Fragments From Floyd

Keeping the good and finding it again is perhaps the hardest thing to accomplish when confronted by the enormous information mountain of the internet. Saving web pages is a poor method. Clipping and saving to a text editor is effective but boring. I've tried OneNote, Evernote, TurboNote, and Scrapbook extension in FireFox--you name it, I've tried it as a method of saving, then retrieving clips and snips for such things as comparing prices on hardware or software, booking plane tickets and lodging for upcoming trips, and environmental links for my students in class, not to mention future blog posts and items I want to keep in longer-term storage.

I've only been testing Google Notebook for a short while, but I think this actually is something I will use--a useful utility that will supplant several of the other methods I've used for keeping snips of web data, then using google's search to find it again.

I installed the FireFox extension that lets me keep a little window open for the current working Notebook, and also to right click a selection and click "Note this" which picks up the url of the page the clip comes from as well. If nothing is selected, it saves the url like a bookmark to Notebook, and then you can add comments or keywords and drag and drop the link into whatever notebook you want.

Unlike the other clip-savers mentioned above, this one is online, with a slick Ajax interface. So if you need a way to save web info across two or more computers, this might be just what you're looking for.

It also works as a low-luster quick and easy webpage maker. I cut-and-pasted some pages from the Slow Road Home wiki into a notebook I made public, just as an in-concept first attempt. We'll see if Google spiders crawl these pages like any other, or if anybody comes to the page from the search terms or "tags" on the page.

At this early stage, it lacks bullets, outlining, linking between notebooks...but I'd be willing to bet, these are not far off. OneNote 12 comes out as part of Windows Vista early next year, and it may have to hit the ground running, with its competition already well-established. Google versus Microsoft. Godzilla meets King Kong.