Finding Old Web Pages

...Search Engine Showdown lists the many places online old Web pages can be found.

How to take great notes

Lifehacker's Gina Trapani gives her take, geared to the needs of business, not journalism, but all may find it useful:

Like it or not, our work lives involve meetings - status meetings, planning conference calls, brainstorming sessions, meetings for the sake of meetings. But a meeting is only as valuable as the action taken after everyone's left the conference room.

Whether you're headed off to a business meeting, a university lecture, or a conference session, taking effective notes is a necessary skill to move your projects, your career and your education forward.

Social Research Update

... is published quarterly by the Department of Sociology at the UK's University of Surrey. Previous issues include articles on "Computer Assisted Personal Interviewing," "Telephone interviewing," "Visual research methods," and "Using e-mail as a research tool."

Create and share timelines with xtimeline

xtimeline "is a place for you to create, share and discuss interesting timelines." You can do it by feeding the free service an RSS feed or a spreadsheet, and you can embed timelines on your own Web site.

Overview of online note-taking tools

Web Worker Daily gives a brief overview of "7 Apps for Online Note-Taking":

If you're like most of us, you deal with piles of unstructured information every day: phone numbers, ideas for later consideration, snippets of information from the web, recipes, phone messages…the list is endless. For the web worker, moving this information into an online notebook can be an attractive proposition. Rather than tie yourself to one computer, or even one operating system, you can get at your notes from anywhere that has a web browser handy.

I've tried a couple of these, such as Google Notebook and Zoho Notebook, but for various reasons found them wanting. My preferred applications for collecting Web flotsam these days are the offline OneNote and ClipMate.

Journal Info

Journal Info provides information on more than 18,000 academic journals organized by subject. The site, by Sweden's Lund University Libraries, is intended to make it easier for researchers to choose where to publish their results. It's also a useful tool because it rates journals' influence, helps you find free journals, and tells you which database services distribute a journal's archives.

Infodoodads

I must be self-absorbed, because when I first saw this blog's name I read it as info-dads, when it should be info-doodads. "infodoodads is a blog that reviews and discusses existing and new tools, services, and technology for finding information on the internet. What kind of information? Any kind. The women behind infodoodads love to learn and find information, and every day new tools are being created and unveiled that help people find, sort, and interact with information." I learned about it from The Intelligent Agent blog, which likes it a lot.

Mindomo: Web-based mind mapping software

A mind map is one of those things you draw with a felt tip pen on a big pad of paper in a meeting where you're soliciting ideas, not all of them sensible, and trying to link them together. Mindomo is Web-based mind mapping software you can use to organize your thoughts and the thoughts of others. The site boasts: "Think clearly. Get organized. Boost your productivity. Enhance your creativity." I dunno if that's true because I haven't given Mindomo a good workout, but I have found the free Freemind, another mind mapping tool, useful on occasion. There are many similar mindmapping programs for sale, including ConceptDraw MINDMAP Personal, which normally costs $119 but which is being given away free today only. The advantage of Mindomo, presumably, is that you can easily share your mind maps and access them from anywhere. Whether the world is interested in your addled brain, however, is another matter.

How to Best Use Page Monitors For Online Research

Informit.com offers a free chapter from the book Information Trapping: Real-Time Research on the Web. The book is by Tara Calishain, the proprietor of ResearchBuzz who also co-authored the books Google Hacks and Spidering Hacks.

How to Read a Book

How to Read a Book (PDF) by Paul Edwards, an associate professor of information at the University of Michigan, is a good, short primer on extracting the maximum content from a book in the minimum amount of time.

Beyond Google Alerts basics

Digital Inspiration explains how to use Google Alerts in more sophisticated ways than just entering a few keywords. This includes limiting the alerts to items from specific Web sites, U.S. states, blog authors and more.

CNET's top 10 Web research tools

CNET gives its take on the Internet's top 10 research tools. Actually they name 11, five of them from Google.

Zotero, the "personal research assistant"

A while ago I wanted to make a bibliography and explored various inexpensive software and Web sites to help me. I didn't want to pay the $240 it costs for Endnote, the standard in this category. Everything I tried was unsatisfactory, if only because each required the tedious typing of each citation. Now there's the free and open source Zotero, a Firefox extension that only works with the just-released version 2.0 of the browser. The sterling part of Zotero is that it grab citations directly from online library catalogs and from Web sites such as Google Scholar and Amazon. Let's say you do a search on Google Scholar for writings on computer-assisted reporting: A small icon will appear on the Firefox address bar with your results. Click on the icon and you have the option of making a bibliographic citation out of one or more of the books or articles you found. Or you can look up a book in Amazon or your local university's online catalog, click on the icon and add a citation to Zotero. Zotero does more than that, though. You can also save copies of Web pages, make notes from selected text, store attachments such as PDFs and images, tag your entries, link related items, save searches and export your bibliographies in multiple formats. This is beta software - the first time I installed it, it didn't work until I deleted my Firefox profile and started fresh. Once I did that, though, it worked as advertised. Zotero is from the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University and its sponsors include the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Alfred E. Sloan Foundation and the Institute of Museum and Library Services, and they recently began recruiting a new developer, so presumably it will only get better.