Posted by Eric Ungs

At the end of each week I want to share with you the interesting things I came across through my “e’s Week in Review” post. It could be anything; blog posts, tech products, new apps., quotes, etc. If you have found any interesting tidbits or news, please share in the comments below, I’d love to hear about them.

“Discipline is the price you pay for freedom.” unknown

1. Form Spring: — This is an easy way to build web forms without any knowledge of web development or HTML. You are easily able to arrange and build data fields to your liking.

2. WebNotes: — this is an extremely useful tool I just came across from a recent Web Worker Daily post. For those in marketing, PR or even today’s blogger, organizing useful tidbits or research from numerous sites can be a tedious copy and paste hassle and very time consuming. With WebNotes everything is organized for you. All you have to do is highlight what you want included in the report, you can also leave notes on the website like you would in a pdf document. It’s organized into folders that you can create, the info is then published in a WebNoete’s file and can easily be reorganized. For final output you can push it to a pdf, html, email, or copy and paste it into a program you wish to use.

There are currently 3 Versions:

WebNotes PR: 2 week free trial, $35/user/mo or $300/user/yr. WebNotes Academic: 2 week free trial, $5/month for students ($10/month without discount) WebNotes Personal: FREE

3. Prezi: — New presentation all on one artboard instead of different slides. Zoom in and out for details. Check out the video on their homepage.

Online annotation and research service WebNotes has been a useful tool in my arsenal since I reviewed it last year. Since that time, the company has released a Pro version and has solidified the feature set.

In a move to further differentiate itself in the annotation space, the company has just announced the availability of a new service plan, WebNotes PR, aimed at public relations and marketing firms who need to compile customized reports, market research and daily scans.

WebNotes continues to provide the core features of adding annotation and notes to web sites, as well as its easy organizational tools to keep track of your work. The major functional additions to the new PR plan include media monitoring, and a revamped and customizable reporting engine.

Reporting has always been a tremendously useful feature of WebNotes. The ability to quickly pull together all of your notes and annotations into one convenient document for sharing and distribution is really well done. Rather than cutting and pasting items manually into a document, the WebNotes reporter does this automatically.

The PR reporting engine has been enhanced to allow for more detailed modifications and customizations including templates and branding. If you’re generating daily scans for your clients, you can automate this process and present a nicely formatted report with very little effort. Options let you limit items by date range and in-place editing lets you customize and tweak the results.

But presentation is only a part of the package, it’s the data that is important. That’s where the new media monitoring functionality comes in to play. In addition to the manual items you have always been able to mark up and track, WebNotes PR allows you to integrate keyword searches into your results. Import or enter in your own RSS feeds, like Twitter search results, and WebNotes can do a lot of the research work for you. It can also generate feeds for you from within the app.

While aimed at PR folks, I can see real value in this implementation for anyone who wants to take advantage of the monitoring tools to automate their research efforts.

WebNotes PR is launching with an introductory price of $300 per user per year with a two-week free trial. Along with this announcement, the prior Pro plan has been renamed WebNotes Academic with a $5 / month price for students or $10 / month without the discount. A reduced functionality, although still quite useful, free personal plan is also still available.

The launch of the PR-specific functionality helps to further differentiate WebNotes from other similar social bookmarking and annotation sharing services. By focusing on a core group of well-implemented services that can be focused and customized towards specific niches, WebNotes is keeping its product offering useful and easy to use.

How much time per day do you spend preparing research reports? Can WebNotes help you?

We are in the process of migrating our old, crusty blog to a new and improved WordPress blog. Please bear with us while we complete the migration!

Thanks,

Alex King

Here’s a very interesting Web 2.0 tool that looks useful for doing online research.  WebNotes allows you to highlight text and stick notes to web pages.  You can annotate and share PDF documents.  You can save your work in folders and build reports that can be shared with others.

The WebNotes home page includes a short demo video.  WebNotes has a free version, as well as,  fee versions with more bells and whistles.

This Web 2.0 tools is worth a try.  For “free,” what can you lose.

Click here to see an example of how you can annotate a web page using Webnotes.

Rick Lillie (CalState San Bernardino)

WebNotes, the online annotation and research tool, yesterday launched WebNotes Pro. This new premium product adds PDF annotation capabilities (check out the demo) and multicolor highlighting to the basic free app that Scott liked when he reviewed it in beta.

Thanks to the good folks at WebNotes, we’ve got a special discount for 50 lucky WWD readers. Use this link when signing up and you’ll get a 50 percent discount off the normal cost of $9.99 per month.

Do you use WebNotes? What do you think of the new WebNotes Pro?

I am in the midst of writing my final research paper for my MLIS degree. I have been procrastinating, but finally decided to sit down and write with the incentive that in the process I would also be exploring various research tools. I began with Zotero “the next generation research tool”. Although this application had functionality it lacked several things I was looking for including an easy interface. After some discussion (via Twitter) on how to decide what to use with the existence of overlapping applications, I attempted to try Evernote, but was unable to follow through, due to a lack of compatibility with my operating system.

Then thanks to The Librain I received an invite to WebNotes beta. After installing the toolbar the application worked seamlessly (no need for a tutorial or how to manual). In no time I managed to highlight and annotate several articles, organize them into one folder, and create a PDF document of my notes to download to my desktop. The only feature lacking in this application is the ability to create a bibliography consisting of citations of the articles in a particular group. Allow this would be a great addition, I am willing to continue using Bibme or NoodleTools for citations. The fact that WebNotes is so easy to use, makes it the ideal application for schools and libraries to turn to for research needs. Hopefully the availability of this application will be extended in the near future so I can recommend it’s use to teachers and students.

Congratulations to my friends at Webnotes for launching their invite-only beta yesterday. If you don’t already know, Webnotes was founded by a handful of MIT grads and it lets you annotate, share and organize notes on any web page.

•  Annotate the Web- “With Webnotes you can highlight text and stick notes to web pages”
• Organize Notes – “All highlights and notes are stored in folders with your Webnotes account”
• Share Comments – “Pages you annotate can be shared through email or online links”

On their first day Webnotes was featured on a number of blogs including, ReadWriteWeb, Mashable, and VentureBeat.

To register for their beta please visit www.WebNotes.net. I also have a handful of invitations available to my readers so if you’re interested just comment (with your email) to this post.

Back in the day, for research or study I used to arm myself with a highlighter and a pack of sticky notes and go to marking up pages in my textbooks that I needed to revisit, or I thought were particularly important.

Now the bulk of my research has moved online, and whether I am looking for information for an article for Web Worker Daily or investigating a client solution, I find myself roaming the web and identifying information that may be useful to me.

The problem is keeping track of it all, and pulling it together when I need to use it.  Aliza Sherman looked at some options to help with her research back in April, but a startup spun out of MIT might just have what I am looking for with their WebNotes service.

I see WebNotes as the online equivalent of that highlighter and sticky note solution but updated for the way we work on the web, with the bonus functionality of being able to organize, search, find, and aggregate all of those notes together in one place.

WebNotes gives me a conveniently placed toolbar that lets me highlight text or add a note to any web page and then quickly file those notes away.

It’s super simple to use but WebNotes is not a toy or fluff service, and there is no social networking component. It is aimed at serious researchers, those doing market intelligence, bloggers, students, etc.. and it does this really well.

There are a lot of tools and services available for organizing web content. But while tools like Notefish or even Evernote grab the contents and move to another page, WebNotes allows me to make all my notes and highlight information contextually. I can easily view all of my notes within the explorer but then I also have one click access back to the page where I can view my original annotations.

All of your notes and annotations are stored in folders within your account. Folders help define the scope of your research. For example I have folders for things like article topics, client solutions, tutorials, and design inspiration. It’s so easy to create new folders on the fly, highlight something interesting, and then just file it away for later. I can even drag and drop between folders.

When I’m ready to pull it all together, the publish option creates a very handy document that aggregates all items within a chosen folder together for me. If you’re used to a tedious copy / paste process you’ll just love this. Options let me customize what to include and this can then be saved as either html or as a PDF which I can distribute further.

All annotations are unique to your personal account and are not visible to anyone unless you choose to share them. This note sharing can be done on an individual page level. Send an email or create a permalink and even those without accounts or the toolbar can view your notes. I’ve already used this with clients to share suggestions or solicit feedback and it’s really handy.

This sharing process is nice and very useful, and although these shared pages are read only, it hasn’t been an issue for me yet. I’m curious how they might add collaboration features without it getting messy.

While I think the My Notes Explorer is really well done, WebNotes can be used in conjunction with other bookmarking or tagging tools like Delicious. Your notes and annotations appear on the pages no matter how you access them, so if you’ve got pages tagged and organized in another system, you aren’t forced to abandon that work and can still use WebNotes to do your markup.

You also get a custom WebNotes page which mirrors the look and feel of your Explorer and lets you access your information from any web enabled computer.

For large organizations, there are plans for the future to offer a self hosted / managed version to be used internally within your environment.

The WebNotes toolbar is available for Firefox 2+ and IE 6 & 7 but there is also a bookmarklet available which gives you the ability to use WebNotes without needing to install software, or for use in other browsers like Chrome.

There is no charge for using WebNotes during this beta phase, and the plan is for Webnotes to be a freemium tool with an entry level option available for free but with optional premium features also available.

WebNotes launched their invite only beta today and the nice folks there passed along some invites for WWD readers if you would like to give it a shot.

They are eager for feedback so if you’ve got any ideas, be sure to pass them along. For me, I really wish I could change the highlighter color to orange.

How do you research on the web? Is a WebNotes virtual highlighter the tool for you?

Many thanks to Alex King, Director of Marketing at WebNotes, for inviting me to visit their offices in Cambridge, MA.  Started by a handful of MIT grads, WebNotes is revolutionizing the way people collect and organize information on the web. WebNotes is currently in Beta and is expected to go live in the next couple of weeks – when they do make sure you check them out.

Online at http://www.webnotes.net/

I forgot to mention that I attended WebInno18 a couple of weeks ago.  The event was packed, which made it difficult to find anyone, however one great thing that came from the conference was being introduced (via their presentation) to WebNotes.  

Created by a bunch of MIT students in Cambridge, WebNotes enables users to “create and manage online annotations.”  In the simplest terms WebNotes makes it easy to highlight text on any web page, save that text to a folder, add sticky notes and share those highlights & sticky notes (directly on the web page) with anyone you want.  If you use the web for research, WebNotes is a terrific service for organizing your findings. Check them out at www.WebNotes.net.

In the last few weeks there has been a bunch of great tech events in Boston, including the WebInno mentioned above.  Next on the list is SummerMash Boston (Mashable) which I’ll also be attending – hope to see you there.

There is a very interesting essay about American classes and which social network they turn to here.

(Via Classy).

Cre8pc looks interesting.

This map of online communites is really very fun to study. (Got it by Svend).

Today I found Arounder.com – 360 degrees from most European citys.

And Plum, which redefines local television.

You gotta love Google Maps new Street View function.

Today we celebrated our constitution from 1849 in Denmark, the one that gave us constituational monarchy. I met some disappointed tourists on the street that was hoping for some shopping – but not today. Unfortunately. Btw. here´s some webnotes:

BBC has a very good site for learning English.

I´m waiting like a boy for Santa Claus to come with my N95.

Maybe the brain needs noise to learn?

And then my wife told me that the worlds first website is this.

Itunes U looks kind of clever.

The killer app in the new Apple TV is not the Youtube integration – it´s the 160GB harddisk.

Scratch from MIT looks interesting (via Tveskov).

Just a quick list of interesting links:

Google Video has a blog.

CNET are presenting CNET.TV.

And last, Washington Post invites readers to mash up their political reporter Dana Milbank.

The Other Side of the Tracks looks like a very promising series of portraits of an all-American family, now all we can hope for is that the series will be as funny as the promos.

Robert Scoble, long-time blogger and co-author of the book Naked Conversations, is interviewed by Beet.tv about his coming vlog, which will appear on the net in September.

And there sure is inspiration to gather from REDs paper on Transformation Design (link is to a PDF). Though it takes it start in design, the thinking behind it is quite interesting and inspiring.

The Guardian has three recent articles about new media worth checking out, one about why Top Of The Pops became an obsolete program in a digital world, one about Rocketbooms now former hostess and why she left, and one were this otherwise progressive newspaper show they basically just dont get it anyway. PSFK has a wellwritten, but a little angry, answer to the last article that apparently is following this earlier statement.