WebNotes is Shutting Down

WebNotes is an online bookmarking service that has been around for more than six years. It allowed users to highlight, annotate, clip, and bookmark resources. I thought it was a good service and many others did too. Unfortunately, not enough people thought the same way and now the service is shutting down. On November 1st WebNotes will go offline. If you have been using it, you should export your data now. You can find a guide for that process on the WebNotes transition page.

A few services that offer similar functionality as WebNotes are CiteLighter, RefME, and Diigo.

Citelighter - Store, Organize, and Share Research

Citelighter is a helpful tool for anyone trying to organize their online and or offline research findings. At its core Citelighter is a browser extension (available for Chrome, Firefox, and Safari) that enables you to select sections of webpages and save them along with the important information needed to create an APA, MLA, or Chicago style bibliography. If you have pieces of text from books and journals that you want to include in your list of citations, you can add those in Citelighter too.

Citelighter also has a community aspect that allows you to share your citations and search those of others. The citations in the public gallery are called "Knowledge Cards." Knowledge Cards are the pieces of quoted text that others have saved and tagged with a subject area. The Knowledge Cards you find in the public gallery can be added to the project lists in your personal Citelighter account.

Watch the video below to see all of Citelighter's features in action.

Citelighter How It Works from saad alam on Vimeo.

Applications for Education
Citelighter could be a fantastic research aid for students. The clipping feature allows students to highlight the key information from a page so that a few days down the road they're not wondering why they bookmarked a webpage. The bibliography tools help students properly format their works cited pages. And searching the Knowledge Cards is like opening to the bibliography of a good book and finding out what the author used in his or her research.