Google Notebook
Google Labs has produced lots of ideas that have gone on to become full-fledged Google tools (Video, Maps, and Desktop to name a few). Since Notebook is still a Labs project, it hasn’t had a formal launch or any of the associated publicity.
It really is a great idea though. You highlight text on a page (say, a snippet from a product review) and then (with the help of a browser extension [or plugin for those of you stuck in the dark ie-ges]) you can add it as a ‘note’ via the context menu. It sounds simple, but it’s great for when you need something more comprehensive than the page title offered by a normal bookmark (did I mention that it saves the URL that the note was taken from?) – like when you’re doing price comparisons, for example – and you can create multiple ‘books’ to separate, say, the reviews of that game you’re thinking of buying from the information you need for an essay. Notebooks can be made public if you want, but are private by default.
Usual qualifiers – self-styled ‘beta’ product, gmail account required, etc.
Links
- Google Notebook extension for Firefox 1.5 (Windows or Linux, apparently it doesn’t work on Mac). Works brilliantly although I haven’t tried using it in the new v2.0 beta
- Google Notebook plugin for IE6 (Windows only, and it specifically says IE6 [not IE6+] so it probably doesn’t work with IE7).
July 28th, 2006 at 2:57 pm
I’ve been been using this at work for over a month now and it’s been really really useful. Up until now I used a paper notebook to take notes on any new projects I was working on but I’m finding that maintaining a notebook for each is a lot easier. Being able to drag and drag notes to reoganise is something that’s just too tricky with paper (even stickies) and when researching something maintaining a link to the source is priceless.
So yeah, use google notebook