When I was young I remember looking at the pre-Christmas toy advertisements on the TV and wanting the latest Six-Million Dollar Man action figure in the Action Man range, the latest new engineering kit from Mecanno, a Lego castle (or two) and perhaps a chemistry set so I could practice blowing things up. Over the [...]

Categories: Apple

Back in 2007 I reviewed the Firefox extension Hyperwords which gave you access to a research context menu after selecting text on a website. You could use it to search in various search engines, encyclopedias or news sites. While I’m not 100% sure, I believe that the Liquid Information add-on is the successor of the [...]

Categories: Browsing, Firefox

Last week we reported, somewhat sceptically I’m happy to say, about a piece of research by a company called AptiQuant Psychometric Consulting, that said that people who used Internet Explorer had lower IQs than people who used other browsers. The research “measuring the effects of cognitive ability on the choice of web browser” was apparently [...]

Categories: Browsing, Firefox, Google Chrome, ie, Internet Explorer, Opera

There can be no doubt that social networking has taken off (which would make a good tweet, hmm) but recent research by research firm TNS has shed some light about variations on how we use it around the world, as reported by the BBC. The research, for which 50,000 people in 46 countries were interviewed [...]

Categories: Misc

An experiment that began 10 years ago with children living in slums in India being given computers for education has brought about surprising results, according to the BBC. The computers were installed as holes in the wall, much in the way people would expect to find a cashpoint, and children quickly learned to teach themselves [...]

Categories: Misc

The Internet offers many people a chance to access resources and information that they could otherwise hardly – if at all – obtain. One interesting source of information is the British Newspapers 1800-1900 archive that is offered by the British Library. It allows everyone to search for topics in many newspapers of that century. Not [...]

Categories: Online Services

I’m a student. I’m also a writer, a researcher, and a number of other things that all seem to involve a ton of research. Particularly that student thing. An increasing number of us, regardless of what we do, rely on the Web to get information, do research, and get work done. For most of us [...]

Categories: The Web, Tools

Google Squared is a new concept search engine by Google. Unlike conventional search engines Google Squared has been designed to present the information right in the search interface without the need of leaving it to read up on the information on other websites. A user who would be interested in Greek Philosophers, American Presidents or [...]

Categories: Search Engines

I recently began to use mind maps again for some of my keyword research projects because they offer an excellent way of visualizing keyword connections which are an important part of keyword research. The Open Source mind mapping softwareFreemind was my application of choice for the first few projects. It worked well but had a [...]

Categories: Software