One of the best of the popular writers on information technology and the Internet is James Fallows, who is also a regular contributor to The Atlantic magazine.

An interesting piece in this month’s issue is called Making HayStacks, Finding Needles, and is a discussion and an informal review of his trial of several Web page search, storage and finding tools: e.g. Onfolio, EverNote, NetSnippets etc.

Unfortunately, the article is not available online, though, except for print subscribers who registered for Web access. It’s interesting to note, though, that performing a search on Google will still display the relevant excerpt of the article with one’s specific keywords, (kind of like a “Keyword in Context” format available in Dialog and other professional online search systems), but clicking on the link automatically refers the searcher to the subscription-only page.

If you want to find some free reviews of these just plug in the names into Google: e.g.
net snippets onfolio evernote and you’ll find several good ones.

(This is a good technique to use whenever you are searching on a company or product to make a buying decision, and don’t just want to retrieve the company’s own pages and PR: put the target company/product name in along with 2-3 leading competitors, and you’ll likely find some good reviews)

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Are you frustrated when trying to retrieve an article you saw published in The New York Times on its own site, but discover that it’s one of those #$%#% “Premium” items available only to subscribers? Before you give up, make sure you try searching Google News too. I’ve discovered that certain technology-oriented articles are often locked up on the Times‘ own site, but links are made freely available on Google News.

For instance, a piece about convenient back-up processes and tools published on September 7th titled “Don’t Keep All Your Data in One Stash” was unretrievable directly from the Times’ site, but a search on Google News retrieved a working URL, here.

This is an example of the upside of all the various ways publishers make their information available–and unavailable–just because it’s not accessible from one site–even the official one–doesn’t mean you might not be able to get it from another site.

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