I love findind new tools and webservices. I came across http://en.eyeplorer.com yesterday and thought that I would do a quick review
What is it
EyePlorer visually displays related facts about a searched topic , and it categories the relationships of those facts to that searched topic. It also allows you to drag and drop facts on to a notepad which then can be emailed or copied to your machines clipboard ready to paste into an application.
Example
I type in “Jersey”, (a place I use to live, small island of the north cost of France, not New Jersey), into the center of the wheel as soon as I hit enter it goes off and populated the wheel with related facts to the searched phrase “Jersey”. Imagine a brainstorming or spider document. It did a pretty good job. It slit the related facts into the following categories; Place, Time, Organism, Organisation, Person, Society, Science and Technology. This changes depending on your search-phrase and also how far you are “zoomed” in. You can also drill down into these categories further. The bigger/more common, the fact the bigger it’s text and dot. Click on a fact and a popup window displays the fact which can then be copied to the notepad.
A picture speak a thousand words so take a look below.
What I liked
· Interesting and logical way to research, better than just reading through long Wiki documents
· Clear interface, drag and dropped worked well.
· Ability to gather faces about a topic in one place
· Linking of facts worked well
· You can embed your search into a webpage
· The way you gain knowledge very quickly and centrally
What I didn’t like
· The facts are only, (I think) from Wiki, (not necessarily bad). Although when you click on a fact you do get three other tabs; Websearch, Images and Twitter. But you are unable to drag and drop from these tabs onto the notepad which is the main thing which turned me of, but I can understand this from either a licensing or techy point of view.
· The notepad is limited. It would be nice to be able to print straight from the notepad with maybe a few other export options.
Conclusion
For me personally I don’t think that I would use this for research too much, mainly due to wanting the ability to capture/store “everything” so I’ll stick to Evernote. But for a quick starter to get ideas for research project it will be useful. I could see it being a great tool for students doing home work. Or maybe in a team meeting looking up facts/ideas on a given subject.
Links
· http://www.facebook.com/eyePlorer
