Onfolio for Windows Live Toolbar - Collect, organize and share your online research

Posted on March 25, 2008 at 6:39 am

Have you ever been lost? I don’t mean not being able to find a particular restaurant. With GPS that probably doesn’t happen anymore anyway. No, I’m talking about having absolutely no freaking idea where on planet earth you are. Perhaps I exaggerate, but being lost can be a frightening experience.

I can remember three times I got lost as a child and none of them were fun. (Why so often, I can’t answer.) The Internet is so huge today that you can easily lose your way. Having a History function in your browser helps, but if your path is long, that won’t always be enough.

Enter Onfolio, now owned by Microsoft and incorporated into Window Live Toolbar. Billed as the easiest way to organize online content, I give it credit for being just that. If you don’t already have Windows Live Toolbar added to your IE browser, it’s a worthwhile add-in. Once you have it installed, you can download and install the Onfolio add-in.

With Onfolio, when you click on the toolbar button, it opens the Onfolio sidebar, and then you can begin to add content as you navigate the Internet. If you’re doing research, you can add anything from articles and files to graphics and bookmarks. Once you have the content, you can easily organize it for easy retrieval and to fit your way of working. You can create notes to describe what you’ve saved, or add comments, keywords and flags.

Here’s the coolest part: You can share everything you’ve done with Onfolio. You can email anything from your Onfolio installation, You can post them to a blog. Onfolio integrates with Microsoft Office. And you can export your information from Onfolio to your computer in folders. Additionally, you can use Onfolio as an RSS reader. With all this functionality, Onfolio is a very worthwhile addition toy your box of tools.

Overall, Onfolio is a great way to collect, organize, and share online content. You can also check out other free software that allows you to clip data from websites and share it, including Clipmarks. Of course, Google Notebook has been around for a while and works very well also for saving clippings of web pages. Finally, you can check out Listas, oddly another program from Microsoft, that allows you to create online lists and share them easily. Enjoy!