Advocate's Studio

One of the features of the mobile Opera browser that I really love is its startpage which shows little thumbnails of your favorite web pages for one-click access. SiteHoover (link here) is a free, web-based app that provides the same service, plus a bit more. From the site:

Imagine a place in which you store all of your favorite websites. Imagine that it is available from any computer in the world. Imagine that it informs you about new stuff coming up on each of your favorite websites…
This place is called a hoover.

The start page consists of little “hoover” thumbnails that you can fill in with the URLs to your favorite web pages. Create as many as you would like and your page starts to look like a window filled with web-panes. Each pane is dynamically updates as the underlying URLs are updated. Cool!

Sitehoover also offers a foldering / bookmarking function – you can create folders and fill with bookmarks. These are not the same as hoovers and do not show on your page, but you can easily access them by clicking the folder links.

Set your Sitehoover page as your homepage on your desktop, or navigate to your Sitehoover on any computer anywhere, and open your window to the Web!

I use Instapaper, an off-line reading tool, but not as much as I should. I use Google Reader, an on-line RSS reader, but I often don’t have the time to devote the proper attention to every interesting article. In Reader, I “star” a lot of articles that I plan to go back and consume later, but many times, later never comes.

Enter InstaReader, a free plug-in that bridges the gap. Lifehacker tipped me to the tool, which can be found here. Simply feed the RSS feed from your Google Reader starred items into InstaReader on your desktop and it will automatically update Instapaper with your starred items every few minutes. Load Instapaper into your iPhone, remember to sync before you go off-line and your are good to go!

Almost too beautiful to be true. Forvo (link here) is a web tool offering hundreds of thousands of words and their pronunciations from more than 200 languages. How cool is that? A word may have several different suggested recorded pronunciations and, in true wiki style, you can add your own suggested pronunciation. Community voting pushes the best options to the top. You also can ask for assistance from another Forvo member who natively speaks your desired language. There are almost 60,000 users and 200 editors. There are tabs for categories, pronunciations, languages and users, as well as a tag cloud to help you find what you are looking for. Social, (semi)scholarly and crowdsourced! Check out the languages included in the recent pronunciations box:

You just never know what you’ll find. Hat tip to ResearchBuzz.

Now that you have your RSS feeds organized, how do you collect and digest the great information you find there? Try Mashpedia (link here) – a real-time tool that searches and collects feed information and displays it in an easy-to-read format. Start off with a search-engine looking box and enter your topic of interest. You will then be directed to a page with results, including definitions, videos, Tweets, and other items. You can also view clickable semantic links between the search results.

Show or hide individual streams or feeds. Customize individual articles.  Static content and real time flow sit side by side, greatly increasing the depth of informtion on your given topic.

Mashpedia is another great application to aid the on-line researcher in staying up to date on a given subject.

Hat tip to ResearchBuzz and MakeUseOf.

Picked up this tidbit from Simon Fodden at Slaw – Zotero 2.0 Beta is now at large! I have talked about Zotero in the Studio before: it is simply a fantastic reference tool for citing and organizing on-line research. 2.0 offers a host of new features. Here is a run-down from Zotero’s site:

Syncing

• Automatic synchronization of collections among multiple computers. For example, sync your PC at work with your Mac laptop and your Linux desktop at home.
• Free automatic backup of your library data on Zotero’s servers.
• Automatic synchronization of your attachment files to a WebDAV server (e.g. iDisk, Jungle Disk, or university-provided web storage).

People

• Zotero users get a personal page with a short biography and the ability to list their discipline and interests, create an online CV (simple to export to other sites), and grant access to their libraries.
• Easily find others in one’s discipline or with similar research interests.
• Follow other researchers–and be followed in return.

Groups

• Create and join public and private groups on any topic.
• Access in real time new research materials from your groups on the web or in the Zotero window.
• Easily move materials from a group stream into your personal library.

Even More Functionality That Makes Your Life Easier

• Automatic detection of PDF metadata (i.e., author, title, etc.).
• Automatic detection and support for proxy servers.
• Trash can with restore item functionality so you don’t accidentally lose important materials.
• Rich-text notes
• A new style manager allowing you to add and delete CSLs and legacy style formats.
• Support for Endnote® export styles

While it is billed as a research-friendly tool, Zotero can also serve as a facile note-taking application for personal and professional pursuits. And, best of all, all that capability is free!

Check out Zotero, now with 2.0 power!

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