All together ... soon?
Recently Google started listing my Google bookmarks in my list of Google Notebooks.
That's clearly a move in the right direction, though in this particular case I'm
not sure I gained much from the intermeshing of the two. It would be more
useful to me to include a notebooking feature within Google bookmarks, such that
when I'd mark something in my bookmarks I'd have the opportunity to add the snippets
that I save in my notebooks at the same time. I've often found it strange that
Google Notebooks are organized in folders, rather than by tagging. Though it makes
sense to aggregate materials on a similar topic under one logical folder, Google's search function, as I've
previously noted, long ago convinced me that the same goal, and more,
can be achieved through search. Since Google bookmarks are already
tagged, if a notebook function were to be integrated into those bookmarks I could easily
generate a list of notes that deal with a particular topic.
Along similar "bringing it together" lines, I find it strange that if
I clip a snippet from Google's RSS reader to a Google Notebook of mine, the clip
takes the title "Google Reader" rather than the title of the page it's
coming from. Technically, I'm sure there's no problem arranging this, and were it to
happen I'd be able to earmark parts of blogposts I want to save to myself
(and to others, though that's a different story) without having to keep the entire
post "unread".
Perhaps, however, I'm not quite as eager to bring all my various tools together
as I sometimes appear, even to myself, to be. I've been using Diigo
for quite a while, and it's been one of my favorite tools. When I first started
using it I particularly wanted it for the on-page highlighting features it offered
me. Since then numerous features have been added to this tool which bring it close
to being the all-in-one solution I claim to be seeking. And yet, I continue to
see Diigo almost solely as the tool I use for on-page highlighting, and don't use it for the
other features it now offers, choosing instead to cling to a number of other tools I've grown
used it for those other needs.
Go to: One tool to rule them all?