productivity (um, i can't think of anything even slightly witty for this one)

The situation: you hear the name of something and you immediately conclude that it will be about x, based on said title. Then much further down the line, you hear more about it - with an explanation this time, and realize that that first idea was totally wrong. Sort of like a misheard lyric but far less amusing.

That was totally me when I first heard about Google Docs. Which, to my unenlightened mind, sounds an awful lot like "government docs," and is the only example I can think of - not being business minded - where the word "documents" is routinely shortened to "docs." Thus, my initial thought was that Google Docs was a lot like that old Google catalog project, where you could search a lot of stuff all at once, only in this case what you might be searching through was government publications.

Oops. My bad. Instead Google Docs is teh awesome. I sort of want to tell everyone I meet about it, especially people in the library who say things like, "My computer time is over, but I didn't finish my report. I need to at least print it. Can I log on again? But I need to use the same computer I was on before. And I need it right now, before someone else uses Word and my stuff is lost. Also, do you have a disc I can borrow, because I'm probably going to have to work on it tomorrow and I don't have one." In the past, I used to recommend that people e-mail their work to themselves, but now I will point them in good old reliable Google's way. And I will totally make use of it myself, as well.

In terms of collaborative projects, I tend not to do very many of them these days. Oh, how glad I am that those infamous library school group project days are over. But how I wish these sort of tools were around when I did them regularly. Way more efficient than constantly emailing things back and forth to one another. If and when the collaborative action returns to my life, I will be keen on using applications like GDocs and Writeboard and the like for them. (In doing the exploring, I really only navigated past the first page in Google, just because I didn't want to sign up for something else I wouldn't immediately make use of, but I'm encouraged by their existence.) Anything that gets me away from my reluctant reliance on Microsoft is pretty swell in my book.