bookgoo

Bookgoo Tops List of Best Web 2.0 Applications For Education

2008-09-11T23:29:00.000-07:00

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

2008-08-07T20:07:00.000-07:00

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!!

2008-07-29T23:18:00.000-07:00

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!

2008-03-22T00:37:00.000-07:00

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!

2008-03-08T23:55:00.000-08:00

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!

2008-01-10T00:58:00.000-08:00

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...

2007-12-31T20:48:00.000-08:00

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:

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!!

bookgoo has arrived!

2007-12-27T00:30:00.000-08:00

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.