Bookgoo Tops List of Best Web 2.0 Applications For Education

Education blogger, Larry Ferlazzo, today announced the list of Best Web 2.0 Applications For Education. Bookgoo tied for the number one spot on the list. Topping this year's list is further validation on the value of Bookgoo's technology in the education space. We are excited that many people in the education community have noticed our efforts. Further, we feel privileged to be part of so many student's learning experience. The upcoming year will bring new features and experiences that we think will further the online learning experience.

Great Review at Web Worker Daily

Today we had a great review written on us by Web Worker Daily - check it out. Big thank you to Aliza Sherman for taking the time to talk with us and go over the site.

Private Content Feature Released!!

Today we released a new feature that many of you have been asking for – private content. Private content allows a user to privately upload a document to the site. The document will not appear in the “Recent Documents” list and cannot be searched. The private document will appear in your “My Goo” list. If you want to share the document with someone else, you can still email the document from the goo page, or copy/paste the URL of the private page and share with whomever. This feature allows users to have a private conversation with a document outside of a public forum. Try it out and let us know what you think!

Social Document Sharing Has Arrived!

Well, its official – we have finally released into public beta! That’s right! We are out of alpha and the wall is down. Check out the new experience at http://www.bookgoo.com/. And check out our press release!

Bookgoo allows you to upload, annotate, and collaborate with your documents. The site allows you highlight and annotate your documents in the same way you would mark up a piece of paper with a highlighter and pen. Bookgoo allows you to then share your annotated documents with friends & colleagues. In turn, the people you share your documents with can highlight and annotate your document and provide comments on your annotations. Bookgoo facilitates the entire conversation right on the document and then stores and manages the user interactions. Our mission is to empower users to collaborate more effectively with documents while enabling in-context document interactions with the community of users.

Bookgoo merges social bookmarking and social annotation concepts to deliver a shared social document service. I call it “social” because unlike most document sharing sites, we encourage users to create in context document conversations. Bookgoo gives users the capability to upload offline and online content to the website and then share it with others. We allow users to highlight regions of a document, apply annotations, and scribble notes. Other users can apply their own annotations to the same document and view all annotations supplied to the document by toggling between users.

Book Goo serves three primary tasks:

Collaboration – Users can share content of interest for work or entertainment. Highlighting can be added to show emphasis on specific areas of a passage or ask a question. Users can further have conversations by applying their own comments to the original editor’s annotation.

Recommendation – Users can recommend content to others by sharing with the community of users.

Research – Users doing research can mark up online and offline content with highlighting and annotations to facilitate their work.

Bookgoo can be broken down into three steps:

1. Upload content – pdf, doc, xls, URL, jpg, gif
2. Annotate – mark up your document with highlights, notes, and scribbles
3. Collaborate – share the document with friends or colleagues and get them to highlight and annotate as well

So, that’s cool – but what can you use Bookgoo for? Well… many things!

Entertainment - http://www.bookgoo.com/goo/view/afdba8fc-f316-11dc-9689-00144f788334

Blogging - http://www.bookgoo.com/goo/view/afdba8fc-f316-11dc-9689-00144f788334

Education - http://www.bookgoo.com/goo/view/cebc8110-d03e-11dc-89a5-00144f788334

And so much more! Play around with the experience and let us know what you think.

Before I end this post, I want to say thank you to Buzz Bruggeman, Ben Curtis, and Jordan Mitchell for taking the time to review our site and pass on a lot of great feedback. Not only are these guys great bloggers, but they are terrific entrepreneurs as well – check out their companies.

Keep on Goo’ing!

Good things are on the way!

Hey everyone - It has been a while since my last post - sorry about that :-)

We are crazy busy working on some cool new features for our upcoming release. We have collected a lot of feedback from our alpha users (thanks again!). There are many new features that we plan to implement. As well, we are making some changes to existing functionality that we hope will create a more compelling goo experience.

Last month we implemented some infrastructure changes. These changes should be seamless to the user, but if you notice some strange behavior, drop us a line.

Please keep the feedback coming. The goo is here for you to create better discussions with your documents!

So, when is this next release you ask? We'll keep you posted... its just around the corner. I know, I know... you want to see it now!

Believe me... its worth the wait! ;-)

Great feedback!

Thanks for all the great goo feedback! In the short time released as a private alpha, we have received a lot of new feature requests :-) and a few bug reports :-(

Rest assured that we will get to many of the features you are requesting and some. And the minor bugs will be dealt with very soon. Keep sending in the feedback! We want to hear from you. Let me know if you have questions or comments - I can be reached at ozz at bookgoo dot com.

Keep on goo'ing!

2007 in review...

2007 has been quite a year - especially for me...

:-)

As we finish up this year and look towards 2008, I’m reminded of all the interesting events that occurred in 2007:

• Feb 2007 - Death of Anna Nicole Smith
• April 2007 - Virginia Tech Shooting
• May 2007 - Madeleine McCann Missing
• June 2007 - Last Harry Potter Book Released
• Aug 2007 - Minneapolis Bridge Collapses
• Aug 2007 - Bonds Breaks Home Run Record
• Aug 2007 - Karl Rove Exits
• Oct 2007 - Gore Wins Nobel Peace Prize
• Dec 2007 - The Iraq War Continues…
• Dec 2007 - Fed Eases Credit Crunch
• Dec 2007 - Benazir Bhutto Killed

Join us in ringing in the New Year by reflecting on the highs and lows of 2007! Upload your own documents and start your own conversations with bookgoo!

Happy New Year!!