Since I returned from my brief holiday hiatus, I put some thought into what would be the first post in Twenty Ten. I decided to go with a tool that's been around for a while, and one that has a great many applications outside of poetry. However its implications for creative work are what makes it particularly compelling to me.

Google Docs is a web-based document-processing product that's been around in some form since late 2006, but I'm routinely shocked by the number of people who've never heard of it or think it has no use to them. Docs is Google's ace in the whole when it comes to dealing with Microsoft's juggernaut Office product. And for those of you who regularly use Microsoft Office, Google Docs will look almost eerily familiar to you:

This image looks nearly identical to a Microsoft Word window, and the same goes for Google Spreadsheets and Presentations, which are basic analogs to Microsoft Excel and Powerpoint. Google does this because the interfaces Microsoft has created are so widely used that they are considered standard. It helps users like you and I to switch seamlessly between Word and Docs without really noticing the difference.

But if the products are so similar, what is the point in switching? That much is simple: Google Docs is entirely web-based. The image above appears as a tab within your normal browser window. The files created in Google Docs are saved to your Google account online, just like your e-mails.

The web-based approach to documents, as opposed to the traditional desktop-based Microsoft Office approach, allows for a flexibility in document creation that has never been seen before. At the surface, there's the general convenience of it: your documents are always online, accessible on any computer behind your secure Gmail password. This eliminates the need for the flash drives full of documents that college students and young professionals have held close to their chests for the past several years. This is the basic argument for cloud computing: that everything can be accessible from everywhere in a secure way.

However, the true usefulness of Google Docs goes beyond basic cloud accessibility. Google Docs allows users to share any document that you choose. You can allow anyone to see a shared document, even if they are not users of Google Docs. And you can even allow other users to edit those documents if you choose. This is where Docs burgeons into true usefulness for creative writers.

Think about collaboration with other writers using Microsoft Word. You create a document, and e-mail it as an attachment to another writer, who edits the document and returns it to you. Now you've got two versions of the same document on your computer: the original and the edited copy. You then make the changes to the original, including some more of your own changes. When you e-mail this version to the other writer, he or she now has two versions of the document on his or her computer. The cycle goes on this way, spawning more and more copies of the same document on both computers until the collaboration is done. And that's if only two collaborators are involved.

Google Docs allows a virtually infinite number of collaborators to edit the original document, eliminating the need to make any duplicates. This kind of seamless collaboration allows poets and writers to work together with an ease they've never had before. All the editors can enter the document as many times as they like, making as many changes as they need to until the document meets the needs of all involved. All e-mails and files sent back and forth are completely cut out of the equation.

What's shocking is that this technology has been around for about four years, and only a small portion of people are using it. In part I blame academic, editorial, and professional organizations, who require documents be submitted in Microsoft's proprietary '.doc' file format. It's been a daunting challenge to get around this requirement, but Google has developed a feature where, with one click, you can e-mail a Google Doc as a .doc attachment. The conversion is not perfect as far as formatting, but it's a quick and easy way to get around these ridiculous requirements.

There's so much useful technology out there, literally at our fingertips, and we're not using it for oftentimes petty reasons. Over the past couple years, Google Docs has changed how I deal with my daily professional and creative workflow. It's allowed a level of sharing and collaboration that has greatly simplified my poetic life, and I think it can do the same for you. All you've got to do is reach out and grab it.

There has been a lot of news out Google's headquarters in Mountain View, CA over the last couple weeks. The release of Google Goggles, Real-Time Search, and the rumors of the imminent release of the Google phone, the Nexus One, are just a few. In the face of this flurry of tech activity, the story we're talking about today has gone relatively unnoticed, but to people who write for a living, it's a very important release.

Back in September, I wrote this article about the futility of subscription-based online dictionaries. I'd concluded by mentioning the fact that a simple search for a word does about as good a job providing a definition as any online dictionary does. Now, it seems that the folks at Google have to come to roughly the same conclusion.
In short, the search engine we all know and love has released their very own free online dictionary. Like everything they do, Google has built a highly functional product that integrates well with the rest of their services. Type an odd word into a Google Search, and a Google Dictionary result is returned right at the top. [This worked a little before the dictionary was officially released, but it's much more complete now.] Type a word into Google Dictionary, and you are offered not only their stored definitions, but also results from the web. Not to mention some pretty nifty integration with Google Translate using the language drop-down menu.

Seemingly overnight, Google has managed to build an extraordinarily competitive dictionary that many people will use through Google Search without even realizing. The need to click through to another service is greatly reduced. For a good example of the functionality of the service, check out this definition for the word 'bath'. Google seems to have most of the bases well covered: multiple definitions, pronunciation, spelling, common phrases, example sentences, and web results.

The only area in which they're so far lacking is one in which a subscription service like the OED shines: etymology. Any avid OED fan, me included, will tell you that the startlingly complete etymologies are this dictionaries ace in the hole. For scholarly reference on the history of the words, there's no matching it. If Google is ultimately trying to compete with the very best dictionaries out there, it's going to have to get on the ball with some word origins.

But, since it's Google, I can't imagine this addition is too far off. After all, they've already pretty much nailed the dictionary market as far as everyday use is concerned. I certainly wouldn't want to be Dictionary.com right now.

All of us at Paradise Tossed love words. It's something of an obsession for us, and being writers and poets it comes with the territory. We're always on the hunt for very new words, very old words and everything in between.

Like never before, words and their definitions are incredibly easy to access through any number of free, exhaustive sources. So why would anyone, anywhere pay for an online dictionary?

In particular, I'm talking about the Oxford English Dictionary, widely respected as one of the best, if not the best, dictionary of the English language in the world. According to the OED website, the New York Times has called it "the greatest work in dictionary making ever undertaken."

Now I love the OED as much as the next geek. In college, I'd use our library's subscription to peruse the endless etymologies, examples, and sentences of words I'd hardly ever heard of. But it nonetheless baffled me why my school or any other would pay $300 a year or better for access to the OED online. [US$295 is the going rate for an individual yearly subscription; the rates for institutions aren't available to the public.] Libraries already spend astronomical subscription fees for journals, which students actually use for research. I may have been one of the only students to ever use my alma mater's subscription. In four years, I never saw or heard reference to the revered compendium in a single paper or presentation from my peers.

The Internet has a glut of free online dictionaries. Here are just a few examples. Merriam-Webster, the OED's upstart American rival, offers its full catalog of words in an ad-supported version. The creators of Wikipedia have brought us Wiktionary, for the ultimate crowd-sourced definitions. By virtue of its name, Dictionary.com likely receives the most traffic of the bunch. The One Look dictionary provides the curious logophile with a number of ways to look up the same word, each providing different results. In a particularly poignant example, Cambridge University's entire set of dictionaries can also be found online free of charge. And lastly, the favorite of the tech-savvy set, the Urban Dictionary provides a great deal of recent words and idioms that the OED wouldn't dare touch.

All of these dictionary services provide free definitions that, though they may not have the gravitas of the OED, constitute just as helpful a service in scope. This alone would be enough to point out the OED's failing to hold on to its revered position, but there's a bigger point to be made here. The dictionary, even the online dictionary, as an independent entity is a non sequitur in the age of the Internet. The Internet itself is the biggest, most complete, easiest to use dictionary in the history of mankind.

Need a definition, etymology, correct spelling, or usage? Type the word you're looking for into Google or Bing. Search engines will scour the entire Internet for the word, not just limited entries moderated by a small group of people. Any dictionary's services pale in comparison to the power of a simple search engine. Facing this fact, any online or print dictionary is redundant or worse. And a for-pay online dictionary is nothing short of absurd.

Since this blog focuses on what happens when poetry and technology collide, we keep coming back to poetry written by computers. Today we want to quickly point out some additional resources to a tool we've covered before, the Google Poetry Robot.

The "robot," which adds words taken from Google's indexed web pages to user-inputed words, is a simple tool that can help to break writer's block now and then. But Geoff Peters, the tool's creator, has expanded on the project with two websites that add value to his program.

The first of these is RobotPoetry.com, a sort of one-stop shop for all things related to the Google Poetry Robot. The most interesting part of this site is the poems that are actually read by computer-generated voices. Peters gives this great explanation of the project:

Of course, with the power of modern text-to-speech technology, it's pretty easy to get a computer to read a poem. But interestingly enough, each robot "voice" seems to take on a character and personality of its own, and it is sometimes pretty hard to shake the feeling that the robot might actually mean something.

This creeping feeling that computers themselves may be able to create, or simulate, what we humans call "meaning" is what makes this project so captivating. If you're used to poetry analysis, it's pretty natural to begin interpreting the poems and the readings as if they were written by an actual person.

And it could be argued that they actually are, since the robot needs human assistance, including at least some human word input, to make the poems. That leads us to another branch of the project: the Robot Poetry Blog. Anyone can submit their own robot poems as posts to the blog, and it boasts an impressive collection of work, reaching back to September of 2005.

Unfortunately, there have been no new submissions since April. If this kind of human-robot writing partnership piques your interest, then I suggest you get to work. After all, resistance is futile. You will be assimilated.

To end the week on a lighter note, here's a very cool little tool that's sure to eat up your free time. It's called Translation Party, and it gives you a quick and easy way to perform a well-worn translation trick.

When you enter an English phrase into the site's box and hit "Find Equilibrium," the site will automatically translate your words [using Google's translation tool] into Japanese and back into English as many times as it takes until the Japanese and English match exactly. By the time the two phrases match, it's been turned into something quite different. The whole process is a bit like a game of bilingual telephone.

It works best with sentences or phrases that are out of the ordinary, so poetry provides the perfect fodder for a party. For my first Translation Party, I grabbed the book within nearest reach, which happened to be Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises. I entered a phrase from Ecclesiastes that is on the novel's first page: "...unto the place from whence the rivers come, thither they return again." [The translator didn't recognize the word "whence," and I had to change it to "where."] This is what it came up with:

"Here, the intrusion of water from the river" isn't even close to the original phrase, but it's kind of interesting in its own way. My favorite example so far is when I entered "You got to know when to hold them, know when to fold them" from Kenny Rogers' The Gambler. I wound up with "I know the time to keep me," which is a pretty zen way to say the same thing.

Have fun with this tool! The possibilities for humor and insight are pretty much endless. Plus it really highlights issues with slippery signification: Derrida would be so proud.