One thing we’ve always wanted to have is a way to allow multiple people watching one of our research sessions to take automatically time-stamped, collaborative notes–everyone working in the same document, live, with entries labeled by author. Then I realized that it’s been under our noses the whole time: IM chat rooms! With a simple piece of free software, you’ve got a time-stamping, notetaking powerhouse at your disposal. And it even supports smileys. All it takes is a little ingenuity!