The new RSS features are now online! You can subscribe to feeds for all notes from a book, all notes from a user, or all notes from a user on a particular book. The respective RSS links are at the bottom of the notes and user pages.

To subscribe to notes from a user on a particular book, first view that user's book notes (click on that user's name or avatar, then click on a book from their page). The feed link will change to just that user's notes on that book.

RSS is pretty powerful and pervasive these days. There are lots of things you can do with them. Here are some ideas:

1. Add your note feed to your blog roll.

This lets you easily incorporate your reading notes into your blog, and makes it easy for your friends to follow along with what you are reading. I just added my notes feed on to the blogroll on this blog.

2. Follow along with someone's reading

See a reader with similar interests? Subscribe to his or her feed to see what they are reading next. If you don't already have an RSS reader, check out bloglines. It's fully online and one of the best.

3. Stay up to date with notes on a book

Subscribe to book feeds to see what other people are noting on that book.

4. Add RSS content to your blog or website.

There are several widgets out there such as this one from widgetbox, which works well with Blogger and other blogs plus Facebook and MySpace.

Well, no doubt all of you can come up even better and more fun things to do with the RSS feeds. Leave a comment or feedback and let me know what you think.

For the more technically inclined, Scribilus's RSS feeds conform to the RSS 2.0 format.

Why are there the three types of note flags: Quotes / summaries, ideas, and questions? When I read a book, the first things I note down are the main points of the chapter. I then spend some time thinking about how they relate to my own experience and other books I may have read. I note down any ideas that pop into my head. I find this technique of cross-pollination very effective, and productive. Finally, I also make a note of any new questions I have from what I just read. As they say, the more you know, the more you don't know.

So, do you think these are the right flags? How do you tend to categorize your notes (if at all)? Let me know.

So, what made me spend my vacation writing Scribilus?

One thing that really bothers me is that I don't remember most of what I read. Granted, I have a poor memory to begin with, but there have been books that I have re-read cover-to-cover again a couple years later and realized that I didn't even remember reading in the first place.

Last year, I decided to do a better job at this, especially for non-fiction books, and I started taking notes while I was reading. I find that I remember what I write an order of magnitude better than what I just read. However, I'm one of those people who just HATE to write in books. Hi-lighter marks and underlines make me *cringe*.

I tried the usual solutions: Index cards, sticky notes, paper, and a spiral bound notebook, which I only used 2 pages of. In the end I found that using OneNote on my laptop PC while reading worked ok for me. I type a lot faster than I can write, and the computer made it easy for me to find my notes later. I even developed my own special marking system for my notes, like [i] to prefix ideas I had and [q] for questions that arose while reading.

But soon I realized that I wanted an even better experience. I wanted to be able to easily organize my notes by chapter so that I could review them later. I wanted to be able to access my notes over the web. Further, I also wanted to be able to publish my (sanitized) notes to my friends who were interested in the same subjects, and see what notes they were making on the same books.

I spent quite a while looking for something that would work for me. I found web-based OneNote replacements such as Zoho Notebook, but like OneNote, weren't specific to what I wanted. I also tried blogging software, but found it hard to rearrange (and filter) my notes after the fact.

So, I decided to write my own tool over Christmas, and Scribilus is the result.

At face value, Scribilus is an online replacement for a tabbed college notebook built specially for taking reading notes. However, the magic of the web allows it to be much more. I looked, and couldn't find any major web tools for reading groups or for sharing notes on books. There were certainly a lot of book review sites, but nothing that actually let you discuss a particular book in any depth. I used to be a big fan of newsgroups back in the day, and I really wanted something like a newsgroup or forum dedicated to discussing the ideas around any book, organized by book and chapter. My hope is that Scribilus can someday evolve and grow to fill this need.

If you are reading this, please give Scribilus a try if you haven't already. All features will be completely free to use through the beta period (which may last a while). I'm thinking about how to best support this in the long run (hosting and bandwidth do cost money). Perhaps there might be some kind of premium account type with additional features if it makes sense, but I intend to always keep a free version available for people to use and enjoy. I'll also make sure that users who give the best suggestions or feedback during beta will get free upgrades and other goodies, so please be liberal with your feedback. :)

Keep in mind that what you see today is the product of perhaps 20 days of on-and-off work, but I am committed to making improvements as quickly as I can. Please use the feedback form to report any bugs or suggest new features. I can't promise when and if I will be able to do most of them, but all your feedback is very welcome and helpful.

If you do find Scribilus useful, please drop me a note, and if you don't please drop me a note as well. I'd like to know how I can make it better.

I intend to post updates on how things progress on this blog, so do check back often.

Happy reading!