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The previous edition of this column described a set of tools meant for capturing screenshots and assembling them into a video movie with a voice over.

Though such tools are good for creating demo videos, they become insufficient when the problem requires detailed explanation of each of the steps.

For instance, if you need to create an instructional video that explains how to install Linux as your machine’s second OS, a tool such as Camstudio (discussed last week), though a powerful product, could turn out to be not suited for this specific purpose.

In this case we require a tool that helps us easily create a narrative slideshow, explaining each step (like partitioning/formatting the disk, loading the OS, configuring it etc) with necessary annotations, highlighting, voice-over and so on. The free software, QlipBoard ( http://www.qlipmedia.com /), is one such tool worth a try.

QlipBoard lets you capture screenshots from any software loaded on your machine. The advantage of QlipBoard is that it plants a ‘Q’ icon (red Q on a white background) on all active applications.

This icon enables you to capture with ease the image of an application running on your machine.

To capture the screen image of an application, click its ‘Q’ icon, select the area to be captured, and then click the ‘Camera’ icon. You will now find the thumbnail of the screen image on the QlipBoard.

You can capture any number of frames from multiple applications. Besides capturing screenshots, QlipBoard lets you import picture files (now only .jpeg files) as well.

After capturing a screen shot, you can draw or highlight it and add text. And by clicking the ‘Record’ button one can even add voice to the frame.

Also, if you add text or annotate/highlight any part of the frame with the recording option on, you can bring animation effects to the Qlippit.

Once done with the content generation task, you can save it as a video file in the .WMV format or send it as an email to clients/friends.

To send the Qlippit as an email, click on the ‘Share’ button. Now, the file gets uploaded on to the QlipBoard’s server and a link to it will be sent to your recipient. The recipient can view it on her browser.

If you want to show a friend how to do a specific task, just generate a ‘how to’ Qlippit and send it to him. Or, if you want to create a multimedia CV, QlipBoard could turn out to be a wonderful tool.

In fact, this provides an opportunity to show your creative skills to the potential employer.

And if you are a personnel manager, you can use this software to generate a multimedia job description.

Citation summary (with information such as the number of citations per paper, number of citations per author and so on) is a valuable resource for an academician/researcher.

As we already know, GoogleScholar (http://scholar.google.com/), the search engine for academic resources, displays citation data along with the results. The free tool ‘Publish or Perish,’ brought to the notice of this author by Prof. S. Neelakantan from Chennai, uses the citation data available on GoogleScholar to generate citation statistics. For instance, to study the ‘Author’ impact, by entering the name of author on the input box you can obtain information such as the number of papers by this author, ‘number of citations,’ ‘number of citations per year’ and so on. Check out: http://www.harzing.com/ resources.htm#/pop.htm.

Apart from the mainstream browsers (such as IE, Firefox etc), there are several others. Maxthon (http://maxthon.com) is one such browser stumbled on by this author recently. This IE-based browser provides almost all the facilities generally available on modern browsers (tabbed browsing, a built-in newsreader, pop-up blocker, integrated search box and the like). Maxthon has certain other advantages as well.

For instance, the ‘Web Sniffer’ facility lets you obtain the real address of a video file posted on video hosting services such as YouTube. Mouse gestures ( http://www.hindu.com/biz/2003/12/15/stories/200312150025 1600.htm), URL alias (facility to give shortcuts to URLs) and a screen capture tool are some other useful features of this free browser worth a mention.

Blogger (Blogger.com) is a well-known blog hosting service used by tens of thousands of bloggers. When one hosts a blog on this service, generally, a profile page (with details such as the author’s location, interests and so on) is also entered. Blogger lets you use this profile data to access blogs with common profile information (for example, all blogs located in India or all blogs from the ‘Education’ industry). To test this feature, access your profile, click on the ‘location’ link and find other bloggers from your location. Likewise, you can obtain the list of other bloggers from the same industry, occupation etc.

For more details: http://buzz.blogger.com/2007 /08/browse-profiles-find-new- blogs-to-read.html.

As regular readers of this column would already know, blog directories such as Technorati helps us easily filter/find relevant blogs from the ever growing blogosphere. The latest blog search engine encountered by this author is Blogcatalog (http://www. blogcatalog.com/).

Unlike, Technorati and other similar blog directories, Blogcatalog is projected as a social blog directory, where registered users are allowed to submit blogs and express their opinion on a blog by commenting on it.

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