Since the earliest days of world exploration, maps have told compelling stories to people who may never see the places depicted. Topographical lines on paper only go a small way to recreate the traveller's experience, however, and the rest depends on the viewers' imagination. Now, personalized and interactive maps are stretching those ...

Online file sharing service Box.net made Webware’s list of the 100 best Web 2.0 applications for 2008 for three very good reasons. The award's not for its file storage capability (there are other free or low-cost backup and file storage options to challenge the modest amount of space that Box.net offers). And not for the ability to access and ...

The trick to effective mind mapping is finding the right tool for the job — whether that tool is pen and paper, as Guy Lewis used to unravel his personal life, or dedicated software, as Patrick Lynch used to explain Wild Apricot’s features to his colleagues. What is Mind Mapping? Mind mapping is a non-linear, highly visual method of ...

''Welcome to the age of the crowd,'' wrote Jeff Howe in The Rise of Crowdsourcing (2006). In coining the term crowdsourcing, Howe pointed to the rise of the open-source software movement; to the success of user-created Wikipedia; and to profitable businesses like MySpace and eBay ''that couldn't exist without the contribution of users.'' Howe put ...

In the first part of this article, we talked about various ways to show data in tables on your website or blog -- their strengths and their limitations.  Here, we'll take a closer look at how to use Zoho Sheet, Google  Spreadsheets, or DabbleDB to create a searchable, interactive table that you can easily embed in your web page, ...

Project management software is a tough and competitive field. With so many excellent choices out there, it's hard to know what tools will work best for your organization's needs. Do you want web-based or desktop application? Which features will you really use? How long is the learning curve — and will everyone in your organization be willing and ...

All it takes is a sudden hard-drive crash to sell a computer user on the value of backing up all important documents. And if you travel, or move between different computers in the course of your work, secure online data storage means you'll never find yourself going into a meeting without that one file you urgently need. I've been using Mozy for ...

Microsoft's Office Live Workspace – just launched – is a free web-based service that lets people organize documents and projects online, access their documents via the web,  and share them with others who may view and comment on shared documents.  It's been described as an online extension of MS Office desktop software, Microsoft's ...

JotSpots, the wiki site acquired by Google almost 16 months ago, has just relaunched in a scaled-back version as Google Sites, the newest member of the Google Apps suite of online productivity and collaboration tools. Google Sites is intended as a quick and simple tool that will enable non-technical people to collaborate and publish online. As ...

We've talked before about the many benefits of social bookmarking (Digg, Del.icio.us, StumbleUpon, and so on) for sharing the web pages you've discovered and for helping others to share your own site or blog. But when it comes to online research and collaboration, are the usual social bookmarking services really the best possible tool for ...