Educause Quarterly Magazine, Volume 33, Number 2, 2010, has published an interesting article called, “Universities and Libraries Move to the Mobile Web.” The article reports on a study that looked at the mobile web sites of large research universities and their libraries. The results found that “few functions on university mobile web sites clearly addressed educational needs, highlighting an opportunity to provide more educational links and applications.” Read the article at http://bit.ly/9ksEvw.

What will the web look like in 5 years? Find out what Eric Schmidt, Google’s CEO, has to say about this. Some intriguing thoughts: the web will be dominated by the Chinese language and today’s teenagers will provide the model for how the web will work in the future. You can read highlights, along with a link to listen to the full 45-minute interview, here:

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/google_web_in_five_years.php

Google Sidewiki is a new addition to the Google Toolbar for Firefox and Internet Explorer. Sidewiki lets you read and post comments about web pages. Google is promoting this as a way to “help and learn from others as you browse the Web” (see http://tinyurl.com/lkbxbw). You can also share a Sidewiki comment via Facebook, Twitter, email, or Web link. Note that Sidewiki only works if you install the Google Toolbar into your browser (Firefox and Internet Explorer only).

To download the Google Toolbar with Sidewiki, go to http://www.google.com/sidewiki. If you try it, please post your comments about the tool on the NewsBits blog!

Adobe has released the beta version of Buzzword, a new online collaborative document tool and word processing program. With Buzzword, you can create, edit, and share documents with groups of people. Buzzword keeps a history of changes to the document, and allows you to export and import content from other programs.

Buzzword is a free service. I found the interface very easy to use and responsive to my actions. The export to Microsoft Word produced a document with the same formatting as I had created in Buzzword.

Buzzword can be accessed at https://buzzword.acrobat.com. You may also wish to view a YouTube tutorial on Buzzword’s features at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zPbDfX-DMfo.

ALA TechSource has an intriguing article by Daniel A. Freeman called “The G Drive and Cloud Computing.” He discusses the possibility that Google will make a giant hard drive available to all through the Internet, using Google’s file system. He also discusses relevance to libraries. Read the article here:

http://www.alatechsource.org/blog/2009/01/the-g-drive-and-cloud-computing.html