Lumifi - Organize Your Research

Lumifi is a web-based workspace for faculty, students, and other researchers to search for and organize their research information. It looks to be pretty helpful as an application. The short introductory video below can explain it much better than I can. Check it out:

Dipity - A Timeline Tool

I stumbled upon a new web tool called Dipity the other day. It's an easy to use timeline creator. The nice thing about it is that you can share editing rights to any timeline with anyone you want (e.g., a class full of students). I can see this as a great way for students to collaboratively cobble together an understanding of a particular time period.

Here is a Dipity timeline that someone created about the Iraq War:



The last event on this timeline occurred four months ago. The creator of this timeline could add more events if she wanted to, or invite collaborators instead to have them do the work for her.

This timeline makes reasonably good use of Dipity's functionality. For each timeline item, you can add a video, an image, web links, and as much text as you see fit.

Another cool piece of functionality: you can have other web services like Flickr or YouTube feed a timeline. Pictures or videos will automatically filter onto the timeline in the order that they were uploaded to those services. RSS feeds work here too!

Five Best Instant Messengers

Check out this Lifehacker post about the Five Best Instant Messengers. I often find myself forwarding this link to my friends when they tell me that they're still using AOL's Instant Messenger application (complete with advertising).

You can find upgrades to your current IM situation regardless of your operating system. I like Adium for OS X, and Digsby for Windows. When I'm not on a personal computer, it's the web application Meebo for me. All of the apps mentioned can do multiple protocols at once, meaning that I can be connected to my friends on Facebook, GMail, Yahoo! IM, and AIM all at once.

100 Helpful Web Tools for Every Kind of Learner

I just stumbled upon this magnum list of web-based tools to supplement your learning on the College@Home blog. The list is broken down into three types of learners (auditory, visual, and kinesthetic). You can find links to mind mapping, note taking, and chart/graph creation tools, as well as various podcast and presentation creation tools.

10 Free Web-based Alternatives to Photoshop

If you can't afford the hefty price tag for Adobe's Photoshop software, and aren't interested in using GIMP (open-source imaging software), check out these free, web-based alternatives at Life Clever ;).

Omnisio: Online video editing

Omnisio is an easy way to edit videos online. For example, you can take a few Youtube videos and splice them together. Academhack found another interesting use for Omnisio:

Omnisio solves one of the problems with making your presentation available online. Before you had to either sink your audio to the slides, and not show yourself talking, or show the video of your presentation at the expense of not always being able to see the slides. No longer. Omnisio allows you to synchronize the video with the slides and show both.