Danny Zacharias's Wired Scholar

In the new SBL Forum for May, published today, Danny Zacharias has an excellent article worthy of special mention:

The Wired Scholar: Five Free Tools You May Not Know About
Danny Zacharias

Four out of the five are Google tools and Googleholics like me will already be familiar with these and using them every day. But even there, there are some extras you might not know about. For example, under the Google Books heading, Danny writes:

I currently know of two "under construction" web pages dedicated to pointing out biblical studies works that are freely available, mostly from Google Books. The first is maintained by Mischa Hooker from the University of Memphis. The links to J. P. Migne's collection are found on this first list. The second is by Bob Buller, with some collaborative efforts on my part as well. We welcome other collaborators who wish to help us maintain this list.

Those lists are both hugely helpful.

I would add a couple of quick additional advantages to the resources discussed by Danny:

(1) Back-up: In my experience (and this is the topic for another post one of these days), people only take backing up data seriously once they have had a disaster. A stolen laptop, a major computer crash, and then people begin to realize that they should have been backing up all along. One of the advantages of using Google Docs, Google Notebook and so on, and let's throw in GMail and Google Calendar, is that they automatically back up and store your data on the net.

(2) iGoogle: If you use iGoogle, customizing your homepage with all sorts of gadgets and widgets, you can throw in the Google Notebook and the Google Docs, as well as GMail, your Google Reader, your Google Calendar and so on. That makes it very straightforward for doing your research on the road, or on multiple computers.