Online Research Toolkit

We don’t live entirely online. There are times when you have a offline “document” that you need to get online, and there is no scanner available or it’s something that isn’t scannable. Whiteboard notes come to mind. You can take a picture, but you generally then have to spend some time adjusting the contrast and color, cropping the image, etc., before you can use the notes.

There are a couple of services that help do some of this automatically and give you a place to store and share the images. Scanr works with cameras, including camera phones, that take at least 1 megapixel images (that’s most newer phones and nearly all digital cameras). Quipit has similar requirements. In both cases, you take a picture of the whiteboard, handwritten/drawn document, or typed document, and send it to the service. They process the picture to increase the contrast, remove shadows and camera artifacts (like flash glare), and crop the background out, and provide a link or account where you can download, share, email, or fax your image as a PDF document. Registration for both requires an email address, and agreement to the terms of service, which are fairly standard.

For the most part, a standard 1 megapixel shot in either service will do nicely for a whiteboard or for handwritten notes, but not for typed documents. Both services have lists of phones that work for whiteboard, notes, or typed documents, so you can easily check if your camera phone will work. Lighting and careful photography are still important, no matter how good the image processing, so both services provide tips for improving your images.

Both Scanr and Quipit have Facebook applications for sharing classnotes. Quipit allows you to post documents to a blog. Quipit works in color or black & white, while Scanr says it is dedicated to high quality black & white images. Both services have tagging and searching.

Security is based on passwords and both services have SSL security for login, however transmission is not necessarily encrypted. You are sending images from your camera phone via the text messaging system, or from your computer via email, and neither service has control over that part of the system. So use care if you have proprietary or personal data.

So the next time you have been scribbling on a napkin, or brainstorming on a whiteboard, get out that camera phone and give one of these a try.

I’ve not updated this blog for a while, so I’m hoping this will be the first of some more regularly updated material.
I had mentioned Zoho earlier. With a word processor, spreadsheet, and presentation tool, they were a nice contender in the online tools arena. I even noticed when they started adding lots more modules, like a database, project manager, and chat. However, they have really won me over now, by being the first on the online tools that I’m aware of to offer (free*) synchronization with Microsoft Office. The Zoho plugin allows you to edit your text or spreadsheets in either Zoho’s online service or Word/Excel. Good job, Zoho!

They are also working on an independent offline editor. Offline viewing is already available via Google Gears. No Microsoft Office required, just the Google Gears download. Very intriguing. Plus Zoho offers plugins for IE and Firefox to view documents in Writer (doc), Sheet (xls), or Show (ppt).

And I’m checking out the Notebook. Not only can you do web clipping (like Google’s Notebook), but you can incorporate documents and other Zoho services, add audio and video (like YouTube), record(!) audio and video, and use the built in chat or Skype. And all of this can be edited collaboratively and be published for public viewing (with comments, too.) I’m going to experiment with this for doing online presentations. (Oh, and did I mention that they’ve got a Web Conferencing module, too?)

(*Thinkfree will be offering an online/offline sync, but it looks like you’ll have to pay for it.)

Zoho came out with Zoho Writer about the same time that all the other online word processors were coming out. They were good, but I didn’t think they were special in any way. However, Zoho is really making strides in the Office Suite department. They now have a word processor, slideshow, spreadsheet, database application, planner, and chat system that are all free. They also have a virtual office suite and a customer relations manager that are free for small groups (10 for the suite, 3 for the CRM), and they are now demoing a project management service. And, of course, all of these allow collaboration with anyone who has an email address.
One of the other exciting things that Zoho offered, and one that I installed immediately, is a plugin (available for IE and Firefox) that will display office-type files in the web browser without having the software installed. It reads doc, xls, ppt, odt, rtf, sxw, sxc, sxi, and pps files. (I’m really excited about this, because, if it works well and I can get our IT department interested, it might solve some of the viewing problems we have on our public computers.)

I’ll be trying everything out and will report on the individual applications separately, but I couldn’t resist posting about the whole thing right away.

Anyone who has used instant messaging knows the problems of moving to a new computer. You have to download the software on every computer you use. If you use a public computer, you also need to be sure that you don’t save your log in information–assuming that you can download the software in the first place.
Enter the web-based IM clients. Meebo (http://www.meebo.com/) is based on a multi-IM protocol and handles AIM, ICQ, Jabber, GTalk, Yahoo! Messenger, and MSN Messenger accounts. You do still need accounts on whatever services you wish to use, but you can log into all of them at once through the single interface. (This is similar to the desktop clients Trillian and Gaim, but does not require a download.) Very handy when you are on a computer that does not allow download or installation of new software (i.e. most libraries!)

Meebo does not allow file transfer, webcam viewing, or many of the other additional services, but it’s great for basic chatting. In my own work, I have found IM very useful for short collaboration sessions, such as planning a meeting, working out some last minute bugs in a presentation. One group even edited a paper via IM. (We sent round the paper in MSWord by email before the session, then went through it paragraph by paragraph over IM, making suggestions and having one person act as secretary. Afterwards the corrected file was sent off to everyone to review the changes–we used MSWord’s Track Changes feature, which our professor also used for grading.)  It’s also nice for just getting to know people. It is often hard to stay on track for long periods of time, however, and since you don’t have the ability to split off new threads, those side tangents get distracting pretty quickly. My advice for IM conferences is to have a single topic to get through, get through it as soon as possible, and then let everyone chat who wants to.

Oh yes, and in IM you will notice connection differences. It’s easy to dominate an IM conversation if you are the only one with a broadband connection, so take it easy if one or more of your group is on dial-up.

Finally, many public libraries, schools, and businesses block IM and chat sites. I generally don’t agree with such policies; I believe that IM is a legitimate collaboration tool, but I do understand the “waste of time” argument. So I’ll include a link to the meebo repeater with a little hesitation. I generally feel that it’s better to work out the problems with the administration through education and pilot programs, but it can be very frustrating in the meanwhile, so I’ll just ask you all to use your best judgement.

Vyew (http://vyew.com/) is a free, Flash-based collaboration platform, suitable for small group work and light weight online conferencing. Consisting of text chat and whiteboard, with optional phone conferencing (toll charges apply), you can share presentations, images, and screenshots. A new feature is a desktop view. Meeting rooms can be created on the fly, even using the guest login. Participants can be invited by email or by providing the meeting room number. Participants can be desginated as viewers (view only) or presenters (full options.)
Registration includes file storage space, so that files can be viewed, edited, annotated and shared. Without registration, only the chat, image sharing from online libraries (Flickr, etc.), drawing pad, and phone conferencing systems can be used. Unregistered users can save images to their computers. Vyew is in beta and the business model is not set yet, but they do promise two years of free services for those who register during the beta period.
Vyew requires Flash and Java 1.4 plug-ins, and has been tested on Internet Explorer (5.5+ for Windows), Firefox (1.4+ for Windows), and Safari (for Mac).

The Vyew website has a good explanatory screenshot.

I mentioned Portable Thunderbird in the Email post. The same person who allows us to carry our email around on a USB drive has also developed several other portable versions of applications. You can download them individually or as a whole collection in the Portable Apps Suite (http://johnhaller.com/jh/useful_stuff/portable_apps_suite/0 ). Imagine carrying around an email program, a web browser, a calendar, an office suite, a chat/IM client, even a web editor and FTP client, all on a USB drive to plug into any Windows computer. (more…)

Need a table for a web presentation? Want to collaborate on something involving figures? Try the Num Sum Web Spreadsheet. You can import or paste data from Excel or Open Office, as well as start a spreadsheet from scratch. Spreadsheets can be public or private, and you can invite others to work on your spreadsheet. Once you’re done you can export your files as tab or comma deliminated files or as an HTML table. Or generate a small piece of HTML code to paste into a website (via the Post to my blog link).

What is a blog? While many people define a blog as an online diary or journal, really it’s just a convenient, chronologically organized, web publishing tool. You can certainly use it as a diary or journal, but it can also be a newsletter (the function of my Frequently Answered Questions), a presentation (see here and here for good examples), a gallery (self-promotion, here), novels, I’ve even tried a CV. The point is that blog platforms offer web publishing without having to know HTML (or have a web publishing software), without having the cost of a site (there are many free blog hosts), and with the ease of being able to publish from any web-accessible computer.

If you can publish pretty much anything in a blog, respecting your blog hosts Terms of Use and general copyright laws, you can use a blogging tool for notetaking. (more…)

del.icio.us is both a clever use of URL naming conventions (.us is for United States registered sites and has mostly been used for local government so far), and a really useful tool. del.icio.us is what is called a “social bookmarking” service. Bookmarking refers to saving links for websites that you want to go back to, like saving into your Favorites or Bookmarks in your web browser. del.icio.us has an advantage over a Favorites list because it’s online, so you can find that site you saved last week from any computer. The “social” part is from that fact that, being online, other people can see what you’ve saved and you can see what they’ve saved. (more…)

Email is a true case of “familiarity breeds contempt”, but it is also indespensible. Email is the one tool that I will say that you cannot do without when doing online research. Not only will you need an email address for registering for various services and resources, but you will at least occassionally want to email yourself notes, links, and attachments. It is possible to use email for organizing your entire research process, especially with a large memory service like Gmail. (more…)