Well, it has been a long road, but bookgoo is finally released! There have been many hours of coding, preliminary user testing, late night design sessions, and one early baby birth!
:-)
Yes, before I can talk about the goo, I must talk about the birth of my son, Aden. Aden, was born on December 24 in the midst of our release to the production environment (its a good thing hospitals have wi-fi these days). My wife and I were sure that we had planned for every contingency. EXCEPT! Early delivery - DOH! Aden was born a full three weeks ahead of schedule. Kind of sounds like a page from software development gone bad - "Should have done some risk mitigation planning". Well, no worries - the cavalry is coming in next week - Mom is flying in from Canada (Regina, Saskatchewan - bet you don't know where that is!) to help us out until February. What to do until then... well I guess I can eliminate sleep - not that I was sleeping much anyway...
Mommy and baby are doing great... and Daddy - well... er... he'll survive...
So... what is this bookgoo all about anyways and why am I working on this when I should be changing diapers (author's note: I am changing many, many, many diapers.... so many... never ending...)
Bookgoo allows you to highlight and annotate your documents in the same way you would mark up a piece of paper with a highlighter and pen. Did you ever write notes in the margins of your school assignments? Did you ever go crazy with a highlighter on a textbook, marking up page after page because you were absolutely sure that your professor would ask you questions about it on an exam?
Well, to explain things a little more, let's start off with a little story from my college days. I loved buying used textbooks. Many reasons for this. First, I was a poor student living a poor student's life - actually quite a sad story :-(
Second, I liked reading pre-highlighted textbooks because it gave me an idea of what I should be studying and where I should concentrate my efforts. Its nice when others are doing the work for you (or at least, giving you a push in the right direction). But I immediately noticed that there were limitations on leveraging another person's highlighting efforts.
For one thing, you really don't know if what the person has marked up and annotated is of any value. There is a credibility problem. Another limitation; there is no way of separating out different user's annotations and highlighting. If the textbook had changed hands 3 different times, which notes go with which user? Again, knowing exactly who highlighted and annotated what would help the new owner assess credibility. There is one additional shortcoming, which is more a limitation of books and hard copy materials in general - the number of highlights and annotations are directly proportional to the number of past owners. Simply put, the highlights and annotations you see are only coming from previous owners. Kind of limiting. It would have been much more beneficial if I could see what the "brainiacs" in the class were highlighting and annotating. Definitely much more valuable. And even if the notes or highlighting did not come from the smartest people in the class, being able to see a multitude of notes and highlighting from a variety of people would promote shared learning.
My college day example highlights an important point - documents on their own (books, research articles, online articles, etc) only provide base informational value. It is the interactions and conversations that people have over the document that makes it critical for learning, entertainment, or business purposes. Documents on their own have little value unless there is some form of interaction with someone else.
Enter bookgoo. The site creates an online community of goo users that can share their documents with others and create in context conversations right over the document. Imagine that you need to review a research paper for a class project. As part of a study group, you could upload the document and then allow users that are part of the class to share their highlighting or notes with others in the class. Or, if you wanted to be more restrictive, just share with your study group. You can also toggle between different users to only view their notes. Further, imagine being able to search through all the notes that have been compiled on a document and cross reference with other notes from other users or even other documents. Sounds cool doesn't it. Its the panacea you have always dreamed of :-) And we've only scratched the surface of the possibilities...
Have I got you interested? Check us out at
www.bookgoo.com. Try the site features and let us know what you think. We are running a closed alpha experience right now. There are two ways you can get an invitation. First, find someone who already has an invitation and ask them to give you one. Each alpha user has 10 invitations that they can give to others. Second, you can try to win an invitation to bookgoo by playing our very own bookgoo game, Gooey Pacman (with apologies to Namco, the original game developer).
Its symbolic that we use this Pacman game as a way for others to gain entry into bookgoo. Pacman was an 80s social phenomena. I believe we are in the midst of a new social phenomena that empowers people to collaborate with others in a community - something we are trying to accomplish with bookgoo.
Before I end this rather long winded post, just want to say that bookgoo would not have been possible without the help of my good friends and partners, Tony and Ron. I'm just the window dressing - these guys do the actual work :-)
Until next time... highlight the world.
