This is the first of a three-part look at nearly 20 free or nearly free search sites aimed specifically at finding information on people by mining not only the Web but also social networking sites, archives and, to some degree, public records sites.

In this post, we'll look at 123people, CVGadget, iSearch and LinkedIn.

The bottom line: No one offers everything available on a person, but taken together they paint a detailed portrait of an individual. Add more traditional resources, such as property and court records, and even more details emerge.

Where we've been

So, a tipster has just shown you the document you need to nail a story.

Problem is, she can't give it to you, there's no copy machine in the diner where you met and you need to show it to your editor before the story runs.

What to do? What to do?

Enter Qipit, a free service that turns pictures from your cell phone into searchable PDFs.

Using Qipit is as simple as taking a picture of a document, white board or even handwritten notes with your

I have two problems. (Well, OK, I've got a lot more than that, but we'll discuss only two here.)

The first is that I'm terribly absent-minded, and when I'm at one computer the file I need is usually at another.

The second is that the university where I teach is so tight with money that I half expect they'll start charging me per credit. They're certainly never going to pay for remote desktop software and, besides, the firewalls wouldn't let it through.

Or so they think.

But a couple of free and secure Web-based applications --

Welcome to the beta version of my new Uplink column featuring cool tech tools for journalists.

Being lazy at heart, I’ve prowled for little utilities, preferably free of charge, to do things I don’t want to learn to do myself or to generally make computing easier since the day in late 1984 I cranked up my first PC. (I do sometimes miss my trusty Kaypro, all 29 pounds of it, then considered "portable"; Two 5 1/4-inch, 360KB double-sided/double-density floppy disks; Wordstar, which fit on one of those disks with room to spare for data; and less than a minute to boot up.)