Testing Britannica Online Content linked from blogs

They say you should be able to see the whole article if I link it from my blog:

If you think a reference to this article on Tsavo National Park will enhance your website, blog-post, or any other web-content, then feel free to link to this article, and your readers will gain full access to the full article, even if they do not subscribe to our service. You may want to use the HTML code fragment provided below.

Try this link: http://www.britannica.com/eb/article-9073594/Tsavo-National-Park

Google Buys Writely = Progress No More

Everybody knows that Google is hiring as many good programmers as they can. You can tell by looking at their job postings. You can also tell by trying to hire for your company in Silicon Valley. It's hard to get people again, just like the dot com times.

What does Google do with all those programmers? They certainly don't spend their time improving the products.

Don't get me wrong: I love Google products and use them all the time. Search, Gmail, Calendar, and Docs are horribly useful. In fact, I use those apps for pretty much everything I do.

But they never get any better.

Google has an amazing knack to create truly innovative products, launch them, and get widespread adoption. But they seem to stop there. They don't seem to improve the products much after that point.

What are all those programmers doing?

I already use the Google products and don't anticipate switching. Google has me as a customer. They will have me as a customer even if they don't make improvements because the products are far better than the competition.

But what are all those programmers doing?

I am most frustrated with Google Docs. The product was created by a small startup named Writely, and I was a big fan. I used it all the time, and I was in communication with their product manager, discussing improvements.

The biggest fault in Writely was that it isn't enough like a wiki. The break out power of wikis is that they are top-down authoring systems. You start by writing the top-level document. When you need a link to another document, you simply create it *before* the other document is written. The link then shows up in red, serving as a reminder that you have another document to write.

Writely should have added this feature. It's completely obvious and would be astoundingly powerful. And it would have been easy to include. But they were a small company and didn't have the resources. Google has the resources.

Another example, this time trivial. I like using align="right" to push images to the right side of the screen and have my text wrap around them on the left. You can do it in Google Docs by choosing the right settings when loading the image. The problem is, at some point, you might want to have a paragraph start after the image. To do this in HTML, you use
.

Google Docs doesn't offer this feature. Fortunately, I can Edit HTML and insert it manually. But it is an obvious feature, and it's obvious that the feature should be added to the Add/Separator menu. Google has the resources to add features like these.

It's not that these are just two of a zillion features, and that they are busy with other features. It's that they don't seem to be adding any significant improvements to the products.

What are all those programmers doing?