Google Notebook

ByMike Moffit

Today just feels like Christmas…

Google keeps coming up with the coolest web applications and this time it’s no different. Currently Google Notebook is in a very very beta testing phase but it still works quite well. Google Notebook is a web application that allows a user to store snippets of text from news articles, blog postings, or really any text or image on a website right in one place!

I’ve only been using it for a couple hours, but I have collected several snippets and parts of new postings and blog postings that I’ve found to be interesting and worthy of keeping so that I can later reference it. You can created more notebooks to break things down which is really nice. For instance I have one notebook called, “Gadget news”, one called “Apple news”, another called “Random snippets” and one called “Small Dog”.

Currently in order for you to use Google Notebook you need to have Internet Explorer 6 for Windows or Mozilla FireFox 1.5+ for Windows, Linux or Mac. It uses a little plug-in or extension and it works quite well. You do need a Google account to use Google Notebook. If you have a GMail account then you can use this. Just use your GMail username and password to login!

The nice thing about this is that Google Notebook can be accessed anywhere in the world, from any computer! You can choose to make your notebook public or private. Each notebook has it’s own privacy settings. So I chose to make all my notebooks private except for my Small Dog notebook which you can see by clicking the link below:

Small Dog notebook

I did notice they’re giving you a pretty cryptic looking URL which I do hope changes to something more friendly like:

http://www.google.com/notebook/vtequine/smalldog/ (note that link doesn’t work)

That would be a lot easier to remember!

So far I am really impressed with this piece of software and how it seemlessly integrates with your already existing web browser. It’s SO easy to add in images, and text to your notebook and I love how you can have multiple notebooks and how you can share them!

Google, you are amazing!

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