Oct 8, 2008

Research tip: Quicknote for the web

by Dave Riley


The usual mode nowadays when you come to researching for an article, talk or presentation is to do so using web search engines.

Once you find an article or segment of an article you need to bookmark it. While there are a few ways to do that -- I prefer to employ delicious -- especially by using the easy one click option offered by the Firefox add on.

It's a large addition to your browser but if you are going to do a lot of bookmarking it's worth it.

And the new feature which opens your delicious bookmark in a side bar is a great way to later review and edit each tags by clicking on them so that they open up in a tab.

But the problem of aggregating content, rather than links is not solved, by delicious which only allows a few characters each time you post a tag.

While there are a few optional ways to grab text (eg: Clipmarks) -- I'm finding the Quicknote add on for Firefox simple to use but very powerful nonetheless. Quickly and easily you can generate a massive amount of quoted text on the one text file which is automtcially posted and saved to your desktop -- each time with a tagging url.

So under one heading and in the one file -- you can build up a collection of "post it" or "Sticky" type notes.