How Do You Keep Track of Your Web-Based Research?

time961 asks: "I use the Web extensively to research a wide variety of topics (weird, huh?). However, much of the time I end up printing out web pages and filing them on paper, because that's the easiest way I know to say 'OK, that was interesting, I'll hold on to it until I actually do something about this topic'. Often, I'll run across something that seems relevant to a long-term project or interest and just want to grab it without even reading the details. Paper is OK for reading, browsing, and scribbling, but it's hard to search, it's heavy, and it's wasteful (and I yearn for a day when browsers can reliably print what's on the screen, instead of cutting it off at the margin because some designer doesn't understand layout!). How do others deal with organizing the results of browsing?" Bookmarks and histories aren't the answer — they're not very good for searching, the UI isn't very good for, say, adding notes, and they don't work offline. Also, stale URLs are a huge problem — a key advantage of paper is that it doesn't randomly fade out in a few days (or decades), so a good solution would have to keep copies, not just references. I imagine something like a FireFox plug-in with a 'Remember This' button and some options for category, keywords, annotations, etc., but I'll bet there are more creative approaches, too."

Comments

PDF

[daeg]

First off, install a good PDF printer.

Media Server

[Anonymous Coward]

Just save your 'research' to a nice media server or something and then you can do the 'hands on' stuff once the missus has left for work innit.

Easy

[aadvancedGIR]

Just write to your ISP pretending to work for one **AA and you'll immediately get a complete list of your activities. As a bonus, you can also use that to terminate your subscription without the 2 mounthes notice.

Take a look at the ScrapBook Firefox extension

[BruceCage]

I imagine something like a FireFox plug-in with a 'Remember This' button and some options for category, keywords, annotations, etc., but I'll bet there are more creative approaches, too."

ScrapBook is a Firefox extension created by Gomita (some Japanese fella), it allows you "capture" web pages, creating a locally stored cache and offers the ability to easily remove content from the captured web page, mark sections or add notes. It also has a whole bunch of tools such as full text search and a pretty intuitive interface.

You can find all the features in a nice list at the official homepage with tons of pretty screenshots. There's even a 50 page manual (PDF) created by Andrew Giles-Peters.

Even though development has seemingly halted since December 2005, it's still one of the most well rounded extensions for Firefox I've come across yet.

New: Google Notebook

[kestasjk]

Something that recently came out of Google and is ideal for this task; Google Notebook. You find sites with Google, now you can take notes from them with Google, and it integrates nicely into Google search. Unlike bookmarks you can search the notes you take and have the URLs ready and waiting, etc.

1. Why would I want to use Google Notebook?

With Google Notebook, you can browse, clip, and organize information from across the web in a single online location that's accessible from any computer. Planning a trip? Researching a product? Just add clippings to your notebook. You won't ever have to leave your browser window.

2. How do I get started?

Simple. Just sign in to the Google Notebook homepage with your Google Accounts username and password, then download the Google Notebook browser extension (if you haven't already). As soon as you restart your browser, you'll see a Google Notebook icon in the bottom-right corner of your browser window. Click on this icon to open your mini Google Notebook, where you can save all the clips of content you want.