Zotero is formally called a Citation Management tool. A what? "Pretty Academic" you say. Well, don't let the terminology fool you. It has many uses. But, let's start at the beginning.

Webpages (and articles, scraps of information) are fine, but they soon breed so, that you have difficulty keeping up with them. So, the idea of the Bookmark or Internet Favourites was invented. Once you saw a page you wanted to return to, you could flag it and the Bookmark would be stored - the Title of the webpage and the URL. Well and good, except your Favourites menu becomes so tall, it scrolls vertically.

So you then spend time organising Bookmarks into Folders. And Sub-Sub Folders. Soon the Sub Folders are nested deep and each Subfolder still has heaps of Bookmarks. But an item can only exist in one Folder. What if the item can be described by several attributes - like ToDo and also IT and also Get Money?

So, Tags were invented. You could then file an item in a Folder and Tag it as well with multiple Tags.

But what if you wanted to track items by Author. Or Date? Or you wanted to file not just the link to the content but a snapshot of the text, graphics of the content as well? What if you want to annotate? And maybe you want to peruse all these offline, rather than be permanently connected to the Internet?

So far, there have been several products. Onfolio was a good effort. It lived in Internet Explorer as an Add-On. It was for-money, then free, then bought and incorporated into Microsoft's Windows Live Toolbar. And there it has languished. Because some people just don't want to run WLT. Or use Internet Explorer as the preferred browser.

Those who have academic pursuits use a desktop product called EndNote for bibliographies. I don't believe Onfolio integrated with EndNote or interchanged data with EndNote.

Along comes Zotero. It is to my mind, like Onfolio. Except it lives in the Firefox 2.0 camp, as an extension. It's free. What does it do?

• You can make folders called "Collections"
• You can add items to these folders - web URLs, actual desktop files.
• You can store actual content as items or attachments - Webpages, graphics, files, notes
• You can assign bibliographic fields like Title, Author, Dates
• You can assign Tags to each item so you have this cross-collection attribute
• You can relate one item to another item.
• You can export this nest as RDF and various bibliographic meta data.
• You can export the notes and the files as well.

Very conveniently, Zotero sits at the bottom of Firefox 2 as a status bar button. When revealed, it will create an adjustable bottom pane within Firefox.

I've discovered a "moment of truth" feature of Zotero - an Enabling Feature.  For Forums and Discussion Groups on the web, it is often very hard to bookmark and/or categorise interesting discussions and posts. Well Zotero makes that a cinch.

Give Zotero a try. It could just be the one extension that enables Firefox 2.