RyeBlog

Google today launched Google Notebook. Notebook lets you easily gather clips of things you see on the web and store them into little Google-hosted booklets. By default, your booklets (called “Notebooks”) are kept private for you to use for whatever you want.

Here’s how it changes your life. First - you don’t have to bookmark as many pages anymore. If you are using FireFox or Internet Extorter - all you need to do is right-click on the content you want to save to some kind of notebook - and then tell your computer to “Note This (Google Notebooks)”. It will copy the cliping (pictures and all) and dump them into a convenient notebook for you.

If, at some point, you decide that your collection of web-clippings on the origins of the Sanskrit language is good enough other people might like it - you can make it public. The second way Google Notebook will change your life is it will change the way you search for specific content. Instead of piling on search terms hoping to get some kind of magic result - the Google Notebook may provide you with a way to find a notebook of someone who already scoured the web searching for that same content.

Currently, public notebooks are not searchable… so I can’t provide any examples of this. In a few days, you will be able to search through them and see what kind of Notebook pages people have been making.

Anyone who has ever spent hours searhing the web on a specific topic can understand how useful this is. Just create a new notebook for it - and when you find stuff that is of interest - throw it in there. No need to keep thousands of windows opened any more… and no need to go crazy trying to find some way to organize your links. Note it and forget it - until you want to remember it.

Features I would like to see

• Collaborative Notebooking - It would be nice if you could create your notebook and give access to cetain specific people - so that you could all add interesting web clippings to a notebook related to a project you are working on… It would work like a dumbed-down wiki. Allowing open edits may be problematic due to spammers… but allowing specific other users to edit would be a very nice feature
• Blog Integration - It would be marvelous if you could scour the web - collect text clippings, and then have Google Notebooks easily post the content to your blog for you. The FireFox spin-off Flock currently has some kind of clipping service that does this - but it would be nice to have it ingetraged with Google Pages. (Perhaps Flock could just write the plugins to do the heavy lifting for that feature anyway)
• Multiple Levels of Subcategories Currently you can create your notebook and you can have subcategories - but that’s the limit to the depth of the notebook. More depth = easier organization.
• Better URL Names for Notebook Pages - When you make a notebook page public, the URL for it is gigantic - and impossible to remember. Easy-to-remember URLs would make public notebooks much more useful.
• Safari Plugin - an while you’re at it… an Opera plugin as well… FireFox and Safari are both rather slow browsers (once you load hundreds of windows like I commonly do). Between the two, most Mac users preer Safari - and if a browser is wanting raw speed they will likely use Opera. Supporting Safari and Opera
• Archive Option - If you use Google Notebooks to keep track of some temporary search… like looking for the best place to buy a certain digital camera or something - that notebook becomes mostly useless after you find the place. Still - in the future, you might want to access that notebook as a jumping point for another search. In the meantime- you don’t want to see it in your list of notebooks because it’s not important to you at the moment. Archiving them would be a good solution to the notebook-clutter problem that may arise.

If you want to see an example of what you can do with Google Notebook - you can look at this Google Notebook on Google Notebook that I threw together this morning. I snipped content from some news releases and form some review pages. It was very easy to put together… I can promise you that it reads better inside the Google Notebook viewer on their website - for some reason their public Notebooks look like trash.

Sign up for Google Notebook and have fun building Google’s search index collecting your information easily.