Week 6: Working in the Cloud

Being a Google user, I had already been introduced to the wonderful world of online collaboration through Google Drive - a service provided by Google, which allows users to store and share files within the cloud, with the option of collaborative editing. A great tool for group projects since Google Drive features a word processor, a spreadsheet program, a presentation program, and a vector graphics editor. It also gives you the option to create files within the cloud or upload files from your computer and edit them directly online. Additionally, you can view your files offline, which is useful if you're on the go and nowhere near Internet connection. But the best thing about it is that it's FREE!

barrymieny. (2011, September 10). Evernote Icon [Online Image]. Retrieved from http://www.softicons.com/

This week I discovered another great tool for online collaborating: Evernote - an information management tool that allows you to archieve, organize, and manage information, including documents, images, bookmarks, etc., from any Internet-capable device. I find it to be a mash between Diigo (a great online bookmarking tool that I talked about on one of my previous posts) and Google Docs. The only drawback with Evernote is that unless you have a 'Premium' account (which you need to pay $$$ in order to have), online collaboration is out of the picture - you can still share 'notes' with others but they're not allowed to edit them. Evernote, however, does allow a 3 month trial period when you sign up for the 'Free' account, which I'm definitely taking advantage of (never turn anything down when it's FREE).

Krahn, A. (CC) 2014

Discovering all these awesome online tools is great, but as my PLE grows, monitoring and curating those tools is beginning to become fairly time-consuming. Thankfully there are online services such as Zapier and IFTTT that integrate webapps to easily move your data and automate tedious tasks. They're based on a conditional statement that includes a 'trigger' and an 'action': "If [this happens on one service], then [do that on another service]."As expected, though, there are pros and cons with everything. Zapier provided a greater number of apps that you can integrate as well as A LOT more 'triggers', but you need to pay in order to integrate some webapps. IFFT, although it has less webapps that you can integrate and less 'triggers', it is completely FREE.
I used Zapier to integrate Evernote and Twitter since I liked the triggers on Zapier better, but I used IFTTT to integrate Evernote and Feedly since that specific integration in Zapier required $$$.

I've now added 3 new tools to my PLE: one to my 'creating' section (Evernote), and two to my 'organizing' section (Zapier and IFTTT). Hooray!

Krahn, A. (CC) 2014

Since I explored Twitter last week, I thought this post that came across on my Feedly would be relevant for sharing: It's a post from readwrite.com titled It's Twitter vs. Free Speech, And Free Speech Is Losing. Twitter had long distinguished itself as a strong supporter of free speech and an advocate for its users' privacy, but recently it's succumbed to various requests from countries (Pakistan, Turkey, and Russia) to block accounts and remove tweets. Users are suffering the consequences of yet another tech company putting profit before people. Thoughts?