Jots allows you to keep a record of interesting links that you find and share those with the whole world or with select others. You can also search for interesting links among those others have found. This allows you a way of separating the search wheat from the search chaff especially if you limit yourself to links recommended by people you trust. You can inform people about new links you have listed via RSS or directly from the web.
Oodle is a search engine designed to find information in local classified advertisements. You can search based upon metropolitan area or college location and you can search based upon the item of interest such as cars, houses, jobs or services. The index is of 76 cities and almost 200 college locations.
Chipmarks is a web tool that allows you to save your favorite sites online so that you can access them from any computer that has web access. Chipmarks works with both Internet Explorer and Firefox.
Users of Chipmarks can also share their bookmarks with others and see lists of public bookmarks to find new and interesting Internet sites.
Bookmark sharing can be a great way of facilitating research as it allows those interested in common areas to quickly share information about new and important web resources. Plus, being able to save bookmarks on the web means that you can take that research with you even when you don't have your computer around.
Wikipedia is the encyclopedia on the Internet with hundreds of thousands of articles in English and many other languages on almost any topic you can think of - and if the article is not available, you can write it yourself. Designed to be written and put together by anyone who wishes, the supporters of Wikipedia do a pretty good job of ensuring that the articles present good factual information as well as good links to additional resources. For any search on the web, Wikipedia is a great and easy place to start.
AskNow is a service run by reference librarians throughout California who are ready to answer your questions - no matter how obscure they may be. You can even open a chat session with a librarian for that kind of personal touch. You will have to provide a California city and zip code [you can use Beverly Hills 90210], but you don't have to be a resident of the state and it could take a few minutes to get hooked up with a librarian. The librarians will also hook you up with other web sites for further research assistance.
Here are a couple of tools to help you find out when a particular site mentions topic of interest to you, so you don't have to go looking all over the web to find out new information or references to a particular topic say, for example, Isidore's Corner. Google Alert will e-mail you whenever topics that interest you appear on the web. RSICopyright's Clip&Copy service allows even more complicated searches including news reports of over two hundred different web periodicals. TVEyes alerts you whenever a topic is spoken on TV.
