I just installed a new Firefox extension called “Scrapbook”:http://amb.vis.ne.jp/mozilla/scrapbook/feature.php?lang=en. It’s really neat. I found out about Scrapbook from a recent “review”:http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1759,1758849,00.asp of 15 extensions in PCMagazine.

Scrapbook allows you to capture full web pages and create plain text or HTML notes. To aid with filing of this information, you can create folders that are managed in a “sidebar interface”:http://amb.vis.ne.jp/mozilla/scrapbook/screenshot/capture_entire_drop_en.png that resembles Firefox’s default bookmark sidebar. You can capture sites through the “context menu”:http://amb.vis.ne.jp/mozilla/scrapbook/screenshot/capture_entire_en.png (right click menu) or by “drag-and-dropping a page”:http://amb.vis.ne.jp/mozilla/scrapbook/screenshot/capture_entire_drop_en.png into the sidebar. You can also capture individual images from a page by “drag-and-dropping an image”:http://amb.vis.ne.jp/mozilla/scrapbook/screenshot/capture_image.png into the sidebar. The “search interface”:http://amb.vis.ne.jp/mozilla/scrapbook/screenshot/main_0.11.0_1.png is pretty trick too.

Man, this is one pro extension.

_*Updated: 2005_02_14*_
You can also “vote”:http://amb.vis.ne.jp/mozilla/scrapbook/todo.php?lang=en for the feature you would like to see next.

Services like “del.icio.us”:http://del.icio.us and “Spurl.net”:http://spurl.net/ (and a lot of others) are trying to capture user’s bookmarks online, so where are the majors (e.g., Google, Yahoo!, MSN) in this? The only one that has any such service is Yahoo!. Their “Yahoo! Toolbar”:http://toolbar.yahoo.com — formally Yahoo! Companion — has a online bookmark feature (hey, they have a new “Firefox version”:http://toolbar.yahoo.com/firefox of the toolbar in beta). However, I doubt that Yahoo! has enough users of this feature to really do anything meaningful with the data.

When you think about it, bookmarks are a huge repository of preference information. It’s like “PageRank”:http://www.google.com/technology/ except that the majority of the data are opaque… locked up in a client. Making these data more transparent could increase the relevancy of search and add new functionality to search — like if you added some “folksonomy”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folksonomy to it, and got “this”:http://del.icio.us/tag/.

So where are the majors?