplish with them. I'm also still expecting Google to integrate Google Notebook into Google Toolbar at some point, but since it still lives under the Google Labs banner ("Labs" is the new "Beta"!) they may wait until it's a more proven product.

[Thanks, Bill!]

The subject of one of Google's many announcements at Wednesday's Google Press Day was Google Notebook, a somewhat mysterious project that Google has described only as "a personal browser tool that lets you clip text, images, and links from the pages you're searching, save clippings to an online notebook, and then share notebooks with others." Google will be launching Google Notebook sometime next week, but today you can see a whole pile of screenshots of the product in this Flickr set. Even from 18 screenshots, though, it's tough to tell exactly how Google Notebook works, but to my eyes it looks basically like an online bookmark system. "Notebooks" seem to be little more than collections of links that you can manage through a web-based interface. In the screenshots the user searches for "gifts for mom" on Google, and then uses a small pop-up in the corner of the results page to save and annotate one of the resulting links. Then the user goes to the Google Notebook site (google.com/gn, but don't bother, it doesn't work) where all of her notebooks are displayed. This looks very Ajaxy, including some pretty transparent drag-and-drop stuff. Notes can be edited and there seem to be rich-text controls, and of course there are buttons to share or make notebooks private, as well as "New Notebook" and "Add note" buttons. And that, it would seem, is about it. In There doesn't appear to be any tagging functionality or any social aspect a la del.icio.us. In the screenshots the pop-up box only seems to be displayed on Google results pages and I don't see any other indication that this is, say, a Firefox extension. However, this shot shows a URL box, so obviously possible to add URLs that aren't included in search results, just more difficult. A bookmarklet will undoubtedly be created either by Google or some third party to make that easier, but I think very soon we'll see that functionality integrated into Google Toolbar.

Obviously Google Notebook isn't intended to compete with social bookmarking systems like del.icio.us, but while the interface and the snappiness that comes with Google's web apps appeal to me, I don't really see anything Google Notebook can do that I can't already do with del.icio.us (with the possible exception of the ability to rearrange items), and without tagging I can imagine notebooks with many items quickly becoming unmanageable. However, for all I know these screenshots are of an older version of Google Notebook, and what we'll be seeing next week might be something different entirely.

Google made a number of big(ish) announcements at yesterday's Google Press Day, but isn't that what Press Day is for? The biggest, or at least most fun, announcement was Google Trends, a new project at Google Labs that gives you pretty Alexa-like charts of search activity and Google News articles for the keywords you punch in. The charts are reminiscent of Google Finance, with news articles marked to correspond to points on the chart. By separating them with commas you can specify up to five different keywords to show on the same chart.

Last week I insinuated that Google Health might be among the news, but that was a little off. What Google did launch is Google Co-op, which is two things: First of all, it's a sort of tagging system that allows Google to create "vertical" search engines on specialized topics, e.g. Health. This works by allowing experts and professionals to "label" (i.e. tag) a bunch of URLs and upload them en masse. The tagging end of the equation isn't aimed at end users a la Yahoo! My Web 2.0 (yet), but the results are. Second, Google Co-op does something called "Subscribed Links," which basically allows third parties to create modules that will pop up for relevant searches, much in the way that, say, links to Google Maps currently pop up when you search for something that looks like a location. Currently there aren't very many Subscribed Links available, but they do show what's possible. The Digg subscription, for example, shows you recent popular posts related to your query on Digg along with how many diggs they've gotten. The Fandango subscription shows you movie information and links to tickets and showtimes for movie title queries. I can imagine this becoming really useful.

Google also announced the Beta release of Google Desktop 4. The biggest new feature is the inclusion of Google Gadgets, i.e. widgets. I won't go into too much detail here since widgets are all but ubiquitous these days (see Apple's Dashboard and the Yahoo! Widget Engine). Instead, take a loot at the Gadget library to see what's available. Of course, there's an open API for creating your own, and you can even import some Gadgets from your Personalized Home to Google Desktop 4, and Google will recommend Gadgets for you based on frequent searches.

Lastly, Google is being a little quiet about the last of its announcements, Google Notebook. It's described as "a personal browser tool that lets you clip text, images, and links from the pages you're searching, save clippings to an online notebook, and then share notebooks with others," but that's about all we know. They could take this in a number of idrections, but it sounds to me a bit like the ScrapBook extension for Firefox, though I'm sure it will have a significant web-based component. Look for Google Notebook to launch next week at Google Labs.