Online wordprocessor
I'm quite sure that there are a lot of tremendous journalistic uses for Writely, a very clever online word processor. It's just that I haven't found them yet.
You go to the site, sign in, and then you can write documents straight into the page, use various fonts and styles, store what you write or download it to your own machine. You can also upload MS Word documents and edit them and download your new documents as Word files.
There's more: you can publish online or to a web page and allow collaborations from named users. It is quick and efficient, it saves your work as you go, and, for the moment, it is free.
On the other hand, it won't work with Safari (a serious defect for us Mac bigots), the spelling dictionary is American, and you have to allow pop-ups, although if you are using Firefox you can allow pop-ups just for this one site.
But it is clever and I admire its ingenuity. I've been struggling to think of occasions when I would want to collaborate online rather than just sending files around, without success. I have come up with this idea. If someone sends you a Word (.doc) or OpenOffice (.odt) file, and you don't have those programs, you can upload the file, read it and work on it, print it out, store it and otherwise work on it. You can also save it to your machine: in Word, Open Office or, if all else fails, as an HTML file from which you can then extract the text you need. I call that useful.
Google Print
The much-discussed Google Print is up and running, and it really is an extremely useful resource for those of us who like to research things in books, as opposed to asking around the newsroom.
One of the surprising things is that it finds information not just in ancient out-of-copyright texts but in current books. Search for "magazine journalism", for instance, and there at number three is a book called Magazine Editing: How to Develop and Manage a Successful Publication by one John Morrish.
Click on that link and you can search the whole book. A search for "flat-plan", for example, brings up no fewer than 38 references.
As an author as well as a researcher, I'm in two minds about this. A person just wanting to know about flat-plans can now find out that information without buying the book or even going to the library and checking it out. On the other hand, many more people than would ever have seen the book now get the chance to discover how useful, interesting and inspiring it is. Some of them may even want to buy it, and there's a series of links on the left of the page to make that easy.
Google's chief executive, Eric Schmidt, responding to a legal action by the Association of American Publishers (the Authors' Guild doesn't like it either), says that the process of putting large chunks of books online can only happen "if the copyright owner has explicitly allowed it". Well, I am the copyright holder in this book and nobody asked me. I certainly don't think the "fair use" provisions of international copyright law apply.
On the other hand, Google does make very clear the process by which copyright holders can have their books removed. As it happens, I suspect I've earned as much as I'm likely to earn from this particular job, and consequently I'm happy to see it up there.
I hope it's useful, and my publishers would probably like it if some of those reading it dipped into their pockets and bought a copy.
Law gateway
AccessToLaw is an excellent gateway site to Internet resources for all areas of UK law, from legislation to court procedure, and including a wide range of legal subject areas.
The site has been created by the Inner Temple Library, and is aimed primarily at practising lawyers and law students, but it could be extremely useful for anyone struggling to deal with legal matters.