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.)

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…)

Netvibes (http://www.netvibes.com/) is one of a growing number of Online Desktops. These services are meant to aggregate as much of your online life as possible onto one private page. You can link (and sometimes view) your email, create notes, to do lists, and calendars, read blogs and other RSS feeds, and link to other Web 2.0 services, like Flickr (photo sharing), Writely (word processors), Box.net (file storage), and del.icio.us (links).

Update: Here’s a great example of using an online desktop for teaching: Owen James’ HigherEdBlogCon presentation and his SuperGlu site. (more…)

If you’re the type to carry around a notebook and jot everything down, you’ll like TiddlyWiki, http://www.tiddlywiki.com/. Wikis are editable online documents–you make the edits right online and the changes appear right away, no tedious uploading. TiddlyWiki is a wiki on a selfcontained HTML file. All you need is a single file and a web browser. It doesn’t have to be online, either. You can use it right from your desktop or USB drive. Which also means that your notes aren’t live on the web for everyone to see. (more…)

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…)

Refworks is a web-based bibliographic management utility. That means that it stores references of the sort that you use in an academic paper. Refworks is somewhat outside the scope of this site because it’s not anywhere near free. However, many colleges and universities (like SCSU) subscribe to it for their students and faculty, so from the user’s point of view it may be free for use. (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…)