Like most computer analysts, I spend a large part of my working day on the Web. Until last week I would copy and paste anything of interest I saw there into some form of editor that was not on the Web. Typically that would be NoteTab (a replacement for Windows Notepad) or Microsoft’s clever but heavyweight OneNote.

Last week, I instead started using Google’s Notebook for note taking. It’s nearly as smart as M$ OneNote and faster than switching to an offline editor every time I want to copy something from a Web page.

The service itself isn’t new, having been introduced last May (see here, on the DownloadSquad blog.) What is new is the ability to share Google Notes, including showing them to the public.

Here’s a public page I made earlier. Ignore the rubbish I’ve written and look instead at the kind of material I can put on the page. Each alternate entry is straight off the Web, with links and pictures (pretty much) as they are on the original page. All you have to do is select the area of the page you want to copy, right-click and choose “Note this (Google Notebook)”.

The size, colour and face of fonts used in the text are all adjustable. I’ve shown that to exaggerated effect, hence the ransom-note look. You can also make any part of a section into a live link to a Web page or an email address. (Try the last section to see this in action.)

A shared notebook can be edited by anyone in the group who has a Gmail account. It then becomes almost, but not quite, a Wiki.

There is room for improvement, of course — Google Notebook lacks a spelling checker, for instance — but the software is still in beta. It should therefore get even better before general release.

One thing that cannot be changed is the fact that what you select and what you write will sit on Google’s servers. Whether that concerns you is a personal and, possibly, a corporate decision. If it is a worry, then you might like instead to look at Surfulator. This is not free — it costs just under £20 — but you will know where your data is if you use it.

I don’t put anything sensitive on any search company’s Web site, anyway, so this clever tool from Google is going to get plenty of use from me.