Google Notebook is now live borrowing from and/or heavily inspired (your choice) from other snip, clip and collect tools like Clipmarks formerly known as Amplify, Shadows, del.icio.us, furl, spurl, Squidoo, OneNote and the list goes on. You can share created Google notebooks publically or keep them private via a Firefox extension or IE add-in. Unlike many similar collecting tools, there is no way to multiple tag the notes, but you can add a single category. Also, the search across public notebooks isn’t activated yet.

The function to actually see the page to download the extension was buggy for me, not prompting when I first visited and logged into the Google Notebook page. So I logged out and in again and this time saw the following page:

From there, choose to install, then restart Firefox and an “open notebook” link appears in the status bar at the bottom of Firefox. Click on that and a small blue window hovers with your current notebook. You can choose to go to full page, pictured at the top of this post, from the actions menu.

The idea is to surf pages and collect things that interest you, which I’m doing while reading the morning’s RSS feeds and will continue to add to the notes below as updates. I created a new notebook called dailyRSS to use for this test and as I read an interesting quote, see an interesting picture or link I’m clipping and dragging within the dailyRSS notebook.

Notes on using Google Notebook
- drag and drop images from other webpages at the insertion point in your notebook
- how to create bulleted lists?

Traffic and monetization
My early opinion on all these clip, snip and collect tools is about the same: I can only use one of them. The challenge will be choosing which one to use on other machines than my tablet pc. Sorry Google, no way are you replacing OneNote on the Tablet with this bare bones, no ink offering.

And the biggest selling point about OneNote over all these tools, including Google, is I can snip this stuff and keep it locally without an internet connection and do not have to worry about it becoming a monetization option for somebody else. For those without a tablet pc, however, OneNote isn’t as compelling. It’s really one of those tools you need to use ink to appreciate.

The converse is that by sharing notebooks with targeted, relevant data, more people might search that and come to your website. The traffic side of Google remains their not so secret weapon over all competitors.

I still am holding out for a OneNote Live offering by Microsoft. If they could just deliver more traffic back to websites then they could become a worthy adversary for Google on offerings like Google Notebook. I’m not completely sure Microsoft wants to share their traffic like Google does, however, although making the Vista and IE default page live.com is a good, albeit too far away, start. Get webmasters more traffic, gain more mindshare, it’s really not that hard a concept.

Webmaster don’t want toys, they want traffic.

If I worked at Microsoft or Yahoo right now I’d be banging this drum as loudly and clearly as possible: traffic, traffic, traffic. How do we push more traffic to websites/webmasters? Especially now that both Yahoo and Microsoft are in the ad business — help your clients make more money and they’ll make you more money.

• Laptops now outselling desktops says study
• OneNote 2007 minimum UI mode
• Organizing Mind Camp attendee list in OneNote
• Checking out the new Google goodies: Trends, Coop and more
• Tablet PC online chat Dec 7, 2005
• Free Experience Pack for Windows XP Tablet PC 2005 Edition