I read a lot on the web and I like to take notes and otherwise keep track of my reading. Pencil and paper are good, but I use some other tools as well. My three favorites (or at least the three I use most are: Readability. This bookmarklet formats your page for easy reading. Go to the site, set your preferences, and drag the bookmarklet to the browser toolbar. Click on it when reading a page and all the distracting ads and titles and comments and blogrolls are stripped out, leaving nothing but what matters to the reader. A bonus is that you can print the formatted page to a pdf file to save for later or to file in your digital clipping service. Evernote. Everybody's heard about this, but I have to concur. Its a great way to save part of a page (or the entire page) in a database that is synchronized to the cloud and to any other devices you have enabled. As long as you upload less than 40 megs a month, its free, and thats a lot of text. Its also good for notes, to-do lists, contacts, whatever. Text editor. With Evernote, you'll probably be able to get away without a text editor. Still, I use one every day for copying quotations and writing notes to myself. I like a small editor with quick start-up and a simple interface. Payware editors like Ultraedit and Textmate are expensive overkill for this kind of work. Vim and Emacs, though open source, have too many features not related to what I want to do. I like to stick with something free and tiny. Textwrangler and Textedit are great for the Mac. For Windows, I can't recommend Notepad as it lacks wordwrap. I'd prefer a "notepad replacement", like Metapad or Notepad++. OS X Textedit and Windows Wordpad have advantages in that they come with the OS and can read and write RTF files.