The Basics: Google Notebook

Google Notebook is one of my favorite google tools– it’s a great useful companion for doing online research and annotating things that you find while browsing the World Wide Web. For a web notebook, it’s feature-rich, but with these features comes the price of usability. With the recent upgrade to Google Notebook (supporting labels), things even gets more complicated. But no worries, in this post I’ll try to show you how you can tame the beast and make the most out of Google Notebook.

Below are the basic parts of Google Notebook

- The top portion of the sidebar is the notebook list. You can sort this list either by name or by Date (which is the default). You can also tell at a glance which notebooks are shared (or published by the yellow icons beside the notebook name)

- The main portion is where your notes or clippings are. There are multiple ways of putting stuff here. You can add directly by typing your notes on the gray field at the top, or you can use the Google notebook extension (we’ll look at this more later). You can also add notes by clicking on the “Note this” link on Google search results page.

A note showing the rich text editor and the tagging (label) interface

You can add section dividers here and move around notes between different sections and notebooks. It also features a rich text editor for formatting your notes.

Dividing notes using section headers

- The bottom part of the sidebar on the left is the labels/tags list. This is how you navigate around your notes and clippings by labels.

One of the best parts of the new breed of Google applications is the presence of collaborative features. With Google notebook it’s no exception. By clicking on the sharing options link on the top, you can share that notebook to other collaborators or make a public notebook page by publishing your content. Shared notebooks are bordered in yellow, making it easier for you to notice and remember that other people will see what you will put there.

Sharing a notebook

When you’re using Google Notebook, don’t miss the Google Notebook extension for Firefox. This mini-notebook that pops up at the bottom of Firefox is a mighty interface for collecting clippings and notes while you’re on other pages. All the changes you make are automatically saved to your main notebook page. You can also move around notes and delete them simply by using the extension.

Google Notebook browser extension for Firefox

As mentioned above, the “note this” link on search results in Google also adds the search result link to the Google notebook. It’s a quick way of keeping tabs of results that you may want to reference later.