Blogging Tips

One of the best ways to increase productivity as a blogger and freelance writer, is to take notes and annotate Web pages.  This is not only great for organizing your ideas, but it helps you to remember your thoughts on any text or images that you may have come across while browsing. There’s nothing like thinking of an idea and then forgetting it a few hours later because you forgot to write it down! With annotation tools like the ones below, you can jot down notes as soon as you think of them and right on the Web pages where you think of them.

One of the most popular tools (and also one of the best) for highlighting and annotating Web pages is Diigo. With Diigo, you can highlight and bookmark Web pages, collect screenshots and images and add notes via their browser extension or a bookmarklet; they even have an iPad Web highlighter. Plus your highlights and notes reappear whenever the Diigolet is active.

However, I’m going to point out 4 other annotation tools that are very handy to have around as well.

Annotary

Annotary lets you bookmark and highlight Web pages, take notes and share with friends – via a browser extension. You can choose to make your highlights and notes public or private. Your pages will remain highlighted and annotated so that whenever you visit them, your thoughts will still be there for reference. Best of all, your annotations are saved in the cloud, which allows you to access them from your computer, tablet or mobile device.

inFocus.cc

inFocus.cc allows you to “highlight and share your focus on the Web.” You can do this via their website (by entering the site URL), Chrome extension or by using a bookmarklet. You can add focus to widgets, text and images. When you add focus to content on a Web page, it treats it like a lightbox – giving focus to the selected content and dimming the rest of the Web page.

Klippie

Klippie allows you to “klip and micro-share things from the Web”  via a bookmarklet. You can save and organize content, articles, images, code and much more – and choose to make your annotations public or private. All you have to do is highlight content on a Web page and then click on the bookmarklet (or simply click the bookmarklet to bookmark the page). You’ll also be able to choose images from the page to save along with your klips.

Citelighter

Citelighter is great for storing, organizing and sharing your Web research. You can highlight Web pages and take notes via a browser extension (Firefox, Chrome, Safari). Your can capture  content from Web pages, add notes and then view and organize your findings via the Citelighter toolbar. Unfortunately, your highlights do not remain on the Web page.

This tool is geared towards projects. You’ll need to a project before you can capture information and then all of your highlights and notes can be added to that project. So, it’s great for working on blog posts and articles because you can instantly organize all of your notes and research.

What is your favorite Web annotation tool?