Intro In our previous discussion regarding gaming we learned about Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games or MMORPGs. Among the most popular was World of Warcraft. This week we consider The Webware Wars. Among the factors that have led to the proliferation of webware are: increased adoption of high-speed internet, greater bandwidth, cheap storage and a new dynamic and interactive web architecture enable by a collection of technologies referred to as Web 2.0 and AJAX. Everybody's getting into the act, including big players like Microsoft and Google, and little fish like Zoho and Thinkfree. Mike, let's start out with what we have been using the longest - What are some of the New Features in Google Docs and Spreadsheets? As with any Google product, new features are quietly added with little notice or fanfare. Since we last talked about Google docs and Spreadsheets (GDS), there have been a number of additions and improvements - mostly on the spreadsheets side of the house. The first addition is actually within Gmail - Google's popular web-based email. In the past, when a Gmail user received an email attachment (either word or excel) the only option was to open the attachment as an an html document-viewing only, or download and open the attachment. Now when a users receives an excel document, the have the option of opening that spreadsheet directly in GDS - presumably, a similar functionality will eventually be available for word documents. Can you describe GoogleLookup? This a new feature in the spreadsheets portion of the GDS that takes advantage of the online nature of GDS. In fact, it's a formula in the spreadsheet that attempts to answer a question by using information from the web. The syntax is fairly straightforward: =GoogleLookup("entity", "attribute") [the double quotes are required!] Some examples include:

• looking up the population of New York City [=GoogleLookup("New York City", "population")] or
• when Google was founded [=googlelookup("google", "founded")]
• =GoogleLookup("Springfield, MA", "population") gives us 152,082 
• =GoogleLookup("NJ", "population") gives us 8,414,350

If you mouse over the cell, you'll see links to the source pages. Don't expect to change the world with this function, but have fun with it.

What are some of the entity types you can look up?

Here are some of the types of entities you can access using GoogleLookup, and a few popular attribute names (some entities won't have all these attributes, and some will have more, so experiment):

• Countries and Territories (like "Burkina Faso"): population, capital, largest city, gdp
• U.S. States (like "Tennessee"): area, governor, nickname, flower
• Rivers (like "Amazon River"): origin, length
• Cities and Towns (like "Chicago"): state, mayor, elevation
• Musicians (like "John Lennon"): date of birth, place of birth, nationality
• Actors (like "Audrey Hepburn"): date of birth, place of birth, nationality
• Politicians (like "Anwar Al-Sadat"): date of birth, place of birth, nationality
• U.S. Presidents (like "Zachary Taylor"): date of birth, place of birth, political party
• Baseball Players (like "Wade Boggs"): games, at bats, earned run average, position
• Chemical Elements (like "Helium"): atomic number, discovered by, atomic weight
• Chemical Compounds (like "Isopropyl Alcohol"): chemical formula, melting point, boiling point, density
• Stars (like "Betelgeuse"): constellation, distance, mass, temperatu