Life's been busy this past week (include a complete rebuild of my laptop due to a bad memory chip, of all things), but I wanted to share a couple of useful resources I've been introduced to recently. Both are research-related, and definitely worth sampling.
- The first is a Squidoo lens on internet research. I do a lot of internet research in the course of work and life, and I found some tremendous tidbits of wisdom here. You'll also find a list of "11 Search Tips" - I already knew some from the list, and learned some new things. One of my favorites is on there:
- "Take advantage of "type of document" searches. For opinions search for PDF and Word Docs and for statistics look for XLS documents (include chart or graph in your search terms)."
I do this all the time, to great benefit - for example, you can do a search for '<person's name> ppt' to get any posted presentations they've done. You can find out a lot about what business people are up to by doing this - tremendously valuable for networking.
The next is a gadget/service called Clipmarks. Clipmarks is a great (free) way to catalog tidbits from your research. Plenty of other tools let you bookmark pages - this one is different. Sure, you can save a whole page, but the coolest thing is it allows you to grab portions of a web page so you can keep only the parts you care about. You can create public or private collections, and there are some built-in features to facilitate sharing.
You can use the Clipmarks web site, but I recommend installing the Clipmarks browser integration for maximum effect (IE and Firefox plugins are available, and the social browser Flock is supported).
Coming soon - I'm beta testing a site that will be an awesome resource to get good prices on airfare. More to come when it emerges from beta.