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.

Blogroll Clips

As I mentioned earlier, I have recently started using Google Reader. One of its nice features is that it provides a live "clip" service on your website and I have added one here, to the left of the screen. It picks up the latest additions to items on my blogroll, and flags them up for the reader. Or, for a fuller version you can follow the Read More link at the bottom of the clip box, or go to this link:

Blogroll Via Mark

Ultimately, I will probably phase out my older, more static Blogroll list, which is currently served via Bloglines.

Switch to the new blogger and thoughts on Google Reader

If you had dozens of posts from this blog appear in your reader this morning, it is because I've just made the switch to the new blogger. I tried to switch a month or two ago but it wouldn't let me because my archive was too massive, and hosted off-site. But now it's allowing me to make the switch and I have done so. One of the features of the new blogger is that it enables labels, at last, so they will be a feature from now on. I will not, however, be adding labels retrospectively to old posts, though, not least since there are well over 2,000 of them.

I am also experimenting with the new Google Reader and I am enjoying it a good deal and it is on the road to persuading me to abandon Bloglines, especially as it turned out to be very easy to export all my feeds from Bloglines to Google. And there are features about Google Reader I like, especially the starring of posts, à la GMail. Since I am a fan of Google applications, and use dozens of them (e.g. Calendar, Docs and Spreadsheets, Notebook), it is probably just a matter of time before I switch fully to Google Reader too. The one thing that is holding me back is that Bloglines renders my blogroll here on this blog very well. As far as I can tell, Google Reader does not have quite the same facility, though it does produce other nice features like clips from my blogroll, which is a lot of fun.