Raymond Johnson @ downclimb.com

When your engineers have 20% of their time to use on projects of their choosing, you get a lot of interesting product ideas. If nothing else, Google is amazingly unshy about pushing these products and services to their users, even if some start out somewhat incomplete and poorly integrated. Enter Google's newest offering, Google Buzz. Unlike some previous Google attempts at social media, this one is going to work in a big way. First, Google integrated Buzz right into Gmail, the reason most of us have Google accounts in the first place. There are plenty of seats at the Google Labs table, but not many projects get to sit at the front with Gmail. Second, your contact list pre-establishes a social network. Third, if you use Google Profile, you already had established information about yourself and the content you create. Fourth, if you create content with Blogger or Reader, your Buzz account is pre-primed with content. Who else could have done this? Nobody. (Even though Buzz is more ...

I'm finally catching onto this Web 2.0 stuff. I created a Google account and started poking around at all the new tools. First I started playing with Google Docs and Spreadsheets and even using a spreadsheet collaboratively with a fellow teacher. Cool stuff. I setup a Gmail account, although I'll be sticking with my regular account for my primary email. Maybe the best find was Google Reader , an RSS feed reader. I had been using the Sage extension for Firefox , but Google Reader is much nicer. As a news junkie with dialup internet access, feed readers are a necessity. (I'm currently off dialup ...more on that later, along with other news on where I'm at and what I'm doing.) I've also started using Google Notebook and Google Calendar , although neither with much frequency. Eventually this all had to lead back to what was probably my first Web 2.0 tool, Blogger. I've been a Blogger user since the end of 2001 (sparingly, I admit, but I was a B...