The whole point of a document in Portable Document Format (PDF) is that you’re not supposed to be able to edit it. PDFs were invented by Adobe to solve a common problem in the early days of computerised typesetting: documents would print differently depending on what computer system you were using, what fonts you’d installed, and what type of printer you were sending the job to. To get around this problem, Adobe invented a format that contained an exact representation of how the document would look when printed, with graphics and any unusual fonts embedded inside it. Creating a PDF was supposed to be the final stage before your document went off to print; the ability to keep editing it was sacrificed for verisimilitude. It’s best to think of a PDF as a picture of your document.

These days, more and more people are creating PDFs, and they’ve become the default means for distributing text. It’s always been possible to print a PDF from Word on the Macintosh, and Word 2007 for Windows introduced an add-on that allowed the same thing. So PDFs are everywhere, and itÆs natural enough to want to do things to them. There’s thus a demand for ways to get around Adobe’s locked-down file specification.

Buy Acrobat Pro

Adobe’s free tool for reading PDFs is Acrobat Reader. If you work with PDFs a lot, it’s worthwhile getting the professional version of this. Acrobat Pro allows two main things: minor edits, and annotation. It’s not cheap, though: about NZ$250 at education prices.

Annotation is very handy when editing or commenting on someone else’s manuscript. You can add sticky notes or pop-up comments to the text, highlight or underline it, scribble on it, add call-outs and so forth—more or less the same things an editor would do to a printed manuscript.

The editing tools are intended only for minor edits: the rule of thumb is that you shouldn’t try to make any changes that would cause text to reflow from one line to another. So the Touchup Text tool lets you add or delete a few words, and you can rearrange elements with the Touchup Object tool. Although Adobe strongly suggests you go back to the original document for substantial text changes, this minor editing is enough to correct typos.

Free Alternatives

There are some things it’s not necessary to buy Acrobat Pro for; it’s always worth Googling to see if a free online solution exists. For example, a common task is adding a covering letter to a separately-created grant application, and there are a number of simple Web-based PDF editors to do this, like MergePDF.net. Likewise, if you want some of Acrobat Pro’s annotation tools for free, try Skim (Mac only).

Wikipedia has a reasonable list of PDF editing tools, both installable and Web-based. (Note that one Windows application, PDFCreator, installs annoying malware and should be avoided.)

Going Backwards

In an emergency, it’s possible to convert a PDF back into an editable document. There are numerous online services that will convert a PDF to Word, though they don’t all work very well. I would recommend finding a few via Google and trying them all. If the PDF was created from an electronic document, you can also use the Select tool in Reader or Acrobat Pro to select and copy text into a Word document.

What do you do if you’re starting with a scanned document, though, like most PDFs of older journal articles? A scanned PDF is just a picture of the page, not text. Acrobat Pro might save the day, though: it has Optical Character Recognition software built in, which can work through the scan and interpret letters and words, ending up with a PDF you can select and copy text from. OCR software used to be amazingly expensive, so it’s nice to see it included in Acrobat Pro. You may want to run this on batches of your PDFs; it’ll even reduce the file size.

Check out this ProfHacker post about different ways of annotating and filing PDFs.

Ever emailed a document as an attachment back and forth between people, gradually adding edits and suggestions? This can be a very cumbersome way of collaborating, especially if three or four people are involved. You may even end up with several different semi-edited versions, which have to be painstakingly stitched together and reconciled. Email is not a tool for revision.

There’s a better way: collaboratively editing an online document. The easiest way to do this is with Google Docs. Here’s how.

Google Docs is a free online suite of tools: word processor, spreadsheet, drawing tool, and pseudo-PowerPoint. You need to have a Google account, which you’ll already have if you’re a user of Gmail or any of the other Google tools. Once you’re logged in, from any computer with Web access, you can see and edit all your documents (and if your laptop gets stolen you can at least be sure all your writing has been backed up regularly). There’s even a tool, Google Gears, that enables you to work on documents offline and have them synced back to the Google Docs collection when you find wireless again.

The real power of Google Docs is that you can give other people access to selected documents, simply through an email invitation (they don’t need a Google account). Collaborators can just read the document, or you can give them editing permission and they can add comments or make edits.

All your edits are kept as a revision history, rather like Wikipedia’s, so it’s easy to see who wrote what and when, and you can rewind a set of edits to an earlier version. That means nobody has to be cautious about making changes, as every previous draft is preserved.

Google Docs isn’t as powerful as Microsoft Office, and there are still a few important things missing: for example, the only way to add Zotero references is through a simple drag-and-drop of your bibliography, rather than citing as you write. But features are being added all the time: for example, you can store files of any kind in your Google Docs folder, up to 1 GB, rather than email them to yourself, and lots of additional storage is available pretty cheaply.

For more help on getting started with Google Docs, check out this Profhacker article, and of course the Google Docs help pages.

In 2008, only 5% of the U.S. population was aware of Twitter; today, it’s 87%, about as many as know about Facebook. But far fewer people use Twitter than Facebook, which is a shame, as Twitter has lots of uses, and is not as evil. If you’re interested in getting started with it this Profhacker article is good value. Read it first, then go to Twitter and sign up with a nice short lower-case username. I’ve posted about 1000 tweets over the last year or two (@adzebill) so here’s my advice for what it’s worth.

Following

To get the full effect, try following 50–100 people. That’s enough to get plenty of variety without being completely overwhelming. You don’t have to read every tweet! Look for good retweets from your friends, or suggestions on Follow Friday (the hashtag is #ff). Equal parts colleagues, friends, and random interesting people seems to work well.

What to post

Share something that people might actually be interested in: links to web pages with your commentary, interesting photos you’ve taken, funny observations, and local news like a fire or police emergency. Find a specialised area of interest and post on it regularly; you’ll attract similarly-specialised followers. You’ll need to use a URL-shortening service for your links; I like SnipUrl, because it lets you pick your own keyword to use as the url.

Retweeting

RT preceding a Twitter name means a reposting of someone else’s tweet. This works best if you add a comment of your own; I tend to use square brackets. It’s not a bad idea to leave room in your own tweets for your name and RT, in case someone wants to retweet you. It’s OK to edit a retweet a little to make it fit.

Hashtags

Click on a #hashtag to see all the tweets using it. Hashtags take three forms. They’re fabulous for follow discussions about a particular event, like a conference (and many conferences publicise their official hashtag well in advance). They can also be used to mark a spontanous mass joke or conversation—you’re welcome to chip in with your own contribution. Finally, a hashtag can be a parenthetical comment on the tweet you’ve just written, not really intended for reuse.

Public replies

Starting a tweet with someone’s @username means they’ll see that tweet, and it’ll be visible in your Twitter stream, but it won’t appear to all your followers, only those following both of you. This is whatÆs called a public reply. If you want the reply to be REALLY public—if it’s of interest to more than just the recipient—add a character before the .@username, like a dot.

Messaging

You can also use Twitter to privately message someone, but here’s the catch: they have to be following you (you don’t have to be following them, though). To contact strangers, you’ll need to use a public reply, or follow them and hope they follow you back (it’s considered fairly polite).

Searches in Twitter

A Google search tells you facts about something; a Twitter search tells you what people think about something. It can be fascinating to compare the two, whether it’s with movies, natural disasters, or political events. Twitter tends to respond faster than the mainstream media to breaking news too.

More advice

Tweet regularly but don’t obsess about frequency, or how many followers you have. Block the spammers. Install a twitter client, like Tweetie or Tweetdeck, on your computer or iPhone—they’re a big improvement over the website. You can delete a tweet mistake if you catch it on the Twitter page fast enough. Give Twitter a try: follow a decent number of people for a month and check in each day, and only then decide if it’s just people prattling on about what they had for breakfast.

The best place to start is this excellent overview of Twitter with lots of detailed ideas, quotes, and links. The Twitter Book by O’Reilly and Milstein (O’Reilly, 2009) is the best printed introduction, and I like the 100 tips to being a better Twitterer. Twitter in also taking off in universities as a teaching tool: how it can be used with students, and ideas lists for academia in general and the classroom.

As part of your web identity, it’s good to have your own domain name, like davehuffington.com or frogresearch.org: one that you control, that you can keep as you go from job to job, and that can be the basis of a permanent personal email address. If you start a new project or set up a company you’ll need a domain name too. It’s not unusual for net-savvy folks to have half a dozen.

If you want a domain name, you need to use a registrar. These are businesses from which you rent the right to use a particular domain name, on a yearly basis. You don’t own domain names: you rent them year-to-year, and when you stop someone else can snap them up. How much does it cost? Usually about US$10 a year; some unpopular domains, like anything.info, can be dirt cheap, while .nz domains are usually more (no surprise there).

What sort of domain should you get?

• .com is a good choice, because it’s the default domain for most web browsers
• .org might be better for a non-profit organisation
• .net used to be just for internet service providers, but now it’s often used for metaphorical ‘networks ‘
• .info is little-used but good for informational sites (like this one)
• .co.nz, .org.nz really imply that the site only relates to New Zealanders, plus they’re pricier. For more information on NZ domains, see our Domain Names Commission site.

Once you’ve figured out a possible domain name, go to a registrar and see if it’s available. GoDaddy is one of the biggest, and fine to use, though they do try to sell you lots of extra stuff you don’t need. If you want a New Zealand domain, there are registrars like iServe, Enlighten, or Freeparking. As always when evaluating competing websites, look for professional design and good Help pages.

At this stage, all you need is the domain name. The next stage is to point it at something: a free blog or your own hosted website. Some registrars will try to get you to add web hosting and all sorts of other services, but there’s no need at this stage; just secure your domain names and figure out the next step in your own time.

(One thing I would suggest: many registrars offer a free service where you can create a single email address using your new domain name—like dave@frogresearch.org—and have it redirect mail to an address of your choice, like davehuffington@gmail.com. This is a useful temporary fix until you set up web hosting, which will give you all the email addresses you could want. But more on that in a separate posting.)

Most students use Wikipedia, but there has been quite a backlash against it from academics. Here’s what a student needs to know.

1. Everybody uses Wikipedia all the time, including lecturers. It’s a great place to get an overview of a field, and it’s usually accurate, detailed, and up-to-date.
2. It’s not a peer-reviewed academic publication, so you really can’t cite it in your essays (Middlebury College actually banned citation of Wikipedia). But you really can’t go citing a printed encyclopedia either, or a dictionary, magazine, newspaper, press release, or blog. Read actual journal articles and books; you’re at university now.
3. Wikipedia’s policy is that all articles should cite other publications, and the reference list can be a great starting point for your own research. As Catherine Pellegrino nicely points out, Wikipedia aims to document every entry with reliable sources, the same sources lecturers want you to use.
4. Copy-pasting bits of Wikipedia into your assignments is bit stupid.

Many tech-savvy folks think that banning all citations of Wikipedia is silly. Alan Liu at UC Santa Barbara has a good policy which allows for citing Wikipedia “when the point being supported is minor, non-controversial, or also supported by other evidence.” But students who cite Wikipedia need to understand how to read discussion pages and history, how to judge the reliability of a page, and how to cite the exact version of the page they looked at. One of the best guides for students on how to use Wikipedia can be found at (no surprise) Wikipedia.

The Google Books project involved spending $300 million to scan 10 million books and make them available on the Web. This immediately caused legal strife with authors and publishers, but a settlement has been reached (at least in the USA). Robert Darnton in a NY Review article gives one perspective on the settlement, Lawrence Lessig in the New Republic another.

Legal issues aside, Google Books is enormously useful, especially if you study work in the public domain: up to the 19th and early 20th century. The fully searchable texts of numerous books are easily available, and they’re actual digitised text, not just scans of the pages. This enables you to do things a library simply can’t—for example, a student had a query about a law essay they were writing, which included a quote from someone called Bagehot about the “appendages of monarchy”. Searching for “appendages of monarchy bagehot” in Google Books takes you to page 315 of The English Constitution, which you can freely read online.

Not just read—you can quote it too. The toolbar in page view has a Plain Text option, where you can switch from scanned text to plain text, ready for copying and pasting.You can download pages, as PDFs or in the EPub format for e-book readers. And there’s also a Clip button, which lets you drag over the page to create, in effect, a screenshot. Google Books gives you an web address for that particular screenshot, and even a link you can paste into your blog that will display the snippet. Here’s a New Zealand reference from Darwin’s book The Formation of Vegetable Mould by the Actions of Worms:

You may be sceptical about the value of being on Facebook. Yes, it is a largely-pointless and addictive procrastination tool. But there are strong arguments for signing up. And if you get sick of it you can always quit, although deleting an account is not as simple as it looks. But it has been nicely described as “a giant lobster trap with your friends as bait.”

Bear in mind, though, that you must set up your privacy so your personal details are not shared with the entire internet (more on that here). And be careful about sharing some personal details with anyone: a man in Wales was sentenced to prison for murdering his partner after she changed her relationship status on Facebook to “single.”

What can Facebook be useful for?

• Organising a non-profit group, with event scheduling, announcements, and a photo gallery
• Setting up a site for your band, allowing Facebookers to become fans and watch your videos
• Sharing photos with a semi-private group of people, not the whole world (though again, this requires careful use of the privacy settings)
• Maintaining contact with people who live far away, via the background noise of their daily activities
• And last, but not least, it keeps track of birthdays for you

Many of these activities, though, could equally be done by other technology: blogs, RSS feeds, DIY social network sites like Ning.com, and Flickr. There’s a certain danger in putting all your eggs in one basket. Facebook is currently privately owned, but who knows who’s going to to buy it? Rupert Murdoch paif half a billion dollars for MySpace. What happens to your personal data then? Social networks rise and fall, and in a few years Facebook may well be as uncool as Friendster.

When you’re learning to use the Net better, it can be helpful to know where you stand in relation to everyone else. There have been numerous attempts to divide internet users into marketing group or tribes: one recent attempt has been the Digital Anthropology Report, which ranks people from Digital Extroverts to Timid Technophobes. The digital divide is not a crude division between the tech-savvy and the luddites: one noticable trend is the increasing number of people who use the Net all the time through mobile devices, but don’t, for example, blog or even send much email. You can take the quiz here to see where you fit.

The Pew Research Center’s internet project has another more nuanced online survey, with categories like Digital Collaborator, Roving Node, and Technology Indifferent. Pew are interested in whether people are creating or just passing on information, and whether they use their phone for voice only or as a window onto the Net. I’d be interested to see whether the availability of broadband, and the cost of cellphone web surfing, affect the usage patterns of New Zealanders compared with the results of these UK and US-based surveys.

If you feel like taking both quizzes, do share in the comments whether the results agree with one another, and if you think they reflect how you use the internet.

Wikipedia claims to be a free encyclopedia that anyone can edit. And that’s exactly what it is. Its name comes from the Hawai‘ian wiki, or quick: a wiki is any collaborative, easily-edited web page. You hear people using Wiki as a nickname for Wikipedia, but that’s not really correct: the foundation that runs it also hosts its siblings Wikinews, Wikiquote, Wiktionary and so on.

Wikipedia was only set up in 2001, but now has over 3 million articles, all written by unpaid volunteers. It’s startlingly comprehensive, if not always well written. It reflects its geeky origins: 11,697 words on Gondor, compared with 6,751 on Ghana. And it seems to have dealt a death blow to the traditional printed encyclopedia. What might be the project, in its infancy today, that will have transformed the way we do research in another eight years?

A good introduction is the history of Wikipedia in the Sept 2006 Atlantic Monthly, which prompted a personal testimonial from Nicholson Baker, in which he reveals himself to be an ardent inclusionist. The inclusionist/deletionist split is a major philosophical conflict in Wikipedia, between those who demand that article subjects be “noteworthy” (which in practice means cited in the mainstream media) and others who believe there’s room in Wikipedia for almost anything; inclusionists like Baker scour the list of articles marked for deletion and add citations to try to save them.

People are always amazed that they or anyone else can click on a Wikipedia page and change the content, and I have to reassure them that it’s legal—indeed, encouraged. They always then ask why the pages aren’t full of digital graffiti and silliness. To see how Wikipedia protects itself, look at the History pages for a typical article: on Baldwin Street, the steepest street in Dunedin and likely the world. On July 20, 2009, an anonymous visitor clicked on Edit and cautiously added an ungrammatical The to the beginning of one section. They clicked save and were no doubt amazed to see their changes appear in the entry. Emboldened, they changed The to penis. Hilarity doubtless ensued. Until, less than a minute later, a piece of software called ClueBot sniffed out the offending word and politely reverted all their edits. Undeterred, the vandals typed in the word JOSH. A minute later, this was deleted by a human being, username Vicenarian (American, male, 24, Unitarian according to his user page). BEN ROX UR JOX typed the vandals. Vicenarian deleted it. The vandals responded with a half-hearted from ben & josh. This was deleted by user Snigbrook (from Lancashire, supports the Blackburn Rovers) a few seconds later. No response. Ban and Josh had no doubt quit in disgust. The entire episode lasted seven minutes.

That’s how vandalism is taken care of. Wikipedia sceptics are also suspicious of the accuracy of the content, though. How can we be sure the information is accurate? Well, as Professor Peter Murray-Rust puts it, “the bit of Wikipedia that I wrote is correct.” There are plenty of experts adding and editing content, and the sheer weight of numbers seems to make articles gradually converge on accuracy. Wikipedia’s great advantage is that it’s absolutely up to date, and errors can be easily corrected, neither of which are true of textbooks or encyclopedias. It’s possible for inaccuracies to sneak in, especially if people start editing their own page to minimise their alleged naughtiness, as Richard Worth did earlier this year. Sadly he did so under a fairly recognisable login name, and was shamed in the media for it.

Further reading:

• An interview with one of the early Wikipedians
• Students surveyed on how they used Wikipedia (YouTube video)
• The official Policies and Guidelines of Wikipedia, to counter any suspicion that anarchy prevails
• A list of fifty fascinating Wikipedia articles, and fifty more, to give you an idea of its scope
• A recent report suggests the explosive growth of Wikipedia is slowing, and editing of what’s already there is becoming more important: here’s a summary, and an older analysis of who actually writes Wikipedia.
• A nice short think piece by Cory Doctorow.

I’m teaching a Continuing Education course on Web 2.0, what it is, and why it matters.

The best summary I’ve seen of all the Web 2.0 buzzwords, and a reasonable mission statement for the course, is this pic from Wired. I’ll redraw it for the page when I get a moment.

Here’s the lecture schedule:

• Wikipedia and the notion of radical trust
• Blogs and the future of publishing
• The Google empire: Storing knowledge in the cloud
• Flickr, YouTube, and Facebook: The explosion of user-created content

Exploration of buzzwords will ensue, and I’ll be blogging each session as I run it.