8:18 Zoho, are you there-ah?

I've just created an account on Zoho, and have been looking at the benefits of using 'Zoho Writer', its online word processing application ... and I think I'm sold - for home use at least.

I think it's great that it's freely available (apart from mostly needing to be online to use it that is, although there are offline features), and that it can easily convert your documents into whatever kind of format you need. I know that I have plenty of old university assignments and bits of personal writing saved to discs that I probably will not be able to access again, because both the storage system and the word processing applications used are already rather antiquated. Fingers crossed, online universal applications like Zoho mean that documents created there will have a lot more longevity. (Although you really should save anything important to some other medium just in case, she nags.)

I also like some of the fancier features Zoho has, such as saving documents as tags - so that one document can be accessed under several folders/tags. From what I can see tags are an integral part of Web 2.0 - and a tag is really just another name for a keyword ... which is the librarian's stock and trade. Although I am sure most cataloguers will be wincing at the uncontrolled vocabulary used for tags. One person's potato being another person's spud and all that. There are also lots of other associated Zoho applications available, such as spreadsheets, that could eliminate the need for a personal user to buy an expensive software bundle - nice.

My main complaint so far is that sometimes you have to wait a bit for the things you click on in Zoho to work. So if you are doing something other than typing in plain text, you will likely find yourself somewhat frustrated when the interweb was being a bit porridgey.