UPDATE (01/22/05): This post has been edited. I originally planned to review askSam's SurfSaver but have decided not to at this time. There are some reports by customers in their support forum that suggest the new version 6.0 has significant issues that need to be addressed before I can recommend this progran.
Over the past month, I've been evaluating a category of applications that provide tools and features for capturing
web content (and other material) for future reference or research. At their simplest, you might look at these tools as
really powerful bookmark (or favorites) managers. Scratch the surface though, and you discover a number of powerful
features to collect, organize, and share the fruits of your surfing labors.
The tools I've been evaluating are:
ContentSaver
Net Snippets
Onfolio
Before you OneNote fans start going crazy with comments about why I haven't included it in this review, while OneNote
can certainly be used for this task, it's a much larger application and doesn't integrate directly into the browser the
way the tools I'll be reviewing in this series do. Even with the Power Toys available for OneNote SP1 and creative use
of SideNotes, there's a context switch required every time you capture something and OneNote doesn't offer the ability
to capture entire pages easily, create metadata about the saved items, or share information as elegantly.
All of these tools share a common set of features and capabilities. They differ in implementation, workflow, supported
browsers, and price. In this first installment, I'll discuss the common features and the tasks you can perform using
any of them. In each of the following installments, I'll delve a bit further into some of the unique aspects of each
and let you know which I've ultimately decided to adopt. Yes, that is a cheap ploy to keep you reading.
Browser support
: All of these applications integrate directly into Internet Explorer. Net Snippets provides limited support for
Firefox. Only Onfolio fully integrates into that browser.
Capture: In each of these applications, you have a number of options for capturing information from
web pages and other sources (Office documents, e-mail, local files). You can establish a link to the original source
material, embed the content of an entire web page directly into your collection, or grab just a “snippet” of text
and/or graphic information. All support either drag-and-drop capture as well as button and keyboard commands for
capture.
Metadata: Metadata is, literally, data about data. All of these applications provide a means to add
notes, capture date, source URL (or file), and other attributes about the items in your collection which can assist
with subsequent searching and organization of the collected information. Each takes a somewhat different approach but
ultimately all provide a common set of tools and features.
Reports and information sharing: All but one of these tools (SurfSaver) have some kind of report
generation capability. Ranging from an e-mail with embedded links to selected information to fully formatted HTML
documents that can be sent via e-mail or posted to the web, these reports provide a means of assembling the results of
your research to share with others.
Price: Only Net Snippets offers a free version. Both Net Snippets and Onfolio offer a choice of
Standard or Professional Editions. Prices for the commercial editions range from $19.95 to $129.95.
Typical usage goes something like this. You’re browsing away, either doing some random surfing or specific research,
and you encounter a web page (or some content on a page) that you’d like to capture for future review, reading, or
sharing. You click a button on the toolbar provided by any of these tools or issue a keyboard command to capture the
entire page (or even a range of pages), enter some additional notes, and continue merrily on your way. If there is a
paragraph or two of information or an image you’d like to capture, you select that content and add it to your
collection the same way.
All of these tools provide the ability to create folders to organize you information in much the same fashion as
Windows Explorer. You can create multiple collections (essentially databases) of content if you prefer. All of these
tools will also import your browser favorites (bookmarks) into a collection as well. All of these applications use the
browser sidebar to display their tools and your collected information so having access to your favorites from within
the applications sidebar means you can keep them open virtually all the time. ContentSaver uses a separate application
for reviewing, organizing, and adding metadata to your collected information which can be invoked from its toolbar,
sidebar, or the Start menu.
This ability to organize and manage your favorites is a fine thing in and of itself since bookmark management in
either Internet Explorer or Firefox has always been pretty rudimentary. As I said earlier, you might find enough value
just in this capability to warrant adding one of these tools to your system. That would only be scratching the surface
of what these applications can do for you though. As we continue to collect more and more information over time,
finding the exact thing we’re looking for becomes increasingly difficult. In much the same way that the desktop search
tools I’ve been discussing help solve this problem for e-mail and local files on your PC, these information
collector/manager applications provide similar capabilities for a specific subset of your data. And they add to the
equation the ability to organize, format, and share your collected information with others.
Next: ContentSaver
1. Actually, there is a free version of Onfolio, Onfolio Express, via Microsoft Partner Pack for Windows:
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/partnerpack/
If you are evaluating Onfolio, I strongly encourage you to look at the Onfolio 2.0 Beta:
http://beta.onfolio.com/
Posted at 6:20AM on Dec 19th 2005 by Bob Jordan