I just noticed today that Google seem to have made a big change to their online notebook and web clipping system.

It seems that this update is part of their intention to integrate their products and present a more unified system for its users. Something that is sorely needed across a myriad of offered services, from word processing to mapping, from content publishing to communication, it is possible for a user to have a huge amount of information stored in various Google product offerings, but there may be no easy way to get information from one service into the other.

What does this mean for Google Notebook? Read on to see the changes that have been made.

Bookmark Integration

They have taken the Google Bookmarks on your account and dropped every bookmark into a new “unfiled” notebook. In my case this means that I now have 1124 notes in my Unfiled Notebook!

Any new pages that I bookmark¹ now appear immediately in this unfiled notebook, which allows for much better searching and filtering of these bookmarks if I am ever trying to find something that I just knew I had bookmarked!

Labels

They have copied across all of your Bookmark labels as well. As a result you can now label any note in your notebook, which should make things easier to categorise and cross-reference.

When you click on a label you are presented with a standard Notebook view, which only shows notes labelled with your selected label. There is a simple drop down menu allowing you to sort and filter these notes, whether by label names, date, or to reduce the number of notebooks by adding another label filter.

This is definitely a nice new feature that was sorely missing.

Comments

They have added a comment feature as well which allows simple input of comments attached to a certain note. Think of it as an extension on each note which is coloured differently to allow for better organisation of your thoughts!

To be honest I can’t be sure if this is a new item or not. If it was there before I hadn’t noticed it and perhaps someone can let me know if this is a new feature.

If it’s new then it’s definitely a welcome addition, especially in the case of shared notebooks.

Any Problems?

Well, there are a few small things that don’t seem to have been thought through fully from an integration point of view.

1. As you bookmark more items around the web, these bookmarks are instantly added to your Unfiled Notebook. This is nice, however at the moment it seems as though labels aren’t instantly updated. Also, if you add a label in Notebook, this label is not made available in Google Bookmarks. Surely it would be better to unify your labels – why else would you dump all these unfiled notes and labels into Google Notebook?
2. Comments are obviously a nice feature, but there is no threading or identifiers. If you have shared a notebook with a colleague it would be nice to see who has commented on what, and I would have thought this would be fairly simple to implement.
3. If you’re going to add Google bookmarks, why not add in the new shared stuff feature from Google²? It seems that whether making a notebook clipping, adding a bookmark, or sharing an item, these are all similar actions, and the idea of having these links combined, collected and sorted in one location is quite appealing – as long as it’s easy to use!

Overall Impressions

Definitely a nice addition to the service, although I think they have the potential to make this an incredible system. For a long time I had hoped that they would create some form of export/synchronisation function, allowing you to download all your notes as text files and allow access when you don’t have a web connection – although I would imagine that their Gears functionality will be rolled out for Google Notebook soon.

Perhaps once there is offline functionality then Google Notebook can take over from all those random text files I have dotted around my computer!

1. I use the GMarks extension for firefox to speed up cross bookmarking
2. The Google Shared Stuff feature is a little lacking at the moment, however, and is probably not worthy of integration as of yet