Push the Future

Today is The Return of Super Tuesday, the big primary to see whether we get any closer to knowing which of the Democratic candidates will go up against John McCain in the general election. There are big, exciting, important things happening all over the world as we speak, and analysis I’m eager to share, but what’s really got me going tonight is a new super-slick research tool, Zotero.

Conducting research is a little bit like laying out the patterns of your thought process, in all of its associative glory. For all the research I do, I’d be hard pressed to recreate how I discovered an important idea, innovation or person; mostly it feels like I’m scurrying down rabbit holes without knowing what I’ll find or when I’ll resurface. But now it looks like I’ll be able to capture all my activity in one place with Zotero.

Produced by the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, this tool puts the best of both disciplines together in one sweet online application (but that can be used offline as well). It’s a Firefox extension that lets you drag and drop pages or references, take notes, link to any desktop document, and store related links, PDFs, images and entire web pages all in one place. And ever so considerately, it automatically records and stored citation references of your sources. I’m looking forward to using it, and expect it will become a part of my regular self-management system.

Zotero’s been launched in its 1.0 phase, with expectations for a Zotero server to hit in 2008. This 2.0 application will make digital research collaborative, allowing recommendations and feeds for new resources to be shared. As they say on their site, it’s supposed to be research, not re-search. I call it b-u-tee- ful!