Introduction
Think back to your old textbooks at Uni. If yours were anything like mine, they were filled with slips of paper marking important pages. And in my wads of photocopied notes, the pages themselves bore the marks of highlighting, underlining, circling and comments scribbled in the margins. This was how I studied - lots of pen activity involved.

Nowadays I do most of my research and studying on the web. But I still have that need to make marks on pages to indicate the bits I think are important, or wrong or contestable or interesting or or or .......

Enter iMarkup. This software application works with Internet Explorer, and to some extent with MyIE which I have reviewed in an earlier submission to Road Test. As its name suggests, iMarkup enables you to markup web pages (local or online) with text or drawn additions. The program has two major sections - Annotate and Organize which can be accessed from a sidebar in the browser (as shown below) or via a toolbar with dropdown menus.
 
Annotate
Types of annotation include

• variously adorned sticky notes which can contain text – plain or formatted

• text changes such as highlighting, bolding, underlining etc

• drawing directly onto the page using a paintbrush tool

• voice recordings

All your additions can be

• formatted in various ways
• emailed to others
• have files attached to them
• have alarms added to them

Your notes are stored locally on your hard drive and reappear whenever you call up the annotated webpage in Internet Explorer. You can save the entire webpage complete with markups to a local file using the familiar .mht format provided by Microsoft.
If you wish others to see and work with your markups, you can ask them to install the free plug-in viewer available from the iMarkup website.
For more sophisticated sharing and workflow control, it is also possible to interact with an iMarkup server for collaborative work but I don't have any experience of this. The server is a big ticket item that might be suitable to implement at whole college/campus level.
 
Organize
Once you have gathered a few markups you will realise that you need ways to organise them.
It is possible and highly desirable to assign markups to user defined categories. Note that you can only make categories/folders one level deep. Several categories come pre-installed.
iMarkup keeps a list of all your markups The name of the website where you made the annotations appears as a folder and each page bearing markups appears with a page icon. Individual annotations are shown under this.
You can sort the annotations according to various criteria such as category, date created etc

Screenshot 2

General comments
Overall the interface is quite easy to fathom and the program is very well thought out in terms of functionality. I haven't had any crashes while using it.
In terms of visual appeal, I think that the some of the sticky note designs are a bit cheesy looking. I downloaded a few extras from the web site but the look of them is a bit dated in my opinion. This is really a matter of taste and a minor quibble in no way impinging on the usability or value of the program.
 
Summary
Name: iMarkup
Cost: USD39.95 with education and quantity discounts available
Current version: 3.62 For Windows only.
Verdict: iMarkup provides a mechanism for an age old information management technique and promotes active appreciation of the contents of a web page. The program is stable and a breeze to use
 
Note: This program tested was version 3.62 used in conjunction with MS Windows 2000, Internet Explorer 6 and MyIE 0.9.26. Sorry Mac and Linux users, no version for you.
 
Disclosure. The makers of iMarkup gave me a complimentary copy to review. I do not feel that this has influenced the review in terms of opinion, though perhaps I have made the review a bit more thorough in view of this generosity.