Online Research Toolkit

Email is great, but sometimes you just need to talk realtime with a group. Making decisions on who will do what on a project, for instance. You can do it by email, but it seems to take forever. This is when a synchronous communication service is needed.

The most common synchronous (”same time”) communication that most people are familiar with is telephone, of course. But not everyone has conference lines available. Instant Messaging is another, but you need accounts with the various services, and there are so many services it can be hard to agree on which one to use. Sometimes you just want a quick, no download, no registration, no hassle chat.

That’s what Chatzy (http://www.chatzy.com/) provides. There are no downloads, no registration, anyone can start a chat and you just need the URL to join (so you don’t even need to give an email). (more…)

TagFacts (http://tagfacts.com/) is a note service offered by the creater of Reader2, a social book list service. TagFacts allows you note down, well, pretty much anything, and tag it with keywords. You can also include links, so you can use it as a bookmarking site for web pages, as well as for notes from lectures, books, interviews, conversations, random thoughts, etc. (more…)