Google released Google Notebook, another nifty online application that lets you take notes and save them for later.  I whipped up a sample Notebook to test the system.

While this is currently being advertised as another neat experiment in Google Labs, it could be Google’s attempt to take on textbook publishers and other companies who need authors to provide large amounts of structured content.

This has the beginnings of the best online authoring system I’ve ever seen.  Consider the current features:

• Users just click on a small bar on the left of the note to drag it above or below other notes.  LOVE the drag and drop feature – allows you to easily organize a large amount of “notes” in minutes.
• Users can instantly collapse all notes or expand them all.  Easily browse content, find what you want, expand and edit, collapse and save for later.
• Click “Edit” to edit the note, and you get a nice WYSIWYG editor.  No need for authors to memorize HTML or XML coding to insert bold and italics.
• Users can easily add “sections” and organize notes into sections.  Users can also expand or collapse sections to browse larger “sections” of content.
• Users can create multiple “Notebooks” (or “books”) and browse between all of them through the navigation on left.  Imagine if these were books of structured content – Handbooks, writing guides, etc.
• User can “print” the page by creating a simple version of their notebook with basic formatting applied.

In short – I’d feel comfortable letting an average user log into the system, author their content, and send in a “printable” version. 

Here are future features that could change this from “Google Notebook” to “Google Textbook”:

• Create multiple headings within headings to create an expandable tree of content.  Currently you can’t create subsections within the larger sections, but if you’re writing a textbook you need to add “a-heads” and “b-heads.”
• Auto-number headings – chapter 1, chapter 2, section 2a, etc.  Kind of like Word but with the ability to keep each piece of content as its own chunk.
• Export to more formats than just the printable page.  Export to RTF format, HTML, IMS-QTI, the user’s own structured XML, etc.  Somewhat like Drupal’s ability to export books to OPML.
• Drag “notes” from a central archive into a user’s book.  Want a custom reader with narrative readings on Gender and Identity?  Just launch your new book on the left, and drag Sojourner Truth’s “Ain’t I a Woman” from a list on the right.
• Ability to tag “notes” (i.e. discreet chunks of content) with metatags. Google’s best tagging system appears to be the “labels” in Gmail, but Flickr, WordPress and iTunes have much better taxonomy tagging systems.  Tag 20 tutorials you just wrote with the keyword “Commas,” then ask Google Textbook to give you all the content related to “Commas.”
• Author content into more structured input forms than just a WYSIWYG editor.  Write a workbook with 10 multiple choice questions, and have Google Textbook (Workbook?) prompt you to enter the question stem, 4 choices, and select a correct choice. 

This product bears watching, as Google moves into organizing and retrieving structured information that’s usually presented in textbook format.

Last week in yoga class we ended the class with Bow pose.  This is the pose where you lay on your stomach, grasp your ankles with your hands, and pull your chest and feet off the floor.

We did Bow three times in a row.  The first time I grasped my ankles and pulled off the floor, no problem.

The second time, the teacher came over, gently took hold of my ankles, and pulled back.  My chest opened wide and  lifted off the ground and I felt my whole body move upwards about three times higher than my previous attempt.  The teacher asked, “Too much?” and I responded, “No, it’s fine.”  And strangely it did feel fine.  The post was probably more strenuous, but I felt the front of my body open in a way it never had before and my legs and back felt incredibly strong.  After a while the teacher said to rest.

The third time I pulled back and felt my body reach the same deep bend as before, only this time my muscles were doing all the work.  I was at the limit of my own abilities, but it was invigorating to see how a year of yoga had changed my own limit.  Strangely, I actually enjoyed the deeper third bend more than my first attempt, since the third bend was a sign of how far I’d come and how far my body could now bend.  It felt great to be able to do a deep pose using my own power, without any prompting or assistance.

Thinking back on this practice, it occured to me that I’ve extended a lot of my personal ”limits” over the past year.  I think part of this growth is due to yoga practice – feeling my body push past its physical limitations helped prepare me to overcome spiritual and mental obstacles. 

Here’s hoping I can expand my boundaries in the coming year as easily as I stretched my body in bow pose.

Here are the latest pictures from my kitchen redesign – three supports to create a granite countertop over the bar.

Nice work from Home Experts (the installers working with Home Depot).  Unfortunately things are about 3 months behind schedule but we’ll see how it ends up.

	All taken from my ongoing Kitchen photo gallery in Google’s Picasa.

Taken at a recent Notre Dame game:

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Used with the Jerome’s Keywords plugin for WordPress, which supposedly lets you add tags.  Let’s see if the plugin works – if so, this post should eventually show up on Technorati at http://technorati.com/tag/Jobriga.

Update after like 2 seconds: It worked.

I love it when a plan comes together.

I’ve always liked to read spoilers – short synopses of movies and books that reveal the twist ending and explain what all the mystery is about.  Some people think I’m weird, but I think that there’s so much media out there that I don’t have time to watch a 2 hour movie or read a whole book just to see what happened.

Over the summer, the producers of the TV show Lost developed an Alternate Reality Game called “The Lost Experience” that slowly released clues about the show – about the Hanso Foundation, the Numbers, etc.  The only issue was that the clues were so scattered that you had to spend a lot fo time hunting them down, assembling them, and keeping on top of the game.  I’m a fan of Lost, but not enough of a fan to spend 24 hours tracking down the backstory of some minor character.

Imagine my joy at finding http://www.lostpedia.com/, which answers every major mystery on Lost.  Fans who played the Lost Experience and combed the Internet for clues assembled them all into a coherent, well-developed story that explains away a ton of the larger mysteries on the show.

I won’t spoil the mysteries here, but Lostpedia includes the following pieces of information:

• An explanation of what the Numbers mean
• What the DHARMA initiative was developed to do, and how the island figures into it
• Photos (and video!) of Alvar Hanso – his explanation of what DHARMA is, and where he is today
• A full list (with YouTube links) of all the Orientation videos, including some which haven’t appeared in the TV show but have appeared in the Lost Experience
• A full list of Dharma logos and stations

The only (minor) issue to having everything explained is that the only thing I have to look forward to is more backstory on the main characters of the TV show, and that’s probably my least favorite part of the show.  How much more can I found out about Jack’s divorce, or Sun and Jin‘s marital troubles, or why Sawyer and Kate might make a good couple?  Most of my interest was in finding out answers to the larger mysteries, and now that I have the answers there’s not much more to find out.

This seems like wiki culture at its finest – using a group of unrelated, geographically distant researchers to assemble and the information and present it in a coherent way.  The YouTube clips (see example) with transcripts alone are amazing – I wish all my company’s media was tagged this well!

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I’ll keep watching the show for now, but I hope the pace picks up soon.  If not, I’ll just skip the watching and read all the answers on www.lostpedia.com.