highlighting / annotating web pages

[UR user]

I am happy with the improvements in beta 3, but I am still hoping that sometime UR will allow highlighting / annotating of web pages. As ever more research is done through the web, it seems strikingly odd that we can capture the content but not annotate it in any way.

Knowledge Workshop just released its beta v2, and it has substantial similarities to UR. It has superb highlighting / annotation functions by comparison.

How do other folks who research content (downloading long articles or cases into UR) read/annotate what they've stored in UR? I don't mean this to be a rhetorical question. Thanks.

[$bill]

I usually just snip out the portions of the page that I am interested in...if I want to edit-I paste as RTF.

Less frequently I have used this method....


http://www.kinook.com/Forum/showthread.php?threadid=1111

haven't tried this yet:

http://www.kinook.com/Forum/showthread.php?s=&threadid=1776

[UR user]

Thanks for the alternative suggestions, which I had been aware of.

The reason why snipping doesn't work so well is that I'm talking about html versions of articles that may be 70 pages long, with internal footnoting links, etc. These are complicated documents that are made available through legal research services such as lexis or westlaw.

Separately highlighting them by editing through Word is a possibility. But it's a bit clumsy. One new word highlighted, then saved, requires a full reindexing of the saved document. As UR users know, re-indexing a 70 page document can lock up the computer for 30 seconds+.

I just think that the highlighting / annotating in programs such as Web Research, Knowledge Workshop, Idea Mason seem to be so much stronger. The whole point of UR and its central strength, however, is that it makes all other programs (besides an email/calendar client such as Outlook) unnecessary. Having a single repository to search through is its central reward (I'm tabling the fact that we can't yet search across UR databases).

I think just the tiny ability to highlight in yellow (even without any stickies, etc.) stored html pages would allow academics and legal researchers to put aside any other tool.

Kinook, thanks for listening.

[igoldsmid]

I think the ability to edit web pages altogether would be a fantastic improvement - not only highlighting - and I think the product called "Web Research" from Macropool has the best implementation of this - although Evernote version 2 is now saving web pages really well, and the content is immediately editable - it is also free. However I don't use it because UltraRecall blows it away in all other respects.

With the new UR 3 with its ability to add links to other Items from within text notes of other Items - kind of but not exactly like a wiki function - if web pages were editable it would be possible then to create cross references to other UR Items from selected content of imported web pages - now that would be cool!