Highlighting Web pages and concentration while reading
Highlighting and concentration
When I read plain old dead-tree books, I almost always have my highlighters in hand, generally two colors, one for importance and one for new concepts. I will also add margin notes, especially when something is not clear and requires some thought (lots of thought often means pages upon pages of columnar scribbling…).
These additions allow me to “interact” with what I read, in a way. It makes me feel more involved, like I’m creating something, adding to the book to make it personal, as opposed to passively reading, thus helping concentration. And need I mention highglights make revision much quicker?
It’s therefore natural that I wanted to port this habit to the Web.
Tools for Web page notes and highlights
The tools come in various sizes and shapes, some online, some offline. Those I’ll mention allow you to actually save the page, which is really handy as Web pages have this annoying tendency to disappear after a while.
One offline, local tool I use extensively when reading long articles online is ScrapBook, a free Firefox plugin. With it, you can save Web pages or parts of them. It then allows highlights of multiple styles (configurable) and sticky notes, among other useful features. You can organize those clippings in a hierarchy and search through them. I use it so much I created special keyboard shortcuts for highlights; I described the procedure on my personal blog.
If you’d rather have a cross-browser and online portable tool, there are a few Web 2.0-ish sites that have similar functionality. Some have the added benefit that clippings can be shared and therefore function as elaborate social bookmarking sites. For the basic functionality, you don’t need to install anything; a simple “bookmarklet” (a special kind of browser bookmark) does most of what you need.
Well known tools in this space are:
- Google Notebook: save pages or selections to your private notebook, you can then highlight and modify freely the clip as any other document. Really good for the editing features
- A.nnotate: allows you to import and edit PDFs and Word documents (among others) online, not just Web pages. There’s a paid version for heavy users. The PDF annotation feature seems particularly well done (I’ve had problems with multicolumn text with other tools, but it handles that very well)
- Diigo: been around for a while, strong accent on the community aspect.
- AwesomeHighlighter: very simple and clean. Just enter an URL and annotate. After you’ve finished annotating, it generates a short URL you can use to link to your annotated page. No community dimension for the moment, though.
There’s also an even more impressive list of sites that allow “clippings” (selections) to be saved without the highlighting-in-place aspect, like Clipmarks.
