Adobe has just released a brand new online word processing application called Buzzword. You can find it at buzzword.acrobat.com. It is a very nice and clean looking interface that fades into the background as you create. That is nice, and it gives you some handy stats as you write. In the bottom left hand corner of the screen, it keeps you up to date on how many words you have type so far, something handy for those columnists who have to come in around 500 words every time. It also keeps you up to date on how many misspellings you have in your document. Something that is quite handy for those of us who are copying and pasting content written by others.

One thing I did notice which I thought was pretty strange. Even though Buzzword is housed at acrobat.com, you can’t save your document as a .pdf. What the…? Come on Adobe! Ridiculous.

My biggest fear for the product is that it may be a little to late to make a big difference. I don’t use online document creation much, but when I do, I use Google Docs. Not so much that it is the absolute best online document creation experience, but rather that they were first, and all my online documents are already there.

Good luck Adobe.

The following is copied and pasted from what I wrote using Adobe’s new online word processor offering, Buzzword.

Hello there you slick little interface. I just wish that I didn’t have such a backlog of documents in Google Docs. You see, this interface is quite slick, but I am not in this world. Flash is getting better and better, but it is so hard to shake those bad feelings I have accrued since the advent of Flash. There were so many sites that used Flash badly. You could use the back button, you couldn’t see the history, and for some reason, the fonts were rendered poorly which led to a ton of illegible, unnavigable sites. Yuck.

In comes Web 2.0 where we go back to standards and get back a lot of the functionality lost just prior to the big web bust of 2001. But, there is a problem a brewin’. With more and more money being funneled into Web 2.0 projects, the market is more and more palatable to larger companies who aren’t as passionate about web standards.

Are we going to go back to an era where tools such as Flash and Flex are used losing the ground yet again that was gained back over the past 3 to 4 years?

Buzzword looks nice, and maybe this rant belongs somewhere else. But is it nice try but too late?

One thing that I am noticing about this tool. There is a word counter and as of this word, I had typed 235 words. Wow that is an eye opener. I figured I had typed much more than that. I wouldn’t work out too good at a newspaper. Writing is like pulling teeth for me, and I realize it is the same for a lot of other people, but the finished product isn’t valuable enough to me to endure the pain on a daily basis.

I like being creative, but just in other ways. Blogging is only a hobby, and one that I don’t believe I will ever pursue much further than that.

ArkansasBusiness.com – Dynamic Duo Combine Skills for Web Training

Here is a great article that was just released by the Northwest Arkansas Business Journal about our company and www.genonow.com, the online training website that we have put together. If you want to know more about SVI, Rockfish Interactive, and Genonow check it out.

Rockfish is an online development company that works with some pretty impressive clients while we, SVI, are an organizational development company that helps companies keep its rockstars through training and development tools.

Nokia has recently announced that it is opening a new online music store called Ovi. Apparently that means something like “Open Door” in Finnish…who knows.

All this is happening at the same time that Sony has announced that it is shuttering its online music play Connect.

So let me get this straight, Sony, who has its own record label and has a lot of experience in the music business is throwing in the towel while a cell phone maker is getting started… hmmm. It sounds to me that Nokia’s music store is on death watch before it even gets started. I don’t think it will work.

I just started using Google Notebook today. I don’t really know what it does yet, but it has that twinge of cool to it. You need to check it out at www.google.com/notebook. If you already have a gmail account, then you are in.

It really starts getting cool when you download the browser plugin that allows you to take notes no matter where you are on the net.

Again, I am not quite sure why yet, but I feel like this is cool for some reason, and I wanted to blog about it.

Sights from Google Street View

A big shout out to Stan Schroeder at Mashable.com for coming up with a top 15 shots captured by Google’s brand new service, Google Street View. This is worth at least 5 minutes of your time.

uPlayMe.com: People Discovery, Music Discovery

I just found this site today. I haven’t gotten the chance to explore it, but it’s new and it looks like a great way to connect with others who share your taste in music.

I want to let my circle of friends know what I am up to in my new job. A big part of it is filming, editing and rendering videos and other “learning objects” for a brand new website on the Internet. It is a site called www.genonow.com. Our hopes is that this site will become the go to place for corporate training.

Initially, it is small because it is brand new. It is still in alpha. Technically, it isn’t open to the public, but go by and kick the tires. We are waiting to get our 30th learning object. Once we get there, we will pronounce it open to the public. Until then, other than this blog post we are keeping it a secret.

Once we are fully up and running, we will be adding new functionality like search, tagging, user-ratings and more. Our hope is to build a community around the content.

Why GenoNow

So, you may be asking, “Why are you building this site?” That’s a great question, let me answer it like this. Let’s say you are the head of Human Resources in a company, and it’s your job to train your work force in their areas of deficiency. Before www.genonow.com, you had to rely in broadcast training. Here is what I mean. Let’s say that 20% of your people have real time-management problems. So, in order to address that problem, you fly in a time-management guru, and spend $20,000 to address a problem that only 20% of your people really suffer from.

What if you could train your staff in a way that is much more granular and focused? That is where GenoNow comes in. You could take that same $20,000 you invested in the time-management seminar and put that into credits for your whole staff. That way the 20% with time management problems could focus on learning objects devoted to effective time managment. The remaining 80% of your staff could seek training in their area of deficiency. That is a much more effective way to spend your training dollar.

Better Training for Less Money For Your Organization

Not to mention that, but we partner with companies to host their training objects. Through the partnership, companies have an easy effective way to broadcast their message to all their employees without having to invest in a distance learning environment. We do all the hard work.

Trainers Needed

We need trainers! We need people who can teach to offer up their training in return for the chance to make some money. The revenue sharing with content creators is very simple. If you sell your content for $20 on GenoNow then you will make $10. GenoNow splits the revenue 50-50 in return for hosting and marketing learning environment object.

Our long term goal is to be a long tail provider of corporate training. That means that you may be surprised at what we would deem as appropriate for the site. Another goal is to allow content owners and trainers to be able to upload and manage their own content. That is coming, but isn’t available yet. Our development team is hard at work creating the product. (Remember you are seeing it in an early stage, there is a lot more to come as far as functionality is concerned.)

If you are a trainer, or if you know a trainer, I want to talk to you. My email is mwilliams (at) sviworld (dot) com. (Please excuse the way I had to publish my email address, I am trying to avoid unwanted emails.)