Neville Franks has informed me of his new product, Surfulater.
It appears to be a combination of uber-bookmarks collector, information collector, content saver and information manager.
Neville’s site says the $35 product is “the ideal tool for researchers, students, teachers, hobbyists and web surfers across the board.”
I’ve downloaded it and am going to give it a trial, with a view to letting you know my views, both good and bad (regular readers know that, like Allan Jenkins, you can’t buy a favourable opinion here at Better Communication Results).
The trial version comes complete with a database already populated with some examples. You can quite rapidly see that under the rubicon of ‘Knowledge Base’ you can save links and/or copy to sites of interest to a particular topic, leave your own notes about those links or text, and attach additional material to supplement the already-saved material.
You can create and save your own ‘To Do’ list, save interesting bookmarks for later reading (and unlike a rapidly unwieldy traditional browser-based bookmark filing system, actually remember why you saved the link), and conduct searches on your saved material.
I can forsee that this would be helpful to tertiary students who, perhaps, use the web extensively for their journal searches; they can save the text from the pages found by their google searches, then search within their saved texts for the relevant reference/paper/article/abstract.
I’ll give it a bit of a bash and let you know what I think. But straight off the cuff I wish the website, surfulater.com, had an easy to download/capture promotional image I can use in my blog.
Update: image now supplied and in place.
I worked with the guys at Skylook on making their logo blog-friendly and it was of great help.
Incidentally, speaking of Skylook, the software was a real help in recording the interview with IABC Malaysia’s President Ghazalie Abdullah, the fruits of which you can hear on an mp3 file located on this site’s ‘My podcasts’ page. So thanks again, chaps, for creating a great tool.
