Snip it with Net Snippets

Like all longtime professional users of the Web, we have been struggling to organize all the material we find online. Every excursion onto the Web leads us to yet more interesting stuff we want to keep for later perusal.

Of course the stuff for later perusal is often far removed from the stuff we first went looking for. This is an easy trap to fall into when you head out looking for information on, say, the obscure internals of Microsoft Outlook and stumble upon a Web site that describes a bizarre struggle between a 13-inch Liposarcus pardalis and a three-inch Pomacea canaliculata.

So how can you collect, organize and share all this flotsam and jetsam that might one day become crucial decision-making data should we find our plecostomus trying to eat our albino mystery snail?

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Like all longtime professional users of the Web, we have been struggling to organize all the material we find online. Every excursion onto the Web leads us to yet more interesting stuff we want to keep for later perusal.

Of course the stuff for later perusal is often far removed from the stuff we first went looking for. This is an easy trap to fall into when you head out looking for information on, say, the obscure internals of Microsoft Outlook and stumble upon a Web site that describes a bizarre struggle between a 13-inch Liposarcus pardalis and a three-inch Pomacea canaliculata.

So how can you collect, organize and share all this flotsam and jetsam that might one day become crucial decision-making data should we find our plecostomus trying to eat our albino mystery snail?

We've tried many products for collecting and managing the results of Web research. Some were fairly impressive, but we just got our hands on a new product that is outstanding: Net Snippets from Net Snippets.

Net Snippets can help you save and catalog not just whole Web pages but also "snippets," which can be the Windows Clipboard; the current page selection as text; all text, images or links on the current page; specific frames within the current page; a link to the current page; a screen capture; an e-mail message; a Microsoft Word file;. . . pretty much anything stored on your PC.

The screen-capture feature is pretty sophisticated, letting you capture areas that are rectangular, rectangular with rounded edges, elliptical, triangular, parallelogram-ular or even completely irregular shapes. What is really useful about the screen-capture feature is that you can capture any part of the PC's screen rather than just the image within the browser window.

Along with the captured content, Net Snippets records the details of the source, and date and time of capture. You can save snippets to folders and assign an "importance," keywords, attributes (creator's name, e-mail address, etc.) and an abstract for each snippet.

Net Snippets can be configured as an Internet Explorer Explorer bar (that's the optional display region on the left side of the browser window), as a floating toolbar outside Explorer or as a "drop zone" in the Windows Start bar. In the last two forms you can add items such as messages from Outlook and Outlook Express or files from Internet Explorer to your snippets collection. There's even a plug-in for Word to select and insert snippets into documents.

The options for organizing snippets include moving them to folders; creating reports, an index or a bibliography on individual snippets, or the snippets in one or more folders; searching your snippets collection; or preparing a selection of snippets for delivery.

The delivery feature is where Net Snippets really breaks from the competitive pack because it lets you easily share your research with other people.

You select one or more snippets to send to another user by e-mail. If that user has Net Snippets installed, you can send the snippets in their native format or compressed in a ZIP file. If the recipient is not using Net Snippets you can send the snippets as HTML files in a self-unpacking executable or a ZIP file.