007 Web Tools

I’ve been using MapQuest and Expedia for years to print maps and get directions and was delighted when Google Maps added features that allowed you to annotate maps and add custom information. I was even more delighted with Microsoft’s Live Search Maps added the Bird’s eye view that appears to be photos taken from a helicopter flying overhead. For some reason, my little corner of Macon County was one of the first to be available with this new feature. I noticed last month that Illinois Wesleyan University of now fully visible online from at least four different vantage points and the imagery is stunning. Many of the residential communities around the county are also available in the Bird’s eye view so check out your house to see what it looks like flying overhead.

The quality of the photography will sometimes amaze you. Try viewing Paris, Rome, Dubai or Washington D. C.–or even EPCOT and DisneyWorld. Some locales do not have bird’s eye views but offer high quality aerial images, while others are blurred and dithered. It’s fascinating to start at a country or island view and then keep double-clicking your way down to more and more detail. You can see when the different satellites kick in and the detail changes–fascinating!

Google is still the leader in interactive maps that allow you to mashup (combine maps and other databases) with other collections–from restaurants and real estate to personal photographs or wikipedia articles.

If you want to see ground level images tryout Google Street View. Only a select few regions of the country are available currently, but I was amazed to see Dubuque, Iowa on the list already.

As always, update your operating systems and browsers to the latest versions to enjoy the fullest experience on the web. You may also be delighted to know that many of these features are available on your mobile device or web enabled phone.

Let’s us know what you think of these tools, what works best for you and any suggestions you might have for us.

We have had several requests in the past few months for tools that offer features similar to the discussion tools and file sharing available through Course Tools and Group Tools in Luminis and allow for participants who do not have an IWU login and password. We are currently experimenting with two of these web-based applications: Google Groups and Yahoo Groups. But before taking a look at features, I want to make it clear that these are not recommendations of the IT office and we can not guarantee their reliability, their continued support or even the fact that they will be freely available. And, of course, as with many web-based tools, advertising and promotional material are abundantly plentiful.

Google Groups

Many of you already have a Google account, and perhaps Gmail, and have played around with several of the Google services like Reader, Blogger, YouTube or Google Notebook. Google Groups offers many of the tools that are available via Luminis Course or Group Tools, e.g., discussions, file sharing and the ability to easily create and edit web pages. There are lots of management tools for inviting or adding members to the group and determining who can see, edit and delete resources. Each participate can choose how to be alerted when content is added to the group site, e.g., an email message every time something is added, a daily digest of activity or no email at all. It works very much like your Course Tool page with the added benefit of allowing participation from off-campus.

Yahoo Groups
Following on the traditions of Usenet groups, Yahoo Groups started as huge international discussion forums to share messages with thousands of folks all over the world. Usenet resembles bulletin board systems (BBS) in most respects, and is the precursor to the various web forums which are widely used today. Recent improvements have given you to ability to create restricted groups with many of the same features listed above. Yahoo Groups adds a few services more familiar to Luminis users, calendar, links, photos, and a couple of new features, database and polls, heretofore unavailable with our group tools.

We have created experimental groups with both services and would be happy to add any interested colleagues. We’d be happy to hear your thoughts on these tools and your recommendation on anything else you have found valuable for exchanging messages and sharing resources.

I have long advocated using more than one browser at a time and I will frequently have both IE7 and Firefox open, sometime with multiple windows and always with multiple tabs. But it does play havoc with my bookmarks (called Favorites in Internet Explorer). Here are some tips and suggestions for mastering bookmarks and for clipping elements from webpages you find interesting.

Creating and organizing bookmarks
Most browsers provide tools for creating folders, and for moving and renaming bookmarks. It’s a good habit to frequently clear out old bookmarks and rename ones that no longer make any sense to you.

Sharing bookmarks between browsers
IE, Firefox and Safari all have options for either importing or exporting bookmarks (or both) among themselves or to an external file. It might help the clutter to save all your bookmarks to an external file — name it Bookmarks 2007 — and then delete all but the most essential reminders from your current list. When you need to go back and locate a URL from 2007, simply open that file from the browser using the Open File… option.

(Mac OS X only) AllBookmarks adds a new item to your Mac OS X menu bar giving you quick access to all your bookmarks. All your Safari, Firefox and Flock bookmarks are shown and can be selected.

Synchronizing bookmarks on several computers (Firefox)
The Foxmarks Bookmark Synchronizer automatically synchronizes your bookmarks between two or more computers running Firefox. It also lets you access your bookmarks from any computer anytime via my.foxmarks.com. An easy-to-use wizard guides you through the quick startup process. Then Foxmarks works silently in the background to keep your bookmarks up-to-date on all your computers. Simple. Solid. Free. And ready to use.

Access your bookmarks from any computer online
Google Bookmarks is an online service that lets you save your favorite sites and attach labels and annotations. Unlike the bookmark feature from your browser, bookmarks are stored securely online, so they are accessible even if you’re using other computers. The most important features that set Google Bookmark apart from other services is that all your bookmarks are private (nobody else can see them) and fully searchable. You are no longer restricted to the title of the page, the description and the URL - you can search the entire page. A similar service is the new version of Yahoo Bookmarks.

del.icio.us is a social bookmarking website — the primary use of del.icio.us is to store your bookmarks online, which allows you to access the same bookmarks from any computer and add bookmarks from anywhere, too. On del.icio.us, you can use tags to organize and remember your bookmarks, which is a much more flexible system than folders. You can also use del.icio.us to see the interesting links that your friends and other people bookmark, and share links with them in return. You can even browse and search del.icio.us to discover the cool and useful bookmarks that everyone else has saved — which is made easy with tags.

Clipping and sharing highlights from a page
Clipmarks lets you clip specific pieces of web pages, then share what you clip with your friends on Facebook, MySpace or anywhere else. Unlike bookmarks that let you share a link to an entire page, the free clip button lets you capture and share the highlights from the page. Clips can also be saved privately, emailed or printed.

With Google Notebook, you can browse, clip, and organize information from across the web in a single online location that’s accessible from any computer. Planning a course? Researching a lecture? Just add clippings to your notebook. You won’t ever have to leave your browser window. You can also quickly clip Google search results by clicking on the Note this link at the bottom of any search result.

Rick and I are sharing a Google Notebook to experiment with its features. Feel free to join us. Just comment to this blog or contact either one of us. Try out some of the other tools descried above and let us know what you think.

Nary a week goes by that I don’t find a new Google trick to make my life easier. So many that I began bookmarking numerous sites that have sprung up singing it’s praises and deciphering esoteric little features heretofore unhyped. I will list several such sites near the end of this post but I wanted to take a few characters to point out some of my favorite tips.

To search for exact phrases, place quotation marks around the text string, e.g. “Illinois Weslseyan”

To include synonyms use a ~ (without a space) before the term e.g. Google ~tips

Notice that your Google results highlight not only Google tips, but also Google Tutorial, Google Secrets, Google Help, Google Guide, Google Advice, etc.

Another helpful tool hidden within Google Labs called Google Sets will help predict terms from a list of similar terms. You type in Moe, Larry and Curly and Google Sets expand the list to Curly Joe, Shemp and several items that may not even make sense to you. Of course, you could have looked up the Three Stooges in Wikipedia and arrived at the same place. Try it out a few times and let me know what you think.

If you’re looking specifically for a PDF file use the advanced search feature and designate PDF as the file format. You can use the language tools to specify searches on pages written in other language and Google will translate the page for you (more or less.)

In the coming weeks we will dissect the Google results page and show you how customize the results and add features to make it easier to organize and annotate to information that you find.

For revised and extended discussions of all the search options and features, peruse the following sites:

Google Tutors Google Search Manual and Google Guide

Google and the all the other also rans have made is quite a bit easier to find what we are looking for on the Internet. In a future post we will discuss some tips for enhancing your ability to use these great tools. Today I would like to point out some nice new tools for finding text on an individual web page. Most browsers provide a “Find in this page” or “Find on this page” function to search for text on a page and move to the next or previous occurrence of your keywords. The Google Toolbar (free download) offers a few additional tools that you might find helpful.

But first, let’s distinguish, for the purposes of this discussion, the difference between search text and find text:

Search text refer to the keywords you type into the Google Search box
Find text refer to the exact words you enter into the Find box

When the ‘Highlight” icon is enabled each word from your Google search text will be highlighted on the page (each word in a different highlight color.) When you enable ‘Word Find’, the toolbar will generate an individual button for each word in the search text and each click of the button will find the next occurrence of that word. If you are searching for a phrase, place quotation marks around the phrase, e.g. “Illinois Wesleyan”. Try it out and let me know what you think.

Click here for help with Google Toolbar features

When you want to find a word or series of words on a page, use the ‘Find on this page’ function to open a Find box. If you are using Firefox 2.0 or later (highly recommended) use the shortcut Ctrl-F to bring up the find box at the bottom of the screen just above the status bar. As soon as you begin typing Firefox will begin to locate words beginning with those letters and offer a next, previous, and highlight option for your current find text. If you’re still following this, you will realize that it is possible that both search text (from your Google Search) and find text (from the ‘Find on this page’ function) will be highlighted at the same time.

In a later post, we will discuss what to do with the text once you find it. Use the comment section of this blog to let me know what you do now…bookmark?…cut and paste into another document?

Note to Safari users:

Use the Edit> Find> Find command (Cmd-F) to open a Find banner at the top of the webpage. Use the arrow keys to move to the previous and next occurence of the find text. Click Done when you’re finished.

Earlier this summer I posted a short blog entry announcing a Wiki page that discusses methods of collecting RSS feeds and asked other to contribute. Only one person did. It’s now time to up the ante. This is your new challenge.

How do you organize your life online?

• What tools do you use for email, distribution lists, listservs, whatever?
• How do you find and read blogs, news articles, journals?
• Once you find them, how do you keep up with them, categorized them and get updates?
• Which tools do you use to keep in touch with your friends, colleagues, students?

Let me know by either updating the Wiki page, commenting to this blog entry, email, or personal contact.

Your responses and insights may help others who are struggling with this issues.

If you are like many of us, you may still be using an outdated browsers and searching techniques that you learn back in 1997. Over the next few posts, I would like to offer some simple tips for organizing, browsing, bookmarking and annotating web content so that it makes sense to you and you can find it when you need it.

Automatic updates:

First of all, make sure your operating system and browser are up-to-date. By spending just a few minutes each month updating your computer you will be protecting youself from viruses and malicious software and providing yourself with the most sophisticated software available. It is very easy to setup your system to automatically download updates whenever they are available.

Using multiple windows and tabs:

Some web sites and application work better for me using Firefox, others work better with Internet Explorer (or Safari on the Mac). I frequently have both open at the same time…and I always use multiple tabs within the browser. It allows me to keep several sites open at the same time and switch back and forth easily. Learn all you can about tabs and I’m sure you will find them very helpful. For instance:

• You can bookmark several tabs at once and easily return to your favorite set of sites.
• You can designate this favorite set of sites as your default setup.

I use Internet Explorer for Luminus (Pipeline), checking my 3900 calls and Google.
I use Mozilla Firefox for several blogs I am currently testing, Google Reader for RSS feeds, Meebo (web-based Instant Messaging) and the IWU Wiki.
And I may have another Firefox session (Window) open if I have a current project that requires several sites at a time.

To learn more about tabbed browsing, search the Help sections of your browser or search the internet for “tabbed browsing tips”. Let me know how it works out for you. We’ve setup a page on the campus Wiki to discuss your favorite 007 Web Tools.

As faculty members inquire about starting their own web pages, I am beginning to consider talking to them about product like this one (Wordpress) as a way of creating a web presence. The content management features of these programs do not require an understanding of HTML or FTP and allow for two way communication between faculty and their students or colleagues. In addition to the typical posting format, one can also easily create web pages and manage them through Wordpress.

I have recently upgraded my browers to IE 7 and Firefox 2 and am currently experimenting with some of the new features. Ive added to Google toolbar to Firefox and the Windows Live toolbar to IE. I’m hoping to find an optimum solutions for faculty that will allow them to check their mail, blogs, and maybe IM and text messages in one location. I’ve opened a new notebook in Google notebooks (which I have open all the time in both browsers) to collect clips and resources for my research.

I’m still searching for way to approach the faculty that will provoke them without pissing them off.

I’ve added a page to our IWU Wiki entitled “Options for Collecting RSS Feeds” as a means of collecting methods of finding, subscribing and readers news articles and blogs. Please take a few minutes to peruse the site and feel free to add your favorites tools, tips, or recommendations.