Toluu : CloudNotes

CloudNotes

A blog about notetaking and bookmarking on the web, or notemarking.

Earlier this evening, Google unleashed SearchWiki, a feature allowing you to edit and annotate Google search results. The kicker? They’ve added the feature to their flagship product: Google. It’s not in beta. It’s not a lab feature. It’s not part of Google Notebook, and it doesn’t require a Firefox plug-in. As long as you’re signed in under your Google ID, you’ll see it whenever you search for something on Google. This video does a great job explaining the feature, so I won’t bother repeating it.

This is pretty fascinating, and I’ve got a couple of thoughts. First, if you’re the type of person who thinks bookmarking is useless because Google gets you there faster and easier than any other option, well, this announcement bolsters your argument. For example, type in “sports.” ESPN comes up first, but you don’t like that. You’d rather see Fox come up first. Press the arrow to promote Fox to the top. Done.

Endnote’s suit against Zotero headed to a courtroomNovember 6

ArsTechnica provides an overview of the legal conflict between EndNote (the leading all-in-one academic research software) and its open-source competitor Zotero. I use Zotero for work, and I recently offered an enthusiastic endorsement of the Firefox add-on, which is still in beta. I’d be misleading you if I offered any insight on the nature of Endnote’s reverse engineering claims against Zotero. I’m not an intellectual property expert (or an expert on much at all :). But I do think the lawsuit opens an intriguing new front in the war between commercial and open source software (via Ars):

Zotero is an open source project led by a pair of academics, Dan Cohen and Sean Takats, at George Mason University's Center for History and New Media. Zotero is a plugin for the Firefox browser, and therefore cross-platform, and also has the advantage of being free. It also includes functionality similar to the Mac OS X application Papers, in that it manages PDF libraries, as well as offering users a way to insert references into a document.

The lawsuit, brought by Thomson Reuters against George Mason University and the Comptroller of Virginia, alleges that GMU is in contravention of their EndNote l

Delicious Bookmarks add-on closer to syncing with Firefox?November 3

A new beta version of the Delicious Bookmarks Firefox add-on uses SQLite to store your bookmarks locally instead of RDF. In a post on the Delicious Bookmarks group, product manager Jared Elson said the switch would result in some serious improvements:

1. Extension should be much more stable and usable for users with
large accounts
2. After the initial conversion of your existing RDF file to SQLite
syncing will be faster and more reliable
3. Corruption experienced in previous versions of the extension with
RDF should be a thing of the past

But I wonder whether the SQLite conversion might also help the Delicious team make good on its promise to enable some form of syncing with Firefox’s native bookmarking and history system, Places. You see, Firefox 3 also switched to SQLite as its internal bookmark database.

I’ll be honest, I’m not sure what advantages a SQLite database has over an RDF, nor am I sure whether Delicious and Firefox using the same storage framework will actually aid their synchronization efforts. So the question in the post title is genuine. Could this ali

Does Twine finally have their shit together?October 21

A while back, I wrote about Twine and criticized the service for, basically, being slow as shit. Well, today the service leaves private beta and opens to the public. To celebrate, they’ve put together a jokey, NSFW video that aptly describes the site’s purpose and mission:

You use Twine to collect, find some shit, and share that shit with people you know.

Viewing it, I wondered if the self-described “Delicious on steroids” might finally have their shit together. Nope. At least, not from a speed perspective. The site is still too slow and unresponsive to displace its main competitor, Social|Median. Social|Median might be more unfocused and cluttered, and all its features don’t work all the time. But SM is a helluva lot faster than Twine and it has some nice features that actually set it apart from simple bookmarking tools. Even without the ‘roids.

Zotero: The best notetaking / bookmarking hybrid you’re not usingOctober 14

I use Delicious as for public bookmarking and sharing, because it works great with my Tumblr blog, FriendFeed, and Facebook. When it comes to personal reference and easy, social publishing, Delicious is where it’s at. But in my job as a lawyer and researcher, I need something more powerful—and more private.

Until a few months ago, I had been using the Scrapbook Firefox extension as my workplace personal assistant. Scrapbook captures links, snippets, and full Web pages to a private, searchable, client-side notebook. It also allows you to edit and highlight your saved Web pages. The one drawback with Scrapbook is that it doesn’t sync with my two computers at home; my notes are trapped at work.

Enter Zotero Sync Preview. It does pretty much everything Scrapbook does (without some of Scrapbook’s deep link features), but it also syncs across computers and platforms (Windows, Mac, Linux) using either Zotero’s server or you