Bookmarking and web content clipping

The past few days at my PC at work or my laptop here at home have been spent (aside from preparing teaching materials for my classes, of course) digging up information about bookmarking and web clipping tools.

I have long been copying the contents of news articles that I have found online and saving them in text files. As I'm a big ATP tennis and Federer fan, I have one directory in my hard disk filled with text files containing news or articles written about Federer, whether it is a review of a past match or praise about his game. (I even have a directory full of Federer pictures; he's not exactly good looking but he moves so gracefully on court and doesn't wear those funny expressions and grimaces most other tennis players have when they're striking the ball.) I would also copy articles about anything I would find interesting including, sadly, obituaries of famous people.

Anyway, the advantages of using text files as opposed to MS Word documents or printing to a PDF file included saving disk space. Besides, by printing a web page to a PDF file through Adobe Distiller for example, I would sometimes not be able to save the the entire URL, that being printed along the page margin but often truncated. However, simply copying to a text file would mean I would lose the text formatting--and any related graphics--that often made it easier to read the text.

And then this semester, I decided once again to take on the challenge of teaching a course for the first time. Naturally, this entailed preparing notes for which I would normally look up textbooks or other sources on the Internet. But for this particular course, it was difficult finding one or two printed sources for the varied topics covered, let alone one that was very very up-to-date. Thus the Internet became my primary source for information and, most importantly, graphics that I could incorporate in my slide presentations. The only trouble was that there tended to be several websites from which I could glean bits of information that I would put together for my lecture. As I had practically dropped the habit of taking notes by hand on paper (my erstwhile neat handwriting has sadly deteriorated ever since I began using computers), it became necessary to cut and paste text (and graphics) from webpages into document files.

But how to organize my notes? Just last week, I had stumbled upon Microsoft's OneNote 2007 in our brand new Dell Inspiron 640m and thought it was neat tool for gathering and organizing notes and graphics particularly those from online sources. I was hesitant though to install one here in my own laptop which was running on Windows XP and was prompted to search for similar tools. I had my eye on the ClipMarks extension for Firefox for some time but users complained in reviews that it was a bit unwieldy. When I came across articles discussing bookmarking or similar tools, I discovered that Google had its own tool for bookmarking and clipping online information. (Although I had heard about Google Notebook previously, I thought it was just like Yahoo! Notebook which was nothing but some kind of online text notepad.) And then there were several other similar services like del.icio.us, ClipClip and Diigo. After poring over several articles comparing bookmarking services/tools, I began to lean toward using Diigo. But my usual hesitation to clutter my laptop with more software kicked in and I ultimately decided against signing up for a Diigo account and installing a Diigo toolbar on my Firefox browser. (I'd even hate to have a Google toolbar!) I likewise ruled out del.icio.us as I wouldn't be able to clip text and pictures and save them. Anyway, sharing my bookmarks wasn't my primary goal and I wasn't keen on creating another account somewhere in the Internet (another username and password to memorize).

Finally, after reading about how other people have been effectively using Google Notebook for organizing their notes, I installed the required extension in the Firefox browser of my work PC and was relieved to find that the little link on the status bar was far less obtrusive than a toolbar. So after clipping some text/graphics and bookmarking a few pages into a few trial notebooks, I became fairly convinced that this would be sufficient to meet my current needs for lecture note preparation and news article clipping. Now I have the Google Notebook extension installed in my Firefox browser here in my laptop so I can clip bits for my lecture notes (and it being Wimbledon time, saving articles about Federer) at home as well.

Some improvements to Google Notebook that I would suggest to Google, however, are to enable:

• changing the color of a notebook or section (a la MS OneNote)
  
• tagging (much more comprehensive than simply classifying notes into notebook sections)
• highlighting of text or changing the background color of selected text (and not just changing the color of text)
• sticking a note/comment to selected/highlighted text and not just to an entire note
  
• copying of an image from a webpage and pasting it into notes without having to bookmark the image