One of my main uses for Blogger is as an impromptu bookmarking tool. If I come across something I think I might want to write about later, or just a URL I want for future reference, I use the Blog This button on my Google Toolbar and make a record of it. In the prior incarnation of Hidden City I had literally hundreds of those notes saved as drafts, clogging up Blogger, perhaps, but allowing me to save them.

So it is with no little joy that I greet the beta release of Google Notebook. From my initial use, it is a fairly good approximation of a web-based spiral-bound notebook (or commonplace book, for those followers of a certain series of unfortunate events). Once you install a simple IE/Firefox extension you can highlight text on a web page, then right-click and use the pop-up menu to select "Note this," and save your snippet (and related URL) to your Notebook on Google's server.

There are quite a few interesting features to this, such as the ability to make multiple notebooks for various subjects, having access to your notebooks from any PC, and make your notebooks publicly searchable and viewable. In effect, you could make a rudimentary mini-blog out of a public notebook (like this). This last aspect seems to have the most far-reaching implications, but this is only the first day in public beta for Google Notebook — let's see what happens.