Links Roundup - April 1-10

Here are a few sites and resources I've found worth bookmarking in the last week or so: 1. On the Office on the Web front - here's the first creditable database offering I've seen so far: Lazybase lets you create tables, link them, share them, and view them in a variety of ways, including on maps and graphs. 2. And here is Near-Time, a wiki/blog/calendar tool that seems elegant and free of feature bloat. I've set up an evaluation site for my office to play with; seems like all the tools you need for a tidy little intranet. They've been getting a good bit of favorable press. Try out a free beta account! 3. Britt has done it again - a while back I linked to Britt Bravo's Introduction to Blogging tutorial, which seemed to cover all the bases - content, style, tools - very nicely. Here's an article she's just posted on podcasting. Not a how-to , she's put together a list of possible applications for this technology in the non-profit arena that - especially if your a text-based dude like me who has not gotten too excited about audio media yet - may get you thinking about buying a good microphone before the week is out. 4. Another nice educational piece: RSS Explained, by D.C. area community technology activist Phil Shapiro. If you have not yet quite figured out what the talk about feeds and feedreaders is all about, pour yourself a nice cup of coffee and settle in with his article. Phil doesn't just explain the nuts and bolts, but makes it clear how this tool can actually be of value to you and/or your organization. 5. Tim Anderson tackles an issue I've troubled over in the back of my mind but never quite articulated. In his posting Software Contracts and Agile Methodology, he comes out and asks it: is it possible that today's new methodologies, emphasizing incremental design and development in shorter cycles, require a whole new approach to contracts between developers and their users? Tags: nptech, web2.0, agile