learnandteachonline.com

While I'd still like to try a new open source model for compliance training sometime, I am going to table the idea of trying an online course in s_____ h_________ training for the present.

I find I'm put off by all the competition -- afraid of the magnitude of it, but also dismayed by the character of it. Google always provides clues to commercial oversaturation. When I blog about h_________ training the contextual ads for training and for l__ firms and even loans are eagerly and persistently present, can't seem to shake them quick enough, even with masked content. And when I research the topic in search, the results are SEO-gamed to within an inch of my propriety. Just too much noise of a type I'm not in the temper to battle or to be associated with just now.

It makes me think that online compliance training in general may be taking on a slimy pall as a consequence of the marketing practices of its purveyors, in the same way that the abundance of affiliate programs and splogs have sullied the rep of online universities.

A rotten shame. We gotta clean up this town.

Mary Jo "Thorn in Microsoft's Side" Foley says the MS answer to Google Docs will actually be a SharePoint space hosted on a Microsoft server. You can sign up for a beta now. Here's the FAQ.

I can see an IT manager of a medium-sized organization allowing this before letting users go to Zoho or Google. Especially if it's a Microsoft shop. The promo pages look nice and safe and corporate and boring -- not like whippersnapper online apps sites that are almost certainly made by commies. ;-)

I signed up for Google Apps for one of my personal domains this morning. I'm tapping my foot now while the CNAME record goes through and Google verifies I own the domain.

It occurred to me after hearing about Google's plans to build social networking on top of its existing properties that Apps already provides something like a closed-circuit network if you wanted to use it that way, a little like Marc Canter's PeopleAggregator .

I thought I might use this as my header.

Oops. Nope. Realized almost immediately that Google marks are not allowed, so I guess I'll have to take out that "M." Don't suppose they can trademark the use of different faces and primary colors within a word, though.

Later: You have to mess with MX records, then wait up to 48 hours for them to resolve, too. I'm not very adept at those sorts of things, always seem to get one little thing wrong and I never know which little thing. It's still very arcane, isn't it? I suppose that's the way the organizational mail server admins like to keep it.

One thing: if Google does build social networking on top of its other services, it might be a comfortable place for grownups.

Now, when you start a new document in Google Docs it can be a PowerPoint-like slideshow in addition to the word processing or spreadsheet choices.

I played around with it and found it easy to use when creating a brand new deck, very smooth. Haven't tried importing a .ppt file.

There's no sign of its name, "Presently," that was being thrown around pre-launch. It wouldn't make sense for it to have a separate marketing name within the context of the Docs interface. You'll recall they dropped the "Writely" name, too, when the independent online word processor was acquired to become part of the suite.

I have hopes for online office suites, but have to say that my self-imposed trial to do without MS Office for six months at home did not work out so well. I found that I needed certain advanced features both in a word processor and spreadsheet that Google Docs couldn't manage.

ZDNet's Google blogger didn't like the presentation tool, but its education blogger did. (Anyone else find the ZDnet education blog a little k-12-centric? When I read about higher ed online learning I find I'm able to apply more of it to corporate training.)

I'm not sure I see why an aggregated page of feeds having an opportunity to comment is such an awful idea. Maybe if it wasn't Google who's reportedly thinking of doing it, the whole concept wouldn't be so distasteful?

Do Techcrunch writers necessarily speak for Techcrunch?

P.S. I think sidebar bloat at Techcrunch got the better of the site again. Something from i.ixnp.com slowed down the page load for me this morning to a level the Comcast tortoises would love.

Later: Found it. ixnp.com is associated with Snap Shots -- you know those little screenshot thumbnails that fly out when you hover over links? Forum thread about their causing slow loads.

Google search: slow load "snap shots"

Looks like the much anticipated launch of Google's wiki and presentation package slipped. It didn't get announced last week at Office 2.0, says Rafe Needleman on Webware.

Still, it seems like Google isn't actively trying to hide their run at MS Office the way they seemed to be doing a year ago.

Know what I'd do to pry the door ajar to the enterprise space? Make some breakthrough feature for the calendar, because of course sometimes you want reminders about work-work you have to do at home, but of course you don't want to use Outlook for it. I use web Outlook, and can access Outlook through Citrix and I still don't want to use it at home -- don't want to feel obliged to look at it except on whole work-at-home days. It doesn't help that web Outlook must be viewed in IE for it to look and work at all well.

Plus, IT managers might not feel as strongly about letting go of the calendar as they would about cutting loose from Outlook for mail.

BTW I had a work-at-home day last Friday and watched part of the panel Rafe moderated at the Office 2.0 conference. He did a nice job. Crack-me-up part: when he invited Sridhar Vembu, Zoho's CEO, to remark on a question, he'd say, "Sridhar?" And every single time it sounded to me like he was saying, "Sweetheart?" Lonely homeworkers have to find some sport, and need to talk back to somebody or something, so each time I'd say, "Yes darling?"

That's overstating it. Maybe. Once in a while I get alerted to something I had not seen before via another watching method. More often I'm delivered the hot scoop of something I'd caught last week, last month, or in a few cases last year.

Google Alerts FAQ.

Awesome! HBO's Soprano's site is using the Google Maps API.

From the NYT:

Longtime viewers of HBO's "The Sopranos" know there are many places in New Jersey to dump a body. And in one of the first marketing efforts to use Google's map technology, HBO would like to show you exactly where those are.

To promote their upcoming season of "The Sopranos," HBO, a division of Time Warner, and Deep Focus, an online marketing agency, have created an interactive map of New Jersey, using satellite maps from Google, and have highlighted important points of the most recent season's storyline. The map has about 15 icons in specific areas where scenes took place. When the user clicks on an icon, the scene plays in a pop-up window, which also supplies a description and a list of characters.

How come? I'd have thought there would be a South American edition, and maybe a separate one for Brazil. Know how I found out? In my referrer logs, my "my gosh" comes up 11th. I suppose Googling a idiom not in your language is a good way to understand its usage.