www.nickhodge.com

Like Michael Rees, Kath­ryn Green­hill asked me to list “web 2.0″ things that Microsoft has avail­able to provide some bal­ance to a Mur­doch Uni­ver­sity event.

By web 2.0, Kath­ryn meant: “To me, Microsoft plays really well in the large cor­por­ate ap space and is very good at that … but if I want to show people about the con­ver­sa­tion, re-mix, open access, inter­op­er­able web, then MS is not the first port of call…”

I can only agree with Kathryn’s state­ment. Microsoft hides all its cool web 2.0 things under a bushel. In fact, the prob­lem prob­ably is that the cool­ness are hid­den under many bushels, all over its web foot­print. But hey, I am not from mar­ket­ing; I am a mere Pro­fes­sional Geek. That is also why these lis­ted are free. Some are even Free-as-in-Freedom, too.

I think it import­ant that people get to hear, see and try altern­at­ives before default­ing to “the known and safe.” And yes, I real­ise can work both ways.

Another per­spect­ive, and my own opin­ion, is that Microsoft should not seek to do everything on the web. For instance, cre­at­ing a “Microsoft Twit­ter Ulti­mate Edi­tion 2010″ is stu­pid. Nor should Microsoft seek to pur­chase every cool com­pany that pops on the web. Again, that is my opin­ion. And I am the low­est on the low of the totem pole; a.k.a Indi­vidual Con­trib­utor or Sac­rifical Unnamed Ensign (ref: Star Trek)

Here is an edited ver­sion of my email response; draf­ted quickly and by no means exhaust­ive. If you have other cool examples, just post a com­ment and I’ll update the list.

• http://Office.live.com for online mini-Sharepoint site for team col­lab­or­a­tion. Office.live.com is a good place to start where people will use desktop apps for a full exper­i­ence. Don’t for­get other online app tools like Edit­Grid and Zoho.
• Don’t for­get bing.com & asso­ci­ated sites (includ­ing Pho­to­synth, Vir­tual Earth) as viable altern­at­ives to google. Lib­rar­i­ans use all sources available
• www.worldwidetelescope.org
• Live Is more than spaces (spaces.live.com) – there are photo stor­age, file stor­age (sky­drive, as men­tioned by Michael Rees in his post), and live.com integ­ra­tion into twit­ter, face­book and other online social media services.
• There is a Cre­at­ive Com­mons plu­gin for Microsoft Office 2007 to per­mit cor­rect (cc) for remix stuff out of spread­sheets, word etc http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=D1DDBDC8-627F-415A-9B0A-97362BC9B480&displaylang=en
• Other remix things: apps.live.com is a single source for our desktop apps, includ­ing Live­Writer (don’t for­get that Live Writer has a whole host of plu­gins: http://gallery.live.com/results.aspx?c=0&bt=9&pl=8&st=5 ) and video edit­ing stuff, too. There are Wiki­pe­dia, FIickr, Twit­ter and all sorts of plu­gins. Office 2007 SP2 has both OpenXML and ODF (for Open­Of­fice) support.
• Don’t for­get that the most-used online con­ver­sa­tion tool in Aus­tralia is Live Mes­sen­ger (MSN) which does video + audio con­fer­en­cing, too
• RSS into out­look… hmm, pos­sible but not some­thing I’d recom­mend. Too clunky
• Don’t for­get IE8; with accel­er­at­ors and webslices http://www.microsoft.com/ie8 these use open formats to work
• http://visitmix.com/Lab has some cool tools, includ­ing Oomph with is a Micro­formats toolkit (works in all browsers, uses jQuery) … I use it on my blog. Licensed under MsPL (open source,  OSI approved, BSD-like)
• Another good, slightly techy tool for Win­dows users is http://www.microsoft.com/web with the Web Plat­form installer. Per­mits install­a­tions of PHP, Word­Press etc on your Win­dows machine without being a rocket scientist