WebNotes online personal productivity and research tool helps you annotate the web
Today marks the first day of the WebNotes invite-only beta. WebNotes is a personal productivity tool for online research that was created by six alumni from MIT in Massachusetts. Spearheaded by Ryan Damico and Alex King, the group has created a better way to do your research online, with additional applications such as personal productivity.
If you have used a Mac, or if you were using Stikkit before the company was bought out, you have seen a computer based highlighter tool and sticky notes in action. WebNotes offers that kind of capability for your browser. This brings the concept of on-the-fly annotation, citation and note taking to the web.
Right out of the box, I wanted to compare this tool to the popular Evernote based on several obvious similarities in how I, personally, would use it. Evernote has become indispensable to me in running my business, researching my writing and taking notes on the fly. WebNotes is not a direct ‘apples to apples’ comparison with Evernote, however. WebNotes offers two features of Evernote that are currently missing: highlighting and on-the-source annotation, in addition to a few other features. However, with both WebNotes and Evernote you can share what you annotate with classmates or colleagues.
WebNotes is simple to install, simple to use and offers a way to keep track of your notes while you research a topic or topics online without having to make a copy; bookmark items using your browser or social bookmarking tools like Fleck, Diigo, iLighter, Delicious or Shiftspace; handwrite notes or print out multiple web pages. This is handy since much of the time a user may never return to those bookmarks, even during the project itself. It is important to note that the guys behind WebNotes do have an import feature for existing bookmarks on their list for future releases, though it is not a priority at this time.
For people using laptops with smaller screens, it is important to note that WebNotes is a downloadable browser toolbar. Luckily, there is a way to use a thumbtack shaped browser button as a handy tool for toggling the toolbar on and off. This lets you save screen real estate while you research your project. For those who don’t care about losing a bit of browser real estate, you can leave the simple tool bar open at all times, linking to your WebNotes page, offering access to the Organizer and one-click sticky note and highlight options, as well as a running count of your account invites and other information.
WebNotes has a nice search feature that searches the text of your annotations and sources. Other tools, including Evernote and Delicious, also offer search, but they only search the tags the user adds to the link or clip. This means WebNotes search is slightly better over all – it catches what a user might miss or forget to tag. I know when I’m in a hurry, I may only throw one or two tag words into my Evernote clips, making it harder to find them later. WebNotes saves me from my own haste by eliminating the need to remember to tag at all.
WebNotes and Evernote both offer a share by email feature. WebNotes also lets you publish your notes to a group by creating a compiled PDF file of all of your notes from any folder in your Organizer. This means that if you have been smart and organized by project, you can give your study mates or colleagues a synopsis of all of the class or project research. This could be very handy for a variety of people, including law students and lawyers who constantly need to cite sources. I liked the collected PDF feature quite a bit.
I switched back and forth between Evernote and WebNotes for several days, running a personal compare and contrast use experiment. Overall, I found the interface of WebNotes more intuitive and faster to use than Evernote. I was continually drawn to that speed and ease of use as I went about my day researching ebooks I’m writing, articles for the blogs I write, character notes for my fiction and potential clients for my social media consulting business. It never took longer than a moment to make a quick note, file it and move on.
With Evernote, however, I was able to do one thing that WebNote can’t do, yet – use it on my phone or my desktop. I am not always on the Web when I am researching something. With Evernote, I can grab research notes from the library, record lectures in class, record interviews, hand write notes on my touch screen phone, take photos of pages in books or events as they occur and send them to the system. WebNotes isn’t quite there yet. Even so, the better search and the PDF synopsis of the notes attached to a project are incredibly appealing to someone like me, with many irons in the fire. I find myself torn between the different cool features of each.
For someone doing stationary research (and granted, much of the time I am one of those people), WebNotes will most likely be enough. For someone on the go, who works or studies on the move, WebNotes may not be viable just yet. You can visit their site on your mobile and read your annotations, but you can’t add to them right now, and that makes it tough for me to give in to to how easy WebNotes is to use. However, the PDF export feature has some serious potential. I hope that the company takes notes during this invite only beta and adds some more mobile features to compliment its browser based service. That just might push them over the edge and into “must have” territory.
I have a limited number of invites to try out the invite-only beta for Blorge readers. You can grab yours by clicking this link. If you have any trouble, let me know in the comments. Enjoy!
Note: This article was written 12/9 and held to be posted after embargo lifted at 12:01 on 12/10.
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December 10th, 2008
I think it would be fair to say that Diigo is the most popular and mature web annotation tool on the market today. With over half a million registered users, It has been continuously refined over the past three years.
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So it would be helpful to compare any new entrant in the space to Diigo. If webnotes is aiming at serious web surfers, then I must say that side-by-side comparisons would show that Diigo is a much more powerful (and mature) tool. For example, Diigo provides rich tagging capability as well as folders for better information organization, and group annotation for better collaboration. Diigo automatically caches the page so it is always available to you. Diigo allows you to search the full-text of your collections, or just within your highlights. Diigo allows you to easily extract your research findings or publish them to blogs …..
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One could argue that webnotes’ is simpler because of less features. Well, if you want real productivity, I should like to argue that it just falls far short of what Diigo enables. In addition, Diigo’s rich functionality has been designed with painstaking care so that if you will be completely comfortable just using a subset of the features to begin with. For tools that are really simple, I would say delicious and google notebooks are hard to beat.
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Diigo team continues to dedicate itself to make Diigo the best tool for research productivity and knowledge sharing. (In the meantime, other web annotation tools such as fleck, i-lighter, jump knowledge, trailfire, etc have essentially stopped development or simply shut-down, to the best of my knowledge. )
December 1st, 2010
Agreed… This will be my 1st time to this site. Greatful for sharing this. I have to bookmark this site. I am a house specialist for 5 years. Our home decorating hint of the week is: Do not crowd a room. Spacing is required. Thanks again!!
March 13th, 2011
I have never tried using a tool like this one. When I was doing a research study while in college I used to do the bookmarking and have to browse the whole thing. Thanks for sharing, I bet I will try use this.