Citebite Redux
You’ll recall citebite, the citation tool that worked fantastically with Firefox, and not at all with IE? Well, now it does. Well done, guys. (and thanks for the reminder, Stuart).
I’m honour-bound to break the news of the existence of a potential competing service, though. Ranjit Padmanabhan tells me he’s launched a product called Dashnote. He says it’s got some advantages:
[It] enables functionality similar to Cite Bite, but the flow is more natural, i.e. you mark the region of the page while you are reading it, and we store a snapshot. We enable multiple citations per page and the ability to add a note on top of the content being cited – kinda like Post-Its for the web.
My own first impressions on trying the service are that it’s very useful as a combined bookmarking and annotation tool, but actually quite a bit different to citebite. Using the bookmarklet brings up an annotation tool that lets you highlight and make notes on various sections of a web document.
Once you’ve made your notes, you get a short-form URL. This can either be viewed through your Dashnote account or used as a link. When the link is clicked, the viewer is directed to an annotated view of the web page.
Quite impressive and useful. There’s also del.icio.us integration, which appears to be a tad buggy at present, but will, I’m sure, eventually be useful. It would have been nice to be able to tag and title your clippings from within your Dashnote account, though.
NB: Like Citebite, a Dashnote link goes directly to the respective service, not the author of the blog you’re referring to. Users writing blog posts etc. may thus want to also insert a plain link to whatever they’re citing in order to maintain link-love karma.
