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.

Share this post:

Possibly related:

• Nifty Web Cite Tool
• Writely Getting Tightly
• Web2.0 Slideshow