Category Archives: Firefox

Metadata for Bookmarks

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Posted in Add-on, Bookmarklet, Firefox, Google Chrome, Internet Explorer, Research Management and tagged , , ,

When you bookmark a site, you are typically able to capture 3 pieces of information:  the site name, the site URL, and a location you create to store and organize that bookmark.  The first two are the whole point of creating a bookmark.  The latter is the folder structure that you devise to manage all of your bookmarks.  In most cases, there’s not much else you can do with a bookmark without an extension.

I was reminded of this when I saw MakeUseOf‘s review of Bookmark#, an add-on for Google Chrome.  Plug-ins can add the ability to extend a bookmark with additional metadata.  The failure of folder structures is that you can only put a bookmark in one place.  The ability to add tags can make that bookmark appear readily.

Chrome isn’t the only browser to have plugins that support additional metadata.  Delicious and Pearltrees are Web sites that enable additional markup to bookmarks.  Delicious was bought, then sold by Yahoo!, and appears to have returned to its roots.  Pearltrees is a site I like because it has a graphical node organization structure – the metadata is in the organization.  In both cases, though, you use a bookmarklet to save the site and then add the metadata.

The ability to add the metadata directly to the bookmark within your browser seems more useful, based on how I use my bookmarks.  A survey of the bookmark plugins didn’t show any category killers, although it surfaced Zotero, which I haven’t used for awhile.  The standalone version plugs into any browser and it may provide the best all-around option since it allows for substantial metadata around any resource – not just Web sites – that you bookmark or save for later citation.  The downside is that the metadata leaves your Web browser so that, if you synchronize your bookmarks across computers, the metadata doesn’t come with it unless you are synchronizing and using Zotero in each location.

Mozilla Firefox’s latest versions have added tagging to the bookmarking feature.  Chrome and Internet Explorer 10 still only take the URL and title and leaves you to organize it.  You can improve Chrome using a plugin but you’re on your own with IE.  If you’re an Internet Explorer user and are interested in enhancing your bookmarks, give Delicious or Pearltrees a try.

Secure Your Browsing with Disconnect

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Posted in Add-on, Firefox, Google, Google Chrome, Safari and tagged , ,

If you perform research outside of the office, you have a number of ways to secure your research session.  The most obvious is to use encrypted browser sessions, like searching https://www.google.com – note the s after the http – rather than the unencrypted site.  You might also use a VPN.  Lifehacker has a nice description of the Disconnect Web browser add-on, which can protect your wireless connection against sidejacking.  An added bonus is that it blocks some of the tracking done by advertisers and other sites while you’re surfing the Web.

Disconnect is a free add-on for Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, and Apple Safari.

Highlight and Save Pages with Annotary

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Posted in Add-on, Business Information, Firefox, Google Chrome, Research Management, Research Notebooks and tagged , ,

If you want to save and mark up Web pages with a tool that’s a bit lighter than Evernote or Microsoft OneNote, Annotary may be an option.  It is a browser extension for Firefox or Google Chrome.  When you hit a Web page that has content you want to save, you click the Annotary button in your Web browser toolbar and save the page.  You can add it to a collection – works like a folder – and you can also add a bookmark.

You can share a single page.  You can also create a group of people, sending them an invitation to participate, and share a collection with them.  This could work well for librarians supporting a practice group or faculty on a given project.  However, the sharing feature seems to be excessively social.  There is a way to see who else has annotated or highlighted the same page, and there doesn’t appear to be any way to turn off this sharing.

Deeper History for Frequent Firefox Finders

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Posted in Add-on, Firefox and tagged ,

CTRL-F is one of the most useful keyboard shortcuts when trying to find information in a document.  It works in your word processor, spreadsheets, and on Web pages and PDFs.  If you use Mozilla’s Firefox Web browser, you can grab the Findlist browser extension to make your find function work harder.  Lifehacker has a great review of how it works:  you get a drop-down menu of up to 50 recent terms you’ve looked for with CTRL-F.  The extension will be useful if you use CTRL-F on one page, then flip to another and have to rerun the search.  Skip retyping and select from your list.

Look Up Information in Your Research Flow

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Posted in Add-on, Firefox, Google Chrome, Safari, Search and tagged ,

I am always on the lookout for easy to use, right-click tools that can be added to a Web browser to speed up research.  A recent addition is Liquid Information, formerly known as Hyperwords, that brings together a bunch of tools and is customizable to add your own reference and search resources.

The basic premise is that you run into information on a Web page that, if you highlight it, you can then send to another site or resource.  For example, if you come across the latin phrase mutatis mutandis in a legal opinion and you don’t know what it means, you can highlight the phrase, and a small button will appear next to the text if you have Liquid Information installed.

When you move your mouse pointer over the button, a menu pops up with a variety of things to do.  You can copy the information (including a link or a citation, similar to the Evernote Web clipper), send it to e-mail or a social media account like Twitter, or send it to a search engine or reference site.  If you wanted to know what that phrase meant, you might select the Merriam-Webster dictionary and quickly pull up a definition.

Liquid Information allows you to customize the list of resources, similar to what you might do with your Google or Firefox search bar.  You can right-click in a search box on almost any Web site and select the Add to Liquid Information option.  Theoretically, it will add this to your list.  My initial experience is that it adds it to SOME list but it doesn’t look like my list of resources.  Sometimes, when I mouse over the button, I see a completely different set of resources.

I like the default options since they supplement the other research tools I use and it makes it easy to flip information over to another site.  If you do a lot of business or competitive intelligence, there are quick links to common sites that show who owns the domain name, what it’s IP address is, and so on.   I am going to play around a bit with some of the less frequently used research sites that are in my own portfolio, and see which of them might be good candidates for filling out the Liquid Information menu.

Liquid Information for Chrome

Liquid Information for Firefox

Liquid Information for Safari

Bye, Bye, Browser Bar

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Posted in Add-on, Firefox, Internet Explorer and tagged , ,

The Web browser toolbar was for many years the way that expert researchers improved their Web browser.    It provided nice added features (term jumping, highlighting) and saved search history.    Google had one, Yahoo! had one, in fact nearly everyone who could do so created one.    Some were little more than advertisements.    Then the Web browser changed, as search began to be built in to the Web browser itself, usually as a box beside the location bar (where you type in   http://www….).    Then it shifted again.    Why have two boxes, when you can search from the location bar?    Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, and Microsoft Internet Explorer all support that now.

It was unsurprising, then, to see that   Google will no longer be updating its Google Toolbar for Mozilla Firefox.    You can still get it for Firefox or for  Microsoft Internet Explorer.    As with   Realtime search, Google is paring down its offerings.    Firefox is a superb browser and I expect all of the functionality the Google Toolbar provides is available by select Firefox extensions.

Searching Social Media with Topsy

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Posted in Bookmarklet, Firefox, Google Chrome, Internet Explorer, RSS, Safari, Search, Social media and tagged , ,

Finding social media messages is a challenge.  This seems to be particularly true when sifting through the information overload that is Twitter, whose own search engine seems perpetually unable to return relevant results.  It was ameliorated by Google and other realtime search, which would let you reach back beyond the last week or two and see relevant messages in the past.  As each of these realtime search tools goes offline, however, it becomes harder to dig into Twitter’s past.

The New York Times’ Gadgetwise blog has a good suggestion in Topsy.  I mentioned Topsy briefly a few months ago but it is worth taking another look at this tool.  Even forgetting the fact that it is a much stronger search engine than Twitter’s own, it has some other features that make it a good draw.

Researchers will like its advanced search template.  You can specifically include or exclude words, and you can search for posts by a particular user or over a particular time frame.

One feature I like is that Topsy recognizes Twitter messages that link to other content.  If you are looking for messages that link to content posted on www.fictionaldomain.com, you can restrict the search to looking just at messages that link to that site.

Topsy also has an Experts search option.  If you are looking for an individual who is knowledgeable on a particular topic, you can search the experts section and it will return Twitter accounts that are frequently cited by other Twitter accounts for that topic.

It’s not exactly a citation index but it can give you some starting points if you are trying to identify expertise.  It is also not necessarily current.  The expert profiles are drawn from Twitter’s information, and you may want to visit a Twitter account profile to verify that the information is current.

Last but not least, Topsy supports RSS feeds for specific topics and experts.