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One of the hazards of spending a lot of time surfing the Web is that you inevitably find dozens of interesting websites, articles or services that you want to remember, pass on to someone else, or go back and look at later in more detail. But what's the best way to do that?

One of the simplest ways is to bookmark the page in question with your browser. But what that tends to produce is a gigantic list of bookmarks (or "favourites" as Microsoft calls them), some of which you can't even remember saving, with little or no information included to help you figure out what they are.

There are a number of software applications and add-ons that can help with this problem, but then you still wind up with a list of bookmarks (somewhat better organized, perhaps) that exist only on your laptop, or the PC at home, or your work machine, etc. What if you want to access them from somewhere else?

That's where "social bookmarking" services such as del.icio.us come in handy. You can save a page or bookmark by clicking a link in your browser, and then go back and see all the bookmarks you've saved at the del.icio.us site. You can also see links that others have saved as well, and sort through them based on keywords or "tags."

Google offers something a little different: a bookmark-synchronizing service called Google Sync that will mirror your links across different machines.

But what if saving a link isn't enough? Sometimes when you're researching a particular subject, you might want to keep more than just a link and a paragraph of text from a particular page. Several Web services are aimed at helping you do this, including one from Google called Google Notebook, which just recently launched as a public beta.

Signing up with Google Notebook adds a "note this" link to the menu of choices that comes up when you click the right mouse button on a webpage. So if you select an image or drag your mouse and select some text, and then choose "note this," the text or picture is saved on Google's servers under your Notebook account. You can log in and review all the chunks of text and images you've saved, and you can also get a plug-in for your browser that lets you see and add to your recently saved items at any time from a popup window.

A similar service that has been around since before Google Notebook, and recently added new features, is called Clipmarks. Like Notebook, it also comes with a browser plug-in that makes it easy to select text and/or photos from pages that you want to save. Your saved content can also be tagged with keywords and shared (or you can make it private), and you can see the content that has been saved and shared by other users as well.

Unlike Google Notebook, you can clip and save video content as well as text and photos. And when you click on any of the content in the page you're viewing (after clicking the Clipmark toolbar link) the content is outlined in orange — although you can turn that feature off — and then a giant checkmark appears with the word "Clipped" to show that is has been saved. You can then save all the content you've clipped, or you can post it to a blog, or you can email it.

If you post it to a blog (Clipmarks supports Wordpress, Blogger, Typepad and most of the other major blogging platforms), you can format the item in a popup window and then publish it to your blog. It appears in a window with a blue border that has a Clipmarks logo in the upper left corner and the text "clipped from...," with the address of the website you saved the content from.

Clipmarks has a 1,000-character limit on content saved for any particular Clipmark, but that only applies if you want to share it publicly. If you want to keep the content in your Clipmark private, or just send it by email, there is no character limit.

Another somewhat similar service is Diigo, which also has plug-ins for the major browsers that allow you to highlight content in a page (in Diigo's case it becomes yellow) and tag it with keywords. You can also add what amounts to a sticky note with comments, and then save it to Diigo's servers, where it is shared with other users. You can then go back to your account and see not just your own comments or highlighted sections from a site, but also the highlights and comments from any other Diigo user who also saved the page.

You can also clip, save and annotate content from the Web with software from Microsoft called OneNote, or a similar free program called EverNote (although the latter doesn't support saving audio or video, as OneNote does). But one of the main drawbacks of such programs is that they have to be installed on any machine you want to use them on, and the notes you save are stored on a single machine in a proprietary format.