Just as I thought I'd finished getting a few examples ready for a short talk at a VLE Forum tomorrow, along come a couple of e-mails about Microsoft's new SkyDrive and pbwiki offer me a nice version of their new wiki2.0 to play with!
SkyDrive offers 5GB of free space on-line and is part of the fetching new Windows Live display design from where you can access other things like Hotmail if you must. Not only does it look good but it also seems to work well. You can upload simply, especially if you use IE7 which allows drag and drop of lots of files at once (but not a folder, apparently).
You can create folders and basically recreate your My Documents if you wish (although if you include My Pictures and My Videos I guess you'll need more than 5GB!) You can also set folders as private, to be shared with specific people or open to the public. In the shared option you can also grant editing rights if you wish.
This is some web tool from Big Blue and could provide a ready-made alternative to lost USB drives if rolled out across an institution. The proximity of the hotmail button could be a pain, though, and don't expect much by way of images as it's a strictly icon and small print area at the moment.
You can view my Public Folder via the link above. Surprised the embedding code doesn't included some personalisation but maybe it's still early days.
Pbwiki 2.0 looks like a long-awaited make-over of this so easy to use publishing and sharing area. It's too early to comment on the changes in any detail but I've spotted a few things I like already. One problem has been the invasion of space of the sidebar which now can be pushed to one side. It's also more obvious how that important section can be edited. The big change is in the availability of a range of colours and a custom option. They were never particularly hot on designs and creating your own was really only for the experts so this new approach is good news.
My first efforts are under the name iline. Feel free to comment and watch as I make mistakes.
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