I do a lot of on-line research and read a lot of blogs. Through all that I find lots of interesting "off-target" information - you know - things that are not what you are looking for right now, but are on your list of things to look at.

And while bookmarks have worked for me (I'm a huge FoxMarks fan), I've recently run into a number of times where the book mark was not specific enough. What I really wanted was a way to hold onto a block of text - the actual thing I'm interested in - instead of just the Url of the page, which requires me to shuffle through the whole page to re-locate the item of interest.

As a quick search for "web clipping tools" will show, apparently I'm not the first person to want something like this. I had heard about web clipping tools like this a few years back, but never pursued it because what I had seen was a pay service, and at the time I did not need it. This time around, I found that Google has answered the call with a little gizmo called Google Notebook.

If you have a GMail account, it's free to use, and has plugins for both IE and Firefox. Now when I find something I want to keep around, I just select the text on the page, right-click and select "Note This". A little window pops up and allows me to specify the notebook I want to add the clipping to.

So simple, so clean. So Google. I've been using it for a few months now, and it's been really great. Everything is always available from any machine (Home/Work/Notebook), and it's really great when I'm preparing presentations - I can do all the web research, and then just grab the quote/fact out of Google Notebook and have the reference (url) right there. No more scratching my head saying "where did I see that..."