Google has been busy in the past week or so, unveiling several new sites as well as an update to Google Desktop. Here’s a rundown…
Google Notebook is a Firefox extension that allows you to “browse, clip, and organize information from across the web in a single online location that’s accessible from any computer.” I can see it really helping if you’re doing research on a topic and want to just capture snippets of text and images from a bunch of sites, instead of using a bunch of bookmarks.
TechCrunch points out that Google Notebook is a direct competitor to del.icio.us, but without the all-important tagging feature that makes it so useful. However, Google Notebook does a reasonably good job of organizing both text and images, and of course being present in Google search results might make it easier to access items than through del.ico.us. I’ll have to play with this some more to see if it’s really easier than conventional bookmarking and/or using del.icio.us…
Google Co-op will take a little more exploring before I really get it. According to Google,
It’s about sharing expertise. You can contribute your expertise and benefit when others do the same. Help other users find information more easily by creating “subscribed links” for your services and labeling webpages around the topics you know best.
Google Blogoscoped goes into more detail, but I’m not so sure that I’m finding this useful yet.
Google Trends gives you all sorts of options to “compare the world’s interest in your favorite topics” by entering up to five topics at once. For example, Micro Persuasion has a list of 25 Things I Learned On Google Trends. This is a very cool way of utilizing Google’s vast amount of search data, but for me personally it’s more of a curiousity than anything else at the moment…
Finally, Google updated Google Desktop to Version 4. The biggest change that I could see was being able to undock items from the Sidebar and the introduction of Google Gadgets. This is obviously suspiciously similar to Yahoo Widgets, which have far more to choose from at the moment. However, I find them to be a bit memory-intensive, so I may see how Google compares in that respect.
OK, I think that wraps things up (for now); time to explore these things further. Let me know if you’ve tried any of these and have found any interesting uses for them or have any experiences to share…
