Turbo-charge your Firefox browsing

As most people know, if you’re not taking advantage of the many Firefox add-ons and plug-ins then you’re not making the most of this browser. Even so, where do you start? I’ve read several blogs recently listing the ‘best 20′ Firefox add-ons with others running the list to 50. But if you genuinely want to take your research to the next level you need a few hand-picked additions that will help you do more in less time. If that sounds too good to be true – here are a few ideas.

1: Scrapbook: This add-on is an incredibly powerful research tool that enables you to save web pages, page snippets and whole sites. You can organise your saves just like bookmarks (by dragging and dropping in trees) but, crucially, scrapbook saves the page (or pages) not just the link. If you need reliable access to sources, this is the add-on for you.

• save pages using a drop-down menu or by dragging the page favicon into the Scrapbook Firefox sidebar.
• drag and drop page snippets and save linked pages just by dragging the links to the sidebar.
• highlight sections in saved pages.
• annotate pages.
• use ‘in-depth’ capture to save whole sites and create site maps (see below).

Scrapbook is the answer if you need access to a range of pages and sites offline and to ‘capture’ a whole site and its links to external sites. Scrapbook even comes with a filter tool that means you can capture only the pages belonging to a target site while ignoring external links.

2: Picnik: Not necessarily a research tool, but beautifully simple and useful. Picnik is a quick way to do what you want with pictures – online, in your browser. You can create files of pictures, pull them from you own accounts on sites such as Flickr and your own hard drive. But, from a research and publishing perspective, you can download images from sites, give them a quick edit, change their format ready for use within seconds.
The Firefox add-on makes life even simpler. Right click on an image (or ‘ctrl’ click for Macs) and you can ‘edit image in picnik’. The image then automatically loads to your library in Picnik. No need for the laborious task of saving images to a photo editing application then exporting locally before you can upload online.

3. The Evernote Webclipper:

This add-on creates a handy button on your Firefox browser that you can use to quickly save a selection of a web page or an entire page to your Evernote account. If you need some background on why Evernote can transform your online life then check my recent post on this app.

4. Juice: This add-on is one of a new wave of intelligent search tools that let you access linked content without you having to navigate away from the pages you are viewing. By highlighting and dragging a selection, Juice searchers for reference material, movies, news and pictures and presents the content clearly in a separate Firefox column. You can switch Juice on or off easily by using a simple button on your browser bar.

Juice’s rocking webcast from Linkool Labs on Vimeo.

5: Semantic Radar: For those of you interested in the development of the Semantic Web then Semantic Radar is another tool that gives us a glimpse of what semantic tools are bringing to the web. Semantic Radar recognizes all RDF content and displays custom icons in Firefox to indicate presence of the data in languages such as SIOC and FOAF. This screengrab shows how Semantic Radar has detected RDF content on a Livejournal page. Click on those icons and you can access the RDF content directly. For more on the Semantic Web see my interview with John Breslin.

Tags: EverNote, filter tool, intelligent search tools, John Breslin, juice, Linkool Labs, picnik, RDF, research tool, scrapbook, semantic radaer, semantic tools

Easy transfer from Google Notebook to Evernote and Zoho

If, like me, you were shocked by Google’s announcement that they are to abandon development of its highly rated Notebook app – help it at hand. Two of the best notebooks have launched importers that enable Google Notebook users to easily switch to Evernote or Zoho.
Evernote’s instructions include a video tutorial while over at Zoho you’ll need a simple Firefox plugin.

If you haven’t tried a notebook app before then see my post on the 10 reasons why journalists and researchers should love Evernote.

Tags: EverNote, google, notebooks, Zoho

EverNote – 10 reasons why journalists and researchers should love it

Over the last few years a number of notebook applications have elbowed their way into the mainstream market including Google Notebook, Zoho Notebook, Ubernote and iLeonardo. A few of these apps were discussed in this Mashable post recently. One of the most recent note-taking apps to emerge is Evernote – an incredibly powerful creation that works on both Macs and Windows. I’ve looked at Evernote from the perspective of a journalist and researcher and found ten reasons to love it.

1 – It does the basics really well. I hope the people at EverNote never lose sight of this. Journalists and researchers use notebook apps so they can quickly and efficiently file away snippets, web pages, documents and pictures into subject files. They also need to be able to dump this content into the note-taking app in a variety of ways and access those notes easily. Evernote has this mastered.
2 – EverNote works on the web and your desktop. Sounds like a source of confusion but the automatic syncing means both operate seamlessly. You can, however, create notebooks only on the web version or only on your desktop.
3 – You can publish your notebooks to collaborate with colleagues on projects.
4 – You can tag notes. Making it easier to search for notes across and within notebooks.
5 – Notes can be emailed easily. Single or multiple notes can be selected and then one click attaches those notes as PDFs to a new message window from your email client.
6 – You can email notes directly into your EverNote account.
7 – EverNote search includes image recognition technology. While not universally applauded, this image recognition capability means you can automatically search through pictures that carry text. If you have taken snaps of business cards, for example, you can search them automatically.
8 – You can import and export. This means that as you build data using the service and catalogue items you can export them later to a different app on a different platform.
9 – The web and desktop interfaces work beautifully. You can view notes in various forms, zoom in and out, view specific notes in one column or work on a specific note by adding text or images.
10 – It’s about to get better. Yesterday EverNote announced released its all-access API which means that developers can mash the service with other apps. The company hopes, for example, that it can be integrated with scheduling services such as Ical and Remember the Milk. This also means that the social bookmarking element of EverNote (published notebooks) may become intergrated with other social networking sites. It also says that new Mac and Windows scripting capabilities mean that you can automate specific processes and add functionality such as RSS feeds

There are other reasons why EverNote has attracted praise; for example, I’ve yet to explore how easily you can create and browse notes via mobiles. One downside might be that the free version allows a maximum data upload of 40mb per month. Even so, $5 will give you access to 500mb which is enough to store 5,000 snaps.

More on Evernote mashups soon.

Tags: EverNote, notebook, notebook applications, sorting, storing

Notebook 2.0: 12 Tools for Researchers – Mashable

Here’s a useful guide to the various ‘notebook’ options available. Most of these allow you to save whole web pages or page clips, emails, pictures and other content to ‘notebooks’ organised by subject. I’m using Evernote which I’ll be reviewing soon. 

Notebook 2.0: 12 Tools for Researchers – Mashable -

Tags: EverNote, notebooks