Organizing What You Find - Information Trapping: Real-Time Research on the Web - page 272

of events. With a little more text formatting you can e-mail other people
reminders of events, and actually get reminders on your cell phone.
OnlineHomeBase is not the ideal solution if you're a) married to Opera or
another more obscure browser; b) needing a start-to-inish infrastructure
for keeping your information and developing your reports; or c) concerned
about having to do a little text-formatting geekery. But if you're in a small
group of people and you want a basic tool for collaboration, and a tool
would come in handy, this is useful. And it's very inexpensive. Note that the
service does include only 10MB of online storage, which nowadays is pretty
paltry. Don't choose this service if you're going to upload a lot of graphics
and iles that'll eat up that space!
TWiki
No no, not the little robot from Buck Rogers. TWiki (twiki.org) is a wiki devel-
oped for sharing information between a group of people across an enterprise.
As an information-organizing solution, this is probably the largest and
most complex thing I'm going to mention in this chapter. It's actually a free,
open source sotware solution that's being used on many corporate sites
(the Web site lists a variety of clients that use it, including Yahoo, Motorola,
and Disney. For obvious reasons most of these sites use TWiki behind a
corporate irewall). Since the whole point of a wiki is that it's editable by any
member of a team that's using it, this is great when you have large groups of
people working together on an information-gathering project.
Furthermore, TWiki has been extended by a large set of plug-ins, including a
calendar and access to databases and RSS feeds. While this sotware is free, it
will require a huge investment in time and training to make the most of it for
a project. If you need an enterprise-size solution for your information gath-
ering or organizing, I urge you to try TWiki. Independent researchers and
those working in small groups in the same place will likely ind it overkill.
Backlip
Backlip (backlip.com) is another information manager that's more about
gathering and managing pages than it is about gathering and managing
small bits of information. Like many of the other resources mentioned in
this topic, it's a free service. Unlike some of the other resources mentioned
in this topic, it's not designed to share bookmarks. Backlip bookmarks are