A Scrap Piece Of (e)Paper To Remember Your Web Journey

When you're on-line and found that great article that you know you'll definitely/probably need again tomorrow/next year what do you do?

You can save it to your browser bookmarks/favourites ... and lose it in the swamp that is everything you've ever thought you'd want but never actually did. You can use an on-line social bookmarking site such as Delicious ... and hope you remember what you tagged it as. Or you can do what most people do, pretend you'll remember the site name and then pray to all things saintly that you find it in the next 5 hours by dredging through every Google search you've ever done and some you've just made up to see if they work.

How about using a wee on-line Notebook? Google Notebook to be precise.
I have to say it's not one of the Google services I am that familiar with but over the past few weeks I have met more and more people that swear by it.

What does it do - this from their FAQ:

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.

So there, it's a place you can "bookmark/favourite" pages but in typical Google fashion they have tried to make it much more than the simple function of keeping a list of website addresses by looking at it as somewhere where you can organise and share them in a logical (to you) fashion.

Google have defined Notebook as having three distinct parts to it:

1. The mini Google Notebook (the browser extension version)
   

   Download the extension to access Google Notebook; you can view your notebooks, organize them into sections, add notes of your own, and more. Quickly add clippings of web content (images, text and links) straight to your notebook by highlighting the content you want and clicking the "Clip" button in the mini Google Notebook.

2. The full-page view (the web site version)
   

   Keep all your notes organized by creating multiple notebooks or by dividing a single notebook into several sections. You can also easily rearrange. Click the "New note" button to add text notes to your notebook, or click the "Add comment" link within a note to add comments to clippings you've collected. Find any information in your notebooks using the search box at the top of the page.

3. Collaborate and share with others
   Now this is probably the more interesting part but I'm not sure how well used it is and as with all modern web services the more people use them the more useful they become.
   

   Invite your friends to collaborate on a notebook with you, giving them full access to edit that notebook and add their own notes. Or just share your notebook with everyone on the web by making it a public web page. Your published notebook will be assigned a unique web address that you can then share with friends and family. And finally, search for notebooks that others have created and published to the web

I suspect Google Notebook will evolve and become integrated into some of the more well known Google offerings, possibly Google Reader, but even so it certainly has potential.

How about we all give it a go and let me know if it solves the issue of finding that long lost article you knew you'd want.