1. Find a PhD

FindaPhd is the lucky place where you find fellow geeks and nerds, a pretty busy Postgraduate Forum provides advices and opinions on your queries about research life and how to find funds, scholarships. Upon the success of this site, two new sites FindaMasters and FindaPostDoc have been started and serving the student researchers actively busy exchange of advice and opinion on PhD life.

2. Google Book Search

You know Google book search exists, but have you tried citing from those books. Often, I had to produce a write-up, essay or the last-minute paper for a conference. When I dotn have enough time to pull out a strong reference from books, I issue a Google book search, up comes the results from book with snippets view showing paragraphs and texts that I were exactly looking for. I paraphrase them and correctly reference them. Neat hack.

3. Book Finder

If you are looking for any kind of book, whether it is rare or out-of-print, specific edition – You will find it at Bookfinder. Over 125 millions book titles to search, you can actually buy new and old-books from this site. They achieve by doing a search through every major catalog available online.

4. Free Note-taking

Mynoteit is a web service that you need to manage all writing works at uni. With mynoteit, you can upload office documents, scanned notes and audio lectures at one place. Yuo can access them at will with even with your mobile.You can join groups of students who are taking the similar subject all over the world. You can bookmark your assignment dates, deadlines at one place.

5. Re”Search Engine”

Scirus is a popular search engine among research community. Scirus searches for scientific information with its comprehensive trusted network of article bases like Science Direct, PubMed and other journal databases. The results are highly relevant and you can choose the keywords used by authors to search for relevant scientific domain. You get the results in three categories, journal results, preferred web results and web results. If you try Scirus once, you will stick to it. It saved me lot of my research time.

6. Digital Theses Networks

Australia is probably, the only country where every research student is asked to deposit a digital copy of their theses to a national database for a common cause. The Australasian Digital Theses Program is very popular among the researchers as every university in Australia is participating in it. A similar initiative is being carried out at the international level, which is PhDData.org – a 5 year old program which aims to collect the research theses from the universities around the world. There is also another initiative named “Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations” that looks promising as well.

7. Bibliography made easy

It’s a pain to follow the style guide of various journal styles when you are writing a paper. Tools such as EndNote help in maintaining your database of references. If you are looking for an online tool, then Ottobib is a really useful. You can store, organize your references, and Ottobib will format it to a style when you need. There is another web service that does a similar job , which is Easybib.

8. Job portals for researchers

Monster has a special site Phd jobs that lists research oriented jobs. There are sites where you can find Policy jobs, Political jobs, Ethical jobs, Market Research jobs, Museum jobs, PostDoc jobs, Law jobs and Human Rights jobs. All these sites provide world-wide listings of opportunities specific to researchers.

9. Docs, Spreadsheets and Presentations

The benefits of Google Docs are obvious, you can maintain your documents and edit on the run. Particularly useful when you are traveling for field visits and you do not have access to your favourite Desktop Office applications. I used to upload a copy of my thesis chapters in Google Docs and share it with my supervisor. He would comment and add suggestions. If you are thinking of developing a document with your peer researchers – across boundaries, you have to use this. No more copying drafts, final versions and confusions on which one is what. With the added spreadsheets and presentations, it is a cool collection of tools for storing documents on the move.

10. List Sharing

Tadalist is about having a to-do list on the web. You can share between your supervisors to track your progress and communicate with your fellow researchers to meet the research deadlines or to organise a holiday.

11. Phd Comics

We are researchers, so what. We need fun, right? I have seen no other humour site that caters exclusive to researchers and PhD students life. PhDComics is awesome because, the site was started by a student and has plenty of cartoon strips on any conceivable aspect of Phd life.

12. Tracks almost everything

An easy way to track all the favourite blogs / research web sites in my subject is to use Google Reader. I use the ‘Star’ function to mark the essential posts, and use them later. A thousand eyes are looking for me and blogging things that are important and I follow them at one place with my reader. Great help – is it not?

13. Research Channel

Research channel is a site that offers videos on various research topics. Research Channel functions as a nonprofit media company with a mission to connect the world research community with latest developments, insights and discoveries across the globe. Anyone can watch the videos for free. But, if you are a researcher or research organisation who wish to contribute video content, you have to apply for a membership to the research channel. All the video submissions are strictly moderated.

14. Wikipedia

Often, the power of Wikipedia is grossly under-rated by the research people, who dismiss it based on the credibility. Well, that is an acceptable fact but from Wikipedia, you will get to know about a human view of a topic. You may get to know the latest happenings or the first hand information on a cutting-edge technology in your field (equivalent of gossips in the film industry).

15. MIT Web

Massachusetts institute of technology maintains a comprehensive web portal on the current research happenings at MIT and covers news and research events that affect humanity. The research covers any conceivable topic under various categories .

16. Eduforge – Free software for education

Just what Sourcefourge did for a programming and application development, eduforge does it for research community. It provides a free, open access to share ideas, form collaborative research groups, content and software development to solve specific research problems.

17. SuTree – Watch and learn

SuTree is a YouTube stye video site for Do-It-Yourself projects. You can watch videos and learn rather than reading plain texts and procedures. You can learn something new, every day. SuTree does not host your videos, users host them on youtube or google videos and provide a link and embed the videos here. These videos are voted by the community and the editors hand-pick them and monitor to keep the scum out of the site.

18. Wridea – Free ideas

Wridea is the place where ideas get into shape. You can record your ideas, browse others’ ideas, rate them, improve them and what not. The design and performance of the site is awesome and you can create unlimited pages for free. Liberate your ideas and watch them grow.

19. World Lecture Hall

World Lecture Hall is the place where you can find course materials developed by the teaching faculty around the world in almost any language. Some courses are only available online, but most of them can be downloaded for offline use. It is a great collection of lectures – a good bookmark.

Academic Materials can also be found at this blog post – 134 free academic podcasts organised by topics.

20. University Channel

University Channel is another directory of lectures (videos, audio and text presentations) developed and hosted by Princeton university. it not only lists the academic lectures and presentations, but also some of the key public affairs lectures, panel discussions and events from the best industrial conferences and academic institutions all over the world.

21. Backpackit- organize your life

You have to experience Backpackit to believe it – this site will be tremendously helpful for keeping track of your research developments. You can track your tasks, references (who said what – over phone / email), appointments, action items etc. If you are looking for an efficient organizing tool, this is the one for you.

22. FreeMind – Free mind maps

If you are looking for a tool to create and organize your thoughts and ideas, mind maps are the best way. With freemind – a java based open source program, you can develop complex yet, easy to organize mindmaps.

23. Free Data and Texts

Freelunch.com – Free economic data for you to download
Geographic Data – Free geographic data (worldwide)
World Bank Economy – Data collected and organised by the World Bank
Project Gutenburg – Free literature (almost any subject)
Bibliomania – free literature online
Literature collection – free literature
Citeseer – Massive resource for papers related to Computer Science.
Algorithms Base – Over 250 algorithms at one place
Tree of Life – Large Biology project that aims to organize the evolution of life.

24. Free Newspaper Archive

Paper of Record is the largest newspaper archive on the web. You can get snapshots of news articles from leading newspapers of the world from pre-1600 era to the current date. You can search through the archive and download the clips as images (gif). You have a quota of 250 mb every day.

25. Citations Database

Refbase is the place where people are sharing their citations and organising them at one place. You can download a copy of the refbase on your PC and connect to the server periodically to update them. Also try CiteSeer for searching through millions of citations.

Bonus Resources:

1. Find quotations

With ThinkExist, you can find a nice quotes for your thesis and papers. The quote is accompanied by the essential information about the author/speaker which will be useful to reference.

2. Research webpages

Research pages at Major companies who likes to share their ongoing developments and trials:

Google Research Blog
Research at Philips
Sun Research
Microsoft Research
IBM Research centre
Yahoo Research Labs
Honda Research
GE Global Research
General Motors Collaborative research centre
Sports Research Centre, Canada

3. All Biographies

Find anyone’s biography here – you can search by a keyword, birth date or place of birth.

Did I miss anything? Which sites are useful for conducting researches?

There are many ways and resources through which one can get information about different online courses. There is lot of material available about 642-503 courses on Google. One can also check Wikipedia for PMI-001 course information. If one is looking for hardcopy or soft copy of 642-825 courses then one can get it on book finder website. Free material of 642-901 courses is also available on free note-taking site. People who are interested in smart business communication systems 650-178 course then they can get interactive test guides on Eduforge – Free software for education site. The world lecture hall site can give free lectures of different course like 70-272 and so on. If you are interested in 70-270 course then its helping guide can easily be searched on yahoo. So there are so any sites from where one can get many helping guide for these courses and thus make exams easy to pass.

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There are 414 screenshots in the flickr set and it is continuously growing in numbers.

Click on the image to start the slideshow.

Click on the “Options” link in the right-bottom corner to show the title and description. The description contains the actual link to every website.

Pretty, pretty – is it not?

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It would be lovely if you create a podcast blog, but there is a free web service available that allows you to convert your blog posts into audio content directly. When you sign up with Odiogo , your readers will see a podcast option, something like ‘Listen to this post’, below every blog post.

When they click on the link, they can listen to your blog post. Readers can subscribe from their iPhone as well. No software install is necessary.

It is based on a similar feature ‘Read the document aloud!’ – as seen on the Acrobat Reader.

Why wait, reach more audience. For Free.

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How do you get hold of such free schwags. If you happen to visit the web conferences, tech fests and seminars, you will get a loads of such stuff.

If not, you can email them using their contact page and ask them. Not all the web companies encourage the users openly as the following few.

Flickr Schwags: FREE
For example, Flickr says in its blog page that if you need stickers, buttons, balloons – you could send an email to them. I did and got a pack of goodies which are really cool.

“When you are organising a flickr meer, if you let us know in addition to adding your event to the Upcoming Flickr group — we can send you some Flickr schwag: stickers, buttons and name tags. Please include your postal address and let us know as soon as you can, ideally, at least a month before the event.” – Flickr blog

Visit http://www.flickr.com/help/contact to let them know you want some flickr goodies. Within few weeks, the parcel should arrive you.

Feedburner Stickers: FREE

Taking a cue from Flickr, now Feedburner provides stickers, but you need to send them some pre-paid, self-addressed envelopes to their address.

Read this announcement on the Feedburner official blog.

Startup Schwag:
There is much an easy way, if you can shell some out some money ($25-$30), startupschwag will collect all such cool schwags (with one T-shirt guaranteed) every month to your address.

There was a startup named ValleySchwag which got shut down earlier because, they could not cope with the users demand. Now, the home page link leads to a 404 page.

Other FREE Stickers:

You can get a free 2007 Ferrari Stickers given away by Shell.

Have you requested such goodies from companies? Whats your experience?

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No, they are not the BIG Pro, A-list bloggers. They are like you and me, our nice, friendly next-door-bloggers, they often produce a stunning post that you wish you had written. Here’s a collection of such 25 top blog posts in five categories that are most-read by their readers. We can all learn something from each of these posts.

1. Utility Posts: You post something useful for everyone (blogger), if your post is convincing, readers will celebrate it. Do not think any topic is known to everyone. There are billions of people who still wants to know what a blog is. Keep your language simple, show them in a clear, concise steps.

Top 5 Steps for Choosing a Blog Theme – Meg is renowned for posting such easy-to-understand, jargon-free, illustrative articles at her blog Dipping into the Blog Pond. I would suggest her to make a “popular page” showing such posts.

Reframing: The sweetest idea for content ideas – Andrew addressed a most pressing issue faced by every blogger in this post. How do we develop ideas for blog posts, to create unique yet, special content which no one else can do.

Should you eat that – Tara, a nutrition student publishes the recipes she tries and the tips on our dietary, eating habits. The blog title Should you eat that reflects the utility for you – to help you to choose your food wisely. If you are looking for recipes, you should bookmark the blog Cook almost anything.

How To Replace the Color Wheel in Your Samsung DLP Television and Save $400 – You don’t need to go looking for such Do-IT-Yourself posts somewhere. Write your own experience how you overcome an issue, a tip that you have developed to solve a problem. That’s all the world is looking for – write from your own experience. This post published by Scott received 594 comments and has excellent photographs to illustrate every step he talks about.

How I stopped a bandwidth thief – Swollen pickles wrote a series of excellent posts to stop a person who stole the bandwidth by direct hot-linking of images. It teaches a lesson to the evil-doers and to you on how to handle if you are in such situation.

2. Surprise Posts: Surprise posts grab your attention at once. You know you want to click and see what’s in there (they are referred as click-baits). You can make that happen with catchy, cheeky titles or opening sentences.

Rate My Ass – The title itself surprises you to know the content.

Amazing Upside Down House – The weird stories such as these are powerful crowd pullers.

Avoid Risk, Sure. Then Die! – Richard wrote a book, “Punk Marketing“, which is based on the mantra that, if you are afraid of risks, then you sure, are ready to die.

And now for an important announcement from the Prime Minister – Lizbee’s picture blog post has a real signature of the Prime Minister of Australia in it.

Australia’s Bizarre Sporting Fortunes – Knowing most of Australians love sports and like reading about them, Mark would never need another better topic other than this.

3. Popular-by-Demand Posts: Every one wants to know your success story (even if there is a pun) or a miserable failure and wants to get inspired or get a good laugh. These posts are always popular among readers, if only you do not disappoint them in delivery.

Snoskred made 5 million dollars online – How much money you could have made if the “spam marketers” were really very generous in their dealings? On a serious note, this post is an eye-opener.

How to grow your blog by over 2000 per cent in one month! – If you are a blogger, you know what it means to grow by 200%, let alone adding another 1800%. Alister who calls himself as “Blogologist” (Did I say that correctly?), posts the techniques he used to get more readership, more links and more comments.

13 signs that someone you know may have an eating disorder – A list of any sort is sure enough to attract your readers. Aussie mum posts a list of signs to check if you or any one you know might have an eating disorder.

Vinyl Beauties post series from Vanessa shows the vintage collection of vinyl records (music album) she presents the cover images in the series. Eye-catching.

How to Turn 300 Contacts Into 3.3 Million: My LinkedIn Network – Des at Thinking Home business talked on how you could develop your social network at a phenomenal rate.

4. Breezy Posts: They are lengthier but compelling enough to keep your attention till the very end of the post. A travel diary, a personal experience, book / restaurant review or just tips from your own life would form this category.

Relaxing weekend ingredients – Jaycee lists the essential ingredients for a successful, soothing weekend at her blog Semantically Driven.

How To Do A Mini Debrief With Traumatized Friends – Megan talks about dealing with a tough situation where most of us would keep silent.

Adelaide to Darwin Backpacking Road Trip Overview – Neerav often writes about his trips (backpackers reviews, travel tips) around Australia (I would like to travel around Australia as well). His travel diary is fascinating as well as informative.

B is for Boracay -It’s all about fantastic beach and real good time!

Personal post about Long Distance Relationships – A short post on her thoughts but I liked it instantly.

5. Analytical Posts: Start with a burning question and provide convincing arguments and you get a successful blog post. You can compare two services or even produce a list of ten best things.

Why Do Blogs Fail? – Dan at The Wrong Advices analyses the reasons behind why bloggers loose interest and close their blogs one-fine-day.

Why Most People Fail at AdSense – Lisa tells her ‘Hodgepodge theory’ on Adsense.

Why StumbleUpon is a better than Digg for promoting your blog posts – This is one of my favourite post where I compared at the stickiness of readers visiting from two giant social network sites.

Why Is Firefox Still Way Behind Internet Explorer? – Everyone hates George Bush. Any Australian whom I speak to hates John Howard. But, they get elected all the time. Everyone seems to love Firefox, but? I would recommend a serious discussion such as this one would be open to your readers. You can ask your readers to tell their reasons then, you can write a round-up of posts.

NO WATER, NO FUTURE AUSTRALIA – Jules shares her wise words on the Melbourne Water’s ‘Your water, Your future’ (now changed as Our water, our future) campaign and tips on changing the strategy to voluntarily involve people in environmental activism. Here’s Your water, your say group.

25 posts from 25 bloggers, now you know why the readers liked them all. Now is the time for you to speak, what type of blog posts you enjoy writing and why? Comment on.

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Before we begin some basic video tutorial links. Tips on using Windows Movie Maker for editing movies.

Windows Movie Maker Video Editing Tutorial

How To Make Videos Using MSPaint and Windows Movie Maker

YouTube Video Tutorial #2 – Windows Movie Maker tips

1. Time lapse video
Time lapse videos are easy to make – you keep your camera mounted on a place (a street corner or at your office) and start recording. After certain duration, stop recording and bring to the editing room. In your favourite video editing software, fast-forward the video to at least 100 times fast. Then add a background score, thats it.

How do I make a time lapse video – A good tutorial for starters.

Sample videos:
All 4 seasons of an year at one place – This video is amazing – seasons change right before your eyes within seconds.

Time lapse street race with Toy cars – You can even shoot a video in your bedroom.

2. Interviewing someone
Prepare 10 questions to interview someone (if the person is a girl, you will get lot of views), and do a timed 1-minute interview. You can make the questions such that the respondent can answer with just a “Yes” or “No”. Or ask a question to many people, say, ‘Who would you like to see as the next president of USA?’ – ask people answer this question with videos (video replies).

Sample videos:
Interview with PARIS HILTON (That’s how my friend calls herself)

A student interviews his teacher

3. Provide your own tips
Start recording your camera and go in front and give some tips to the world. Yes, you can provide funny tips on a specific area of your expertise. Choose a wild topic such as, “10 ways to save yourself when a hungry Rhinoceros chases you”, “Things to do when you are stuck in 10,000 BC”, “10 things that you want to know about Australia” or “Tips for organizing a bachelor party”. Be creative and think of some wild topic, it should inspire your viewers to post replies and comments.

Sample videos:
Teen Tips: How To Buy Alcohol – If you are under 18, how do you buy alcohol. Here’s how.

Trick Tips: How to Look Like a Good Skater – when you are, actually, NOT.

4. Playing with texts
Use MS powerpoint slides to make compelling statements. Print them and show them in front of the camera and remove one page at a time (give enough time to readers to read the print), end with a final punch line. Add background music to the video and upload it.

Sample videos:
I’m a PayPerPost Blogger – Simple printed slides make a movie

Playing with texts – A cute, 30 sec animation done by a student

5. Screen capture your Desktop activities
Install good screen capture software, first. Start the screen capture software to record any screen activities you do on your PC. Paint a drawing or doodle in Photoshop. Or just simply browse as you normally do. Or just type something – a letter, or a blog post. Stop the screen capture recording, edit the movie (use fast-forward technique) and add some peppy music as the background score. That’s it you have made a very cool movie for Youtube.

Sample videos:
A month in the life of geek desktop – Just snapshots of desktop for a month, then a creative movie.

Latest Desktop Wars – If you have not heard this animation series, it is worth a watch.

6. Make an Advert
Shoot an advert or a television commercial for McDonalds, KFC or for the poor Microsoft. Write your own script, draw a storyboard – use existing videos and your own voice and music. When you are making and advert on a well-known global brand, you are bound to get lot of viewers (and criticisms). Who knows, the MNCs would make a way to your door to sign you up (ok, I was kidding!).

Sample videos:
McDonalds ad – Done by students as a school project

Coca Cola Commercial – Watch this 30 second animation

7. Dub for someone
Get some videos where political leaders make a speech or famous celebrity giving an interview to someone. Now, strip off the celebrity speaker’s voice (use volume mute in your video editing software) and add your own voice and a funny one-line. Mix different questions and use some funny one-liners from stripped from old James Bond movies.

Sample videos:
LOL Bush & Condi Comedy Spoof - Who is the president of China? Very funny.

Bill Gates is retiring – From a TV show, but it can inspire you.

What are you waiting for? Go out there, shoot some movies and upload them in YouTube.

Got any idea? Share it with us!

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Google reader allows you to make certain things public (the feeds that you can share with others), and google offers those rss items on a public page as this one, Thiru’s shared items (sorry, you are not supposed to monetize those feeds, ok?

Google can build a social network around such shared RSS feeds by us and they can put together a Digg like site. They have not done it yet. Here’s where Feedrer is coming in.

Feedrer is a social network where you can add friends, and see what others are reading currently. Now, you can get a list of mini-feeds that your friends have subscribed. If you like a friend’s feed then, you can subscribe to them with a click.

Feedrer is a start-up and they are working on the site to add more features. What they can do is to add a front page showing, “most liked feeds”, “most read feeds” to use the wisdom of the crowd to bring the best feeds on top.

What are the benefits of joining Feedrer?
If you are looking to publicize your blog’s RSS feed, or find new readers for your blog then, these tips are for you.

1) If you have a blog, then you can get a RSS feed at the free Feedburner service (Google’s) and register it with feedrer. Make friends at feedrer, generously subscribe to their feeds. Since the people in the community are already loving RSS feeds, they would subscribe to your RSS feeds. The feeds are mini-feeds, so, readers need to visit your blog (more page visits) to read them. So, you win all the way.

2) One of my SEO friend at gridpro tipped me that every links from feedrer is considered by search engines as Google /Yahoo as one way, inbound web links. So, if you have 10 friends subscribing to your blog’s feed, you are going to get 10 links. When you pubish 10 posts , the links are going to be 10 by 10 = 100. Can’t get my head around this, I have to confirm this myself.

Update: To gain access to Feedrer (currenty in beta), you need to enter an invitation code “INVITEME” at the registration form (Thanks Anand, for pointing me). Enjoy!

There you go, another start up, social network, web 2.0.

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The footer now contains the links to Orkut blog, Help forums, and the ways to interact with Orkut management.

The Friends page looks very pleasing to eyes.

Orkut releases the new design in phases, some may get their home page upgraded to new design where as others may need to wait for few more days.

Do you like the new design?

The official press post here:
orkut Blog: Redesign Preview: It’s the little things…

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Now, there is a ready-to-use solution in our hands. Daniel Milner’s free program "Net Profiles" (link via Amit of Digital Inspiration) solves this problem of swtiching between different networks.

This free program when installed on your laptop automatically detects the wirless network (office or home), and changes the corresponding settings. You need not worry about remembering connection settings, or use different browsers for different networks.

Additional features include,

You can have different network drives for each profile.

You can have a different "default printer".

Unique, home pages, desktop profiles for each network.

You can download Net Profiles. Thanks Daniel, for sharing this program for FREE.

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