Marsco Information & Research

Download the Congoo toolbar and you can access web content that you normally have to pay for, such as FT.com.  Anyone used it?

Via Peter Scott, been sitting in my Bloglines for several months…

Brilliant!  Librarian In Black has linked to I want a Freeware Utility to…450+ common problems solved.  Find spyware on your PC, chat, burn CDs, add widgets to your site, budget, ooh, all sorts!  Great resource.

As a public librarian I had a lot of computer documents to keep track of.  Disks didn’t allow much storage and we weren’t given pen drives (much cheaper now).  I tried using Yahoo Briefcase for a while but something went very wrong and I lost some work.  After that I took to just emailing myself stuff (not the greatest system when your network was prone to crashing, gosh I’m glad I got myself a new job!).

Online storage sites are becoming much more popular and if I was in the same position now I’d probably give one of the a go.  Whilst tidying up my Bloglines saved posts, I found one about Orbitfiles (thanks to I want to) and it looks pretty good.

The free account gets you 1000MB of storage and you can use it for backing up and sharing files as well.  There is also a tool you can download that will automatically upload and therefore back up your files for you.

Peter Scott reports that the latest version of Koha has been released.  What’s Koha?  Koha is what I wish I had known about several years ago, it’s a free, open source library management system.  I don’t know much about it but from what I’ve seen it’s pretty impressive and should definitely be looked at if you need an LMS and are on a tight budget - especially if you are seriously considering using Access!  As I did…

Lazybase allows you to create a database online that can be accessed and edited by whoever you choose.  Because it’s online, this could be anyone from anywhere in the world.  Don’t expect anything on the scale of Access, but it looks to be a simple utility for contacts, books etc.

Via I want to.

Something that I've seen various bloggers asking.  I instantly found a use for Google Spreadsheets as I don't have Excel on my home PC and have to keep a personal budget spreadsheet at work.  On a weekend I have to try and remember how much I've spent so I can enter it in on Monday to check I'm not spending too much (not always achieved if you're thinking this sounds too anal!).

Now I can keep my budget online and update it anywhere.  It's something very simple but I'm impressed.

I've had this article sitting around for over a month, but Phil Bradley posted about the Web 2.0 Awards.  Web 2.0 seems to be everywhere with everyone claiming they have a brilliant new application -it's hard to keep up!

Having a look through the winners and honourable mentions gives you an idea of what's out there, although you could be on this site all day!  

What applications do I use?  I'd be lost without Bloglines, my personal blog is signed up with Technorati (time to get this one up too), Flickr to organise my photos, del.icio.us for keeping track of all the good things on the web, Blink for keeping track of business sites on the web, I keep up to date with news affecting my work with a personalised Google page…

(My other half has just informed me of an interesting BBC news article on the Web 2.0 revolution, check it out.)

Just found out, thanks to blogher, that there is an online conference at Tech Soup on the use of social networking applications in non-profit organisations. It's home is the US so may be some time differences, but get on over there if you want to know more.

So glad this kind of thing is online then more of us can take part.

Often you hear that you can find a program to do just about anything on your computer for free, which is possibly true, but how good is the quality? Where do you go to find freeware? Is it really free? Lifehacker have posted about a great directory of freeware so now we know where our first port of call should be. Scroll right down to the bottom and there are some useful 'how to's as well.

I've had this bookmarked for a few weeks now, meaning to post about it here. Gabbly is a web application that allows you to chat to someone over the web, about a particular website. If you ever need to guide someone through a website, or want to do some surfing with other people, Gabbly could be the tool for you. When I was a public librarian my colleagues and I were based in different libraries throughout Leeds and trying to help someone with a website when you can't see what they're doing is very hard.

This may also be useful for parents just getting into using the net who keep calling up for your help! (Mine are past that now…)

Via Lifehacker.