Author Archives: Brock Tice

Google Notebook

I mentioned my newfound love for Google Docs the other day.  I’m also rapidly becoming a fan of Google Notebook.  It allows you to set up any number of notebooks, and with a browser extension makes it easy to add any highlighted bit of text from your browser to the notebook.

This isn’t a big deal, as it’s relatively easy to copy and paste text into an editor. It has three key advantages over that method:

1. It automatically includes the title and URL of the page from which the clip was taken.

2. It is accessible from anywhere and …

3. It’s possible to add comments on to any of the clips.

If you’re a Google Docs user, another benefit is that you can send entire notebooks to Google Docs. Thus, researching a personal reference page might go something like this:

1. Search for whatever it is you’re looking for. Your search could include web search engines, books, electronics, various other items, even library searches.

2. As you find things you’re interested in, just paste them into the google notebook (usually one dedicated to the topic).  This is the search equivalent of brainstorming. You might add notes on clips indicating why you chose them.

3. When you’ve exhausted your search, go back to the notebook. Trim down the list to get rid of stuff that ultimately you don’t need. Add further comments if you have them. Drag and drop clips to reorder them. When done, export to Google Docs. From there you can edit all of your clips and comments, merge them into a cohesive whole, whatever. You can then export to something else, like PDF, post to your blog, or publish to the web.

I know it’s been around for a little while, but I didn’t really grasp how powerful it was when it first came it. It’s definitely worth a try. I’ve used it as described above at least three times in the last two days.

PLoS ONE turns 1

I noticed today the the PLoS ONE blog is celebrating the first birthday of PLoS ONE. It sounds like things have been going pretty well for them since last August:

On 1st August last year, PLoS ONE opened its doors for submission and so we have decided to call today our official birthday.

…

Most importantly of all though, in the last year, or, at least, in the months from December 2006, we have published 695 pieces of original research. All of that research is, of course, Open Access and all of that research can be annotated by users, discussed by users and for the last few weeks rated by users.

…

This potential for interaction is unprecedented in any other scientific publication and it is being used to an extremely high standard.

You should go read the whole thing. They have three birthday wishes:

Whenever you write about a published paper, be it in a journal or on a blog, always provide a link to the freely available version of the paper if one exists.

Whenever you read a paper in PLoS ONE, always rate it before leaving.

And most importantly….

Whenever you write a scientific paper, always, always, always publish it Open Access.

I finally signed up today to get notices about articles in PLoS Computational Biology and PLoS Medicine. (Where’s PLoS Computational Medicine, hmm?)

PLoS Articles from JHU

I’m doing some research for an interview with a faculty member here at the Institute for Computational Medicine who has published an article in PLoS Computational Biology. Along the way, I found out that the Johns Hopkins University is a member of the PLoS consortium, and there’s even an automated page on their site that shows papers published in PLoS journals by Johns Hopkins authors. My quick manual count was about 75 papers since 2005.

It’s pretty clear that with 75 papers in two years from Johns Hopkins alone, PLoS is off to a great start. This can only mean good things for the future of open access publishing in the sciences.

Google Docs and Spreadsheets as a Personal Wiki

I like having a personal wiki. I keep track of my personal projects, various GTD meta-stuff, and even tracking shared expenses with family and roommates. Originally, I used MoinMoin, a very easy-to-edit but powerful wiki clone written in Python. We’ve been using MoinMoin for several years (at least 3, I think) in our lab. It offers a straightforward syntax, ease of uploading attachments, and easy creation of tables (hard to find in wikis). MoinMoin was working pretty nicely, but its main downfall was that it was difficult to create new MoinMoin webs. Thus, if I wanted to have a wiki for my roommates, a wiki for my wife and I, a personal wiki, a wiki for a project with someone, and so on, I had to go through the tricky process of creating those and making them accessible through the web server.

Enter TWiki. TWiki promised to be a more powerful MoinMoin with the capacity for quickly creating new “webs”, or sub-wikis. TWiki’s syntax was unfortunately obtuse. It was possible to make it compatible with MoinMoin’s syntax, which I did, but I never worked all of the kinks out. Furthermore, it was more difficult to attach items in TWiki, and I found the interface very cluttered compared with MoinMoin. While I intended to make even heavier use of my TWiki than my MoinMoin site, in the end I used it less because it was inconvenient. Oh, and it requires you to log in every time you open a new browser window, which bothered the ever-living hell out of me. I hear they’re changing that in some CVS revision. Whatever.

These things are no longer an issue for me. I’m moving to Google Docs and Spreadsheets. It turns out that you can link from one google doc to another directly, which is the basic function of a wiki. Furthermore, google spreadsheets are (compared to wiki software) fantastically easier to use and more powerful. It’s possible to upload word, excel, openoffice spreadsheet, openoffice writer, text, html, and other files directly to google docs. It’s easy to share a google doc with one person, a few people, or even the entire internet, giving either read or read and write access to various people. Google docs can be grouped in multiple folders (tag-like), seen directly ranked by most-recent-edit in iGoogle, and accessed from pretty much anywhere. You can also download google docs in common file formats. I suspect soon complete offline access will be enabled with Gears a la Reader.

It has only been a week, but so far Google Docs as a wiki service is treating me well. Do you use it?