October 30, 2005
Surfulater: product testing in progress
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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.
Stumble it!
Filed under: miscellaneous
One Response to “Surfulater: product testing in progress”
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October 31st, 2005 at 5:46 pm
Hi Lee,
Thanks for offering to take Surfulater for a spin and of course for this post.
We get bombarded by information these days and trying to keep track of it all, especially all the great stuff on the Web is indeed a challenge.
Surfulater’s role is to be a simple and effective tool to save anything you see on the Web, annotate and edit your content, add value by linking related content together and organize it in ways meaningful to you. There is also full text search, so you can find information in a snap.
Our customers love it and hopefully you will is well. Shameless plug over.
I’ve sent you some screen shots and will work on getting a promotional image together.