Lotsa Techie Links [Jan 29]

I read several interesting technical articles recently, and thought I’d share some of the more interesting ones with you.

The first bundle of links are all all Google-related:

• Michael Arrington of TechCrunch notes that 1,000 human lifetimes have been spent looking at Google Earth. I would never have given this any thought on my own, but it does not surprise me. It is an incredibly useful application that is getting more useful all the time.
• Philipp Lenssen of Google Blogoscoped tells how to write a book using Google Docs. I had an experience with this recently when putting my eBook together. I tried using Google Docs to create the Word document and save it to disk so I could use the MobiPocket tools to create an eBook from that. It worked great except for the images. The interesting thing to me was that the eBook creator first had to form an HTML document from the Word document, and the HTML code for the Google Docs version was tremendously cleaner than the HTML generated from MS Word. yet, because of something screwy about the pictures, I ultimately had to use MS Word. So, I would add to Philipp’s discussion: if you want clean HTML and Word documents, but are not concerned about how the pictures are handled, use Google Docs. It’s great. If you need to embed pictures, you might be better off with Word.
• Tony Ruscoe, also of Google Blogoscoped, notes that he has come across a beta of Google-Gears-enabled Google Docs. This is fantastic! Not clear when this capability is going to be rolled out in full, but I look forward to it. Tony notes that it looks like it will initially apply only to documents, and that the spreadsheets and presentations will come later. For me, that would be fine.
• And one final link on Google Apps: Ashley of CyberNet tells us that Google Docs now allows bulk uploads of documents and that Google Presentations can be saved in PDF format.
• Update: just came across two more really good Google-related links: Matt Cutts gives us 11 Gmail power tips and Gina Trapani tells us how to have multiple HTML signatures in Gmail.

For those of you who do a lot of mobile work, have you found out how to enable Google Gears on mobile devices such as a BlackBerry or iPhone? I haven’t seen any evidence of it, but perhaps it exists and I just have not found it. (?) Also, if any of you have learned how to overcome the problem with pictures in Google Docs, which I had when using MobiPocket Creator, I’d love to hear from you in the comments.

Now for the non-Google links:

Craig Mathias of ComputerWorld speculates that the notebook will lose out to the ‘Web tablet’ and that we will see this begin to happen this year, despite the intro of MacBook Air. He notes that Linux will play a role in this. My guess: based on my watching technology predictions for the past 25 or 30 years, I suspect that Craig’s timeframe is wrong, probably way wrong. We may see a dominance of Web Tablets in time, but technology, especially innovative technology, always seem to move much slower than predicted (Moore’s law excepted).

SignOnSanDiego has an article on the many new roles taken on by cell phones. They note, for example, that

Frequent business travelers use phone cameras to help remember which ubiquitous rental car they’re driving and the number of the night’s hotel room.

Some people have abandoned wallet photos of babies and pets and instead store slide shows on their phones.

[I came across this link via a tweet from Steve Rubel on Twitter.]

Continuing on, I read a neat article by Steve Laser of Mobility Site in which he shows how the Advantage is a better ‘UMPC’ than a UMPC is. Steve packs a helluva lot detail into this review, along with lots of purty pictures. Good job walking us through what the Advantage can do, Steve! If it weren’t for the $800 price tag, I might get one for the heck of it. But, whenever I start thinking like that, I remind myself of the money I’ve already spent on gadgets.

Since I started this post talking about Google stuff, I’ll close with it too: I wrote the initial draft of this post using Google Docs. I then copied the HTML version of it (using Google Docs’ HTML editor) into WordPress and tweaked it a bit. There are some things I liked about using Google Docs for this and there are a couple I didn’t (relating to the HTML code). I’ll continue to tinker with this in the future, though, and it could become a regular publishing tool for me.