ReadWriteWeb

There's something very appealing about the design of the London Underground (PDF) Tube maps. The design has spawned plenty of spinoffs, and is in demand for all types of projects. If you're looking to include something similar in your own project, Nik Kalyani has produced a jQuery plugin that you can use to create your own.

Google today announced the release of a Living Stories plugin for WordPress.

Living Stories was Google's "experimental format for displaying news coverage" a two-month-long experiment with the New York Times and Washington Post.

Google software engineer Eric Zhang wrote about the process of developing the plugin on the Google News Blog.

OffiSync is launching an all-new version of its Microsoft Office to Google Docs synchronization tool, a plugin that's a "must-have" for anyone still straddling the two worlds of office suites: that is, the desktop-based world of Microsoft software and the web-based world of Google Docs. In the updated version of OffiSync, set to arrive minutes from now, you'll be able to co-author documents in real-time between Microsoft Office and Google Docs, no matter what version of the Office software you use. There are a few other new features too, including improvements to search, added Google Sites support and the ability to store any file type, but it's the co-authoring feature that's today's biggest reveal.

A new service from AwayFind lets you ignore your inbox without worrying that you're going to miss an important message. It's one of those ideas that seems so obvious, you're left wondering "why didn't someone think of this already?"

With the new service and its optional web browser plugin, you're able to configure alerts for critical, "can't miss" email messages and can choose to have those alerts sent to you via instant message, Twitter, SMS text message or even a phone call.

Feedly, the magazine style feed reader we first covered back in August of last year, is now available for the Google Chrome web browser. As with the Firefox implementation of the service, the Chrome version also uses a browser plugin to offer an alternative user interface to Google Reader. This early version of the Feedly for Chrome release offers most of the features found in the original Firefox version of the service, but requires the installation of a dev build of Chrome in order to work.

Xobni, the Outlook plugin that reveals the hidden social network in your inbox, has today launched a business service called Xobni Enterprise. With this, I.T. administrators are being given new tools to deploy and manage the plugin across corporate desktops. In addition, the company is offering customizable extensions for popular enterprise systems including Salesforce CRM, SharePoint, Microsoft Dynamics, and others. It can even tap into a company's own information store saved in an LDAP database like Microsoft's Active Directory or it can pull from other internal websites.

Google just announced the launch of Chrome Frame, a new open-source project that will allow Chrome's rendering engine to run within Microsoft's Internet Explorer 6,7, and 8. This plugin, which is available now, will give developers the option to ask users if they would prefer to switch to the Chrome rendering and JavaScript engine. Users simply continue to use Internet Explorer and the switch will be completely seamless, with no noticeable changes to the user interface.

DeeperWeb's recently released add-on/plugin for IE and Firefox allows users to see traditional Google search results with enhanced results in a sidebar.

The suite of DeeperWeb enhancements to Google results include tag clouds, metrics, Q&As, and results from specific sources such as journalism sites, blogs, and Wikipedia. And unlike other next-gen search engines, DeeperWeb plays nice with Google, allowing users to maintain the familiarity of the Google interface and the reliability of Google results while experimenting with new paradigms.

The Cooliris browser add-on was just updated to a new version that now offers something many users have been clamoring for: Linux support. With the 1.10 release of this 3D photo and video viewing plugin, Linux users running Firefox 3 can now also take advantage of this visually impressive software program for surfing through rich media on the web. In addition, the new version of Cooliris includes improvements to their Facebook support, the ability to browse local files on your computer, and the addition of metadata to the content you're viewing.

Backtype, known for its fast-growing comment-aggregation service, announced the availability of a new BackType Connect plugin for standalone WordPress blogs today. The plugin uses the newly-updated Connect API to integrate comments from a variety of different sources around the internet directly in to the WordPress comment system. Supported sources include Twitter, Digg, FriendFeed, Reddit, other blogs, and of course, Hacker News (since Backtype is a YCombinator startup). Installation is straightforward and comment import happens quickly.