After reading this post about merging bibTeX files, it reminded me of a program I used in the writing of my dissertation. The program, cb2Bib, is a “free, open source, and multiplatform application for rapidly extracting unformatted, or unstandardized bibliographic references from email alerts, journal Web pages, and PDF files.” This program in addition to an institutional subscription to statindex.org helped tremendously in quickly incorporating references.

Google wave is an in-development project that blurs the distinction between email, instant messaging, blogs, etc. It is meant as an online communication and collaboration tool. To incorporate this technology in the way we do work, it would great if the tool allowed users to mark up pdfs or images. I am only half-way through the video so perhaps it already does.