Buzzword - Am I being as stupid as I think I may be?

So the title says it all really. I've decided to take what I think may be a somewhat unusual step on my road to PhD thesis writing. I'm using Adobe's Buzzword.

Yes, I know it's pretty simplistic, but if I'm honest that what appeals. An online, accessible-from-anywhere, intuitive, and, frankly, elegant design for creating documents just screams 'use me'.

It could be dangerous (it's still in Beta afterall). What if I lose files, want to add TOC (table of contents), and other exciting MS Word features? Hmmm, well I've thought about it and my concession is this - I don't think it's going to be completely realistic for me to use Buzzword as my one and only word processor and I'm going to be printing off lots of draft versions as back up (which I do when using Word anyway). So I'll be switching between Buzzword for creating drafts and Word for 'fine-tuning' the drafts.

I feel like I can write quicker and create smaller (read as 'concise'!), more modular documents in Buzzword's simple, uncluttered interface (with half a mind somehow aware of the hellish task awaiting me in collating these multitude of docs with only Word).

Yet it seems appropriate to use an online tool to tell my thesis story - after all my research is all about how technology is changing the way we communicate. Why not extend that to the way we create and distribute?

Any comments from anyone who has used Buzzword would be welcome...

GuiMags

So it's been a while since my last blog (understatement of the year) but I just came across this website and felt compelled to blog about it.

I'm becoming increasingly technophobic whilst still maintaining an aspect of geekiness (it takes skill I tell you) so when I found this suggestion on a website I was thrilled:

"Could designing software without a computer save you roughly 80% of your time...?" - GuiMags

They've created GuiMags - magnets of, you've guessed it, GUI elements like drop-down menus, radio buttons, labels etc, designed for use on a whiteboard. Much quicker than the use of paper prototyping and, I think, would offer a much more collaborative, interactive workflow.

is it wrong that I skim read an article on literacy?

Is Google making us stupid?

Nicholas Carr writes;

"My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle."