Web Worker Daily

For years, I’ve been looking for a serious online research tool that would let me not just add to the ratnest of bookmarks and “favorites” I have, but really control, annotate, correlate, tag and source online material. Last week, as I was gearing up to join WWD, I found an awesomely deep, free, open source and innovative tool in the form of a super-stable FireFox 2.0 extension: Zotero.

Zotero is a brainchild of the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, well funded thanks to several grants, including $1.2 million from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The money shows – Zotero is as slick as any commercial product, the documentation is deep and tasty with lots of nicely done screencasts and the developer info is some of the best Open Source project docs I’ve seen. Zotero has already gotten rave reviews in the academic community, with now 600,000 active users.

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