Still part of the problem.


It would seem that Google Notebook lets us do just what it claims it lets us do, so on that level I can't really complain. If I want it to do something different, then that's, perhaps, my problem. But it makes sense that a tool that collects information on the web and makes it accessible to us in an organized framework should mesh much more seamlessly with other informations that we gather and store. The fact that Google Notebook doesn't yet do this is quite a disappointment.

If I want to take notes, I can use my word processor. Even if it's a bit round-about, copying text and graphics into a page of notes isn't difficult. And with desktop search I can easily find those notes, even if they're not organized on the same page. So the advantage of a tool such as Google Notebook should be (to my mind at least) the fact that it would integrate with other items that I save.

So, rather than giving me a stand-alone program that either competes with other programs for my thoughts and notes (and pretty much demands that I check a few different tools in order to find where, or on which platform, I saved those thoughts), what I expected this program to do was to integrate my notes with my mail. I expected that I'd be able to tag a paragraph of text from a web page that I'd visited in the same way I tag mail threads today. What's more, I figured that I'd be able to add those tagged notes into those mail threads. Instead of replying to a mail message and not sending that reply but instead saving it as a draft, it seemed logical to me that what Google Notebook would do would be to create a note to myself that would be kept in a logical place as part of my mail.



Go to: Doing things the hard way.