As part of our counsel to clients/colleagues, we track the news regularly and provide analyses on the issues discussed.

The Problem
Very often, the administrative hassle – of collection, collaboration, formatting, sharing and publishing – impede our personal efficiency and ability to get the real work – of analysis and counsel – done quickly and effectively.

The Solution
Google Notebook - which just came out of beta last week - seems like the perfect solution.

As you search for news articles online, you can easily add them to your Google Notebook by simply cutting and pasting. It’s even simpler with a Firefox Extension - you can “add clippings of text, images and links from web pages to your Google Notebook without ever leaving your browser window”.

More importantly, you can type in your analyses in the ‘Notes’ section at the bottom of every notebook entry – just as you would comment on a blog post.

Organize, Collaborate, Publish
You can create sections to categorize your news clippings by date, topic or in any way you please. And you can collaborate, share, publish and even export your entire notebook to Google Documents and saved so that it can be stored offline.

I used to think that a blog was a good way to keep a shared record of news articles with relevant commentaries, but Google Notebook offers a far more intuitive interface for this purpose. Plus it has collaboration features that blogs don’t.

What it Lacks
My only gripes at this stage are:

1. We can’t add tags to each entry. This makes sorting quite difficult if we have a massive amount of entries.
2. We cannot post images, and audio and video news clips, directly to the notebook. But this problem is easily solved by hosting the clips on an ftp site or a file sharing service like YouTube.com and linking to it.

But still, I love it. If you haven’t already, you should certainly take a tour and see how this can dramatically improve your personal and team productivity.

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