Bookmarking & collaborating on web research with iCyte.com
Posted By RichC on April 23, 2010
At some point in collecting and bookmarking websites for research and the organizational complexity that comes with doing it can be daunting. My XMarks synced bookmarks have become so unwieldy that I don’t even use them anymore – same for those I’ve archived with Delicious.com. I’ve turned to use an Instapaper’s “ReadLater” bookmarklet, a PDFit add-on for Firefox which captures pages to a PDF file … or a Pagenest offline browser archived version of a website. Still it isn’t easy and oftentimes just searching for the site I’ve ‘marked’ is so difficult that it is easier to search all over again. So when I read Katherine Boehret WSJ article this week I decided to give the iCyte.com bookmarking and page saving option a try.
iCyte is a way to collect a copy of a page for later reading or research and also offers an easy way to share or collaborate information on particular subjects with other. 
It offers a bit more since there are options such as including tags, notes, comments and even highlighting. The highlighting feature works well with the two currently supported browsers, Firefox and Internet Explorer, and helps when trying to assemble the bits and pieces one might want in developing a paper, articles or project. The management features of iCyte.com have made it easy to search the 
many sites being marked all of which is currently free.
Another helpful option is developing an RSS feed for a project. Since I run a sidebar RSS reader (Sage Firefox add-on), it is handy to keep a feed running for a project where all sites being archived are easy to access … of course iCyte also has a built in button for the browser that pulls up their own sidebar too. (tested the embed feature above in this blog)
Perhaps one of the best reasons to capture a page is for those that eventually disappear from the parent site or get relinked differently in a site update or rebuild. When reviewing a marked page you’ll have the option of viewing the captured ‘cyte’ or clicking a ‘liveview’ that links to the origination page (helpful if there is updated information, comments or attached media … I was unable to capture video)
The the WSJ article reviews a few more of the details if you are interested in reading further before signing up for a free account.
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