Surfulater for PIM
Surfulater is a personal information research service…basically you can bookmark webpages, search all your bookmarks (full-text), organise them into folders, browse by date.
But you are not only bookmarking the URL, you can clip a section of the page, using a right-click extension.
When you go back to Surfulater you can organise that bookmark in folders (even choose from a gallery of folder and bookmark icons).
NOTE: this is not a web-based service and it is not a social service (although the application and data is small enough to carrry around in a USB).
When you click on the bookmark you will see its information page:
- the clipped section
- the URL to the native page
- the link to the attached version of the webpage (offline)
- thumbnail
You can re-edit the clipped section (HTML editor), and makes a comment/note
Both clipmarks, and Diigo allow to clip sections of bookmarks and leave comments, but both of these services are web-based, enable tagging and are social systems…plus Diigo does so much more these days, especially annotating webpages.
Also see Notefish and Google Notebook for non-social clipping services…although both enable a public view.
NOTE: Surfulater organises using folders with a tree browsing or date browsing view as opposed to tagging and flat level view…although you can keep a bookmark in multiple folders.
Also to note is that you can make as many Surfulaters as you want, you can make different tabs or channels (ie. multiple knowledge bases)
An advantage is that Surfulater allows you to clip non-web text (eg. PC files)…and you can also create HTML templates for your space, instead of a clipping webpages view you can have a to-do list view, contacts view, etc…
See the Surfulater screenshot or take the tour…here’s the overview.
I probably haven’t covered all the features, see the feature list (right sidebar), and scroll to end to see competitor offerings…here’s another feature list.
I’d like to see a feature comparion matrix with the competitor products…any out there?
See the blog for updates.
[ADDED 05/08/06: I forgot to add e-snips to the web-based social clipping alternatives]
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Hi, I’m the author of Surfulater and would like to express my thanks for your review. I’d like to mention of couple of things not covered in your review.
Surfulater enables you to access all of your saved content without having to be connected to the Net. It is also much faster to access, organize and work with your content than Web based applications. With Surfulater you don’t need to worry about having all of your valuable content locked away on some third party site, with no sustainable business model.
You can publish Surfulater content to HTML, MHTML or E-Mail it. In future you will be able to publish entire Knowledge Bases to HTML, including the Navigation Tree. This will be ideal for folks who want to share content on a Web site. And Surfulater content is stored as industry standard XML, not some proprietary database.
Surfulater uses HTML Templates to define what Articles look like and the data they contain. These templates can be changed and new ones added by the end-user.
Soon we’ll have Knowledge Base Synchronization available. This will enable KB’s to be synchronized between say your Desktop and Notebook PC’s or your Home and Work PC’s, over the Internet. This lets you move from PC to PC and have all of your content available.
There is much more to Surfulater and much more on the drawing board, but that’s enough from me for now.
Again thanks for the review, it is much appreciated.
Neville Franks Surfulater, Save what you Surf
Comment by Neville Franks — August 7, 2006 @ 10:38 pm