The following may be bordering on off-topic for this group, but an aspect of information management that is becoming difficult to avoid is the storage and retrieval of online information.

Internet search engines are now quite mature but I don't see much effort yet being put into capturing web information (before it changes at the speed of light).

While programs like Brainstorm can import web text quickly and efficiently, the graphical nature of the web makes it inevitable that we also need to download both text and images.

If you want to save both text and images from a web page, are people here -

- saving the web information onto the hard disk using one of the various formats available or
- importing it directly into a PIM or
- using purpose built tools like SurfSaver
- some other method?

TIA

Jack

Jack,

I have just bought Netsnippets for this very thing (I have been using the free version for a while) http://www.netsnippets.com/

It works with Firefox and MSIE, and stores the downloads in native HTML, so its accesible to any search type tool. The others I tried all used s dedicated format.

The tools are bit more sophisticated in MSIE, so I use the Firefox addin on the context menu to "Open Page in MSIE" when I need the extra facilities, I hope that they will improve the Firefox integration as it lags behind the MSIE integration.

In fact it doesn't just work with browsers and you can add anything from the clipboard into it from any document - online or offline. And you can capture any screen from right clicking on the NS icon in the sytem tray, or even add a blank "snippet" if you want to add a note to yourself about something.

There is a mark up option for any item in Net Snippets, as well as keywords, absract etc.

The Net snippets bar is a tree, and for any folder you can produce a report of all entries with a TOC, or/and a bibliogrpahy of the contenst in standard APA, MLA or Chicago format.

I am still sorting out how to use it, and the list of features above is far from exhaustive, but it looks very good.

Graham

Jack

I take a completely different route depending on what I want to do; for example, I often download customers' complete websites on my disk using WinHTTrack to have rapid access to info on them. After the project's finished, I erase them.

I also created a few infobases of selected webpages with Mybase, which I found quite convenient thanks to the WebCollect add-on; however, files tend to get too big too quickly. Similar add-ons exist for other information managers but the results are similar.

UltraRecall imports every webpage separately through its own interface, but I find this slow and inconvenient. The ideal for me when collecting information is to do it straight from the relevant application, in this case the browser. Mozilla Firefox has some very useful plug-ins, such as CopyURL.

Couple this to Brainstorm's Magic Paste (for text) or an able clipboard manager (for full pages) and I think you've covered most applications. The latter in particular have evolved to fully fledged information managers; the beta version of ClipCache, for example, uses a SQL database to keep clippings.

alx

I am again trying Onfolio -- the latest version, and quite liking it. Now that it works with Firefox I prefer it. Surfsaverdrove me nuts, and didn't live up to its hype. NetSnippets may offer a bit more than Onfolio, but at a lot more cost.

Daly

For those toying with Onfolio, if you visit this blog: http://www.chadalderson.com/ you'll find a coupon for an excellent discount on Onfolio Professional ($30 instead of $100). I think Onfolio 2.0 is a big step forward, and the extra features make the professional version worth having (and at no cost with the coupon code).

I realise many people (myself included) are uneasy about the proprietary file format. This has also been discussed quite a bit in the Onfolio forums. The developers seem to accept the point, and have provided an "export to XML" utility, to export whole collections. They also say they are working on plug-ins to allow Google/Yahoo desktop search to index the Onfolio files. This won't go far enough for some, but it eases my worries.

I'd prefer if Onfolio had an open format like Netsnippets, but I do think Onfolio is a better program, particularly for those who use Firefox.

JohnK

PS: the coupon referred to above does seem a genuine public coupon provided to the blog writer by Onfolio. It expires on May 31.