Thursday, March 04, 2010 by Adrian

There is a lot of information on the world wide web. A LOT. Anyone who's ever tried to look up something online is likely to be aware of this, but probably won't realise the scale of information their chosen search engine is dealing with and just the amount of activity going on online that day. Here's a fun, graphic illustration of the vastness of the internet on Gizmodo, which helps to put things into perspective.

When performing a search, once the search engine has pulled up your matching results there's often a bit more work to be done. Sifting through to work out a site's relevance or picking out the specific details needed and at times, you'll visit more websites than you can keep track of, and although your web browser's bookmarks come in very handy for this, they can become awkward when you're trying to save specific information for review. At Ouno Creative were very interested to check out iCyte's shareable bookmarks that help solve these problems.

The brain child of LiveNote's founder, Graham Smith, and CEO Stephen Foley, iCyte was started in 2007 to "apply the concept of annotations to the broader market of doing research on the internet."

Since then, the product has evolved to incorporate the saving of webpages and collaboration features known as "Cytes". iCyte further explain that "In Graham's earlier creation, lawyers would annotate transcripts that were often hundreds of pages in length to find the portions of it that were most relevant to their case", but in the more developed iCyte, users are able to highlight text on any website displayed by the Firefox or Interent Explorer web browsers, then bookmark the highlighted text in the cloud. This allows you to either share it with someone else or review it yourself at a later time. iCyte market the idea as "better than bookmarks" because you can access your Cytes from any computer, even if the original webpages you looked at have been deleted or changed.

Samuel Axon's post about iCyte on Mashable.com points out that for this reason, "iCyte is particularly useful for sharing stuff on social media sites like Twitter or Facebook. Sometimes the content of a link changes after you've shared it on social networks or there's so much content that your contacts don't know where to locate the stuff you found interesting, but iCyte addresses both of those issues. Cytes are preserved as they appear when you first make them, and the text-highlighting feature means you can draw your audience's eye to whatever it was that you found interesting."

Although there is other note-taking desktop software available like OneNote, VoodooPad and Evernote, many find such apps heavy and difficult to use. As iCyte lives inside your browser, it allows you to add and view things swiftly. Setup itself is also comparatively quick and once installed, the programme is very comprehensive - you simply install the browser plugin, then create an account. To use, highlight the text you want to record then click the iCyte button located in your browser. This saves the link with the highlight included, and is your "Cyte". You can name it, apply tags for easy searching later, and choose whether or not the cyte is public or private. A further button brings up a sidebar panel that lists all your iCyte bookmarks.

In iCyte's Youtube video, the company identifies students, parents and lawyers as some of the types of people who could be most likely to use their product. As a free application that is supported by supported in Firefox 3, Internet Explorer 7 and Internet Explorer 8, we see it as a valuable tool to have in the browser of any designer, account manager, journalist - or pretty much anyone who ever needs to quickly save a lot of information for efficient and comprehensive access by themselves and others.

Get regular news from Ouno Creative, a digital and print agency:

Follow Ouno on Twitter Follow Ouno on Facebook