The Internet is a great place to research almost any topic, but how do you keep track of what you find? Archivd is a tool that helps you organize information from web pages and share it with other co-workers and team members.

As such, it has some similarities to other online services like Google Notebook, Springpad and Zenbe’s Shareflow.  Just as with Google Notebook and Springpad, Archivd uses a bookmarklet to allow you to clip relevant information you find online and save it for later in just a couple of clicks.  Just as with Shareflow, the information you save then becomes visible to other members of your project group.

However, for projects that require collaborative online research, Archivd has features that make it superior to each of these other options. For example, the service automatically grabs and indexes images from the pages you bookmark-although this feature didn’t work for me when I tried it out, so it may only work for certain sites. Shareflow can grab either the text or the picture, but not at the same time.  Springpad and Google Notebook just grab the text.

The user interface is what really makes Archivd stand out. Other online notebooks have a tendency to become unwieldy. Archivd keeps you organized. You can break a project down into separate lists, and then use tags to further organize and filter through your notes. You can view the pages you’ve archived in several formats: lists, tables, cards or images.  Archivd also makes it easy to share knowledge with your coworkers. All of the users on an Archivd account can contribute notes for a specific project, and they can comment on each other’s notes, as well.

Other nifty features: If there’s an address on a  page that you’ve saved, Archivd maps it automatically for you. Also, you get an “Activity Feed” that tells you what other users have been up to on the project.

However, there are some limitations. For example, you can’t post a document from your hard drive  to Archivd for your co-workers to review-you can only clip web pages.

Still, if you need to organize and share information about a specific topic with the people you work with, Archivd is an extremely useful tool.  Plans vary in price depending on the total number of users and projects. The basic plan is free, but only includes one user and one project-suitable for the lone wolf freelancer, but only if you don’t mind deleting all your research when its time to start a new project.  From there, paid plans start at $24 per month and max out at $99 per month.

What do you use to organize your online research?

Our Rating of Archivd

Tags: Business

Categories:web