Finders, keepers: Tools to make web browsing more productive
Issue: Volume 28 Number 3
You are at a coaching seminar, deep in conversation with another coach about the latest strength and conditioning program. ‘I saw it on the web,’ you say, ‘I’ll forward you the link.’
No sooner do you make the promise than you realise you know considerably less about the program than you thought. Back in front of your computer, you begin running various combinations of the little you do remember through your favourite search engine.
An hour of fruitless searching later, the best you can hope for is that your new contact has forgotten all about your promise.
Sound familiar? You are not alone. Sports coaches increasingly turn to the worldwide web to research trends, new products and equipment, get background on competitors and competition venues, and to keep informed of the latest rule changes in their sport.
The challenge for coaches is to make the time they spend browsing — around seven hours a week for the average Australian, according to Roy Morgan Research — productive; and this requires minimising the time wasted finding the same piece of information more than once.
Bookmarking
Bookmarking web pages (known as ‘Favorites’ in the Internet Explorer web browser) is the easiest way to avoid repeating searches. However, you can only create so many bookmarks before the one you need becomes difficult to recall, or results in hours spent organising them into folders and sub-folders.
And even when you do find the bookmark you want, there’s no guarantee the page still holds the same information, or even exists anymore. In fact, if the information was contained in the online edition of a major newspaper, you can be almost certain it will have disappeared into a paid archive by the time you need it again.
This leads some users to print out articles before this can happen. But this strategy leaves you with same, time-consuming filing task as bookmarks — only further complicated by the need to find a home for another bit of paper.
Help is at hand
Fortunately, there is a better way to make your browsing more effective than the equivalent of felling a small forest of trees. A number of computer software tools are now available to coaches frustrated by the ‘now you see it, now you don’t’ nature of the web. The five featured here — Surfulater, Onfolio, ContentSaver, Webstractor and Yahoo! My Web 2.0 — are by no means an exhaustive list. They each take a slightly different approach to tackling the following, basic challenges of managing information found on the web.
Capture
You are browsing away and hit on something interesting that you would like to keep for future reference. Providing you are using Internet Explorer or Mozilla Firefox, capturing the relevant web page is as straightforward as clicking on the special toolbar. The featured software tool will typically add to either of those two popular web browsers. This will save a complete copy to your hard drive, though you can opt to save only a link if you are confident the page will not move anytime soon.
However, saving complete copies of web pages will soon fill your drive with as much advertising as useful information and, if interesting facts and figures are buried inside long articles, may leave you scratching your head about why you saved many of them in the first place. So most of these tools allow you to save only selected text and images from the page, while retaining a link to the complete version should you need it later on. Some even allow you to edit the page directly to create your very own personalised version.
Organise
The items or pieces of information you capture typically ends up in folders, which you can view and manipulate either through a sidebar inside your browser, or by switching to a separate program. Folders can then be grouped under a single topic or project, sometimes called a ‘collection’ or ‘knowledge base’. Most tools also let you assign categories or flags to items, as well as your own comments.
Search
While most of the tools featured here can help you put items in the right folder the first time around, there will be times when your project is so large, or your query so specific, that wading through even meticulously organised folders will try your patience. This is when a search feature is indispensable.
Searches based on item contents are standard, and most tools will also allow you to refine your searches by any categories or flags you set up. More intriguingly, one tool lets you create ‘dynamic’ or ‘smart’ folders, so-called because they fill themselves with items based on search criteria that you specify.
Share
There are a number of ways to share with others the fruits of your browsing. Importantly, they do not require the recipient to be using the same tool. Indeed, all of the tools will allow you to share entire folders via a standard email, either as a list of links or as fully formatted web pages that the recipient can view through any browser.
Extras
While it is important to get the basics of information management right, it can be that extra feature or two that makes a tool invaluable. For example, if a lot of your most valuable information arrives by email, you will be interested in a feature that allows the capture of email text and attachments directly from Microsoft Outlook with a single mouse-click. Alternatively, if you regularly browse from different computers, you may be prepared to sacrifice other features for online storage of your saved information.
The bottom line
The goods news is that these tools will not break the bank. If you do a reasonable amount of web research, the time, let alone embarrassment, they may save you, make them worth a second look.
Web research tools
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