VanishingPoint

With little fanfare Zoho has launched its newest application, Zoho Notebook.  At first glance, I was visualy very impressed.  It is clean, bright, and packed with features. Click on the thumbnail to the left and you can see some of its capabilities highlighted.  It is easy to embed video from TeacherTube, Google, Yahoo (I struggled with video from YouTube though…) and even create a webcam video right on the fly.  Audio recordings can be added as well with the same on the fly recording capability.  Heck, you can even embed whole LIVE websites.  If you utilize the other Zoho suite of products you can even embed and UPDATE written documents (Zoho Writer) and spreadsheets (Zoho Calc).  When you save the notebook, these apps get updated as well!  Impressive. 

While I am a big fan, you can tell that this is still a beta as my attempts to record audio or video hung the service.  You can check out the test notebook I created here: http://notebook.zoho.com/nb/public/sweidig/book/3946000000003251 When you see the Notebook cover, click to advance to the next page. Play around with the sliders, heck click on the links in the pages to browse around on the web!  I put a clock on page two to show that these are updating aps that are sitting in MY notebook, but can be fully shared.  Sharing can be done from the Notebook level, page level, or even down to the object content level… 

Think of the applications possible for collaborative learning and content creation!  Oh yeah… when you are sharing, you can launch  Skype call right to other users from the notebook!  This has great potential once it gets past the startup pains. 

There are layering issues with some content, and occassionally movement of text objects breaks… all in all I am really impressed though!

Wow… Three ring binder welcome to Web 2.0