BlogWorks: Cool tools for your bookmarks

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April 26, 2006

Cool tools for your bookmarks

By Chris Poterala

You're searching the blogosphere for posts about a certain subject. Someone sends you a link to great blog, but it's written in French, and the whole noun gender thing stops you cold. What to do?

If you're a Firefox user, install and start using gTranslate, a great extension for the Firefox browser:

"With gTranslate you can translate any text in a webpage just by selecting and right-clicking over it. The extension uses the Google translation services to translate the text."

Very handy.

But now it's a week later, and someone asks you to send them a link to that same great blog, but you're not at your machine at work; you're at home. You're facing the dilemma many of us face: how to manage bookmarks. Exporting and re-importing booksmarks to keep two or more machines in sync is a pain.

What to do? Start by signing up for the new Google Bookmark service.. Like the other services from Google (gmail, calendar, etc.), it's easy to use.

The service is very similar to del.icio.us, letting you assign tags to bookmarks and grouping bookmarks rather than having to explicity group items in folders. It does not yet have the social networking/sharing features of del.icio.us, but I'm sure those will soon be incorporated, allowing people to share bookmarks and to see similarly tagged bookmarks from other people. I find their bookmark service a great way to let me organize and manage my bookmarks AND be able to access them from anywhere.

"But," you say, "I don't want to have to go to Google to see my bookmarks..."

I'm right there with you. I want my bookmarks available in a drop-down menu, in my browser.

The author of the gTranslate service has another great extension available; the Google Bookmarks Button, or GBB.

Install this extension in Firefox and you will then have a very handy drop-down bookmarks menu added to your browser's toolbar, providing ready access to your Google Bookmarks.

Posted by staff at April 26, 2006 11:58 AM