A little late to the party and a USER not a CODER:
I write voluminously for three reasons:
1. I am a Writer
2. I am an Aetiologist (I have to know things, everything!)
3. I am getting old and I have a fading memory
Oh, and it's also how I make my living, such as it is these days. :-)
The complications created by the above three reasons mean that I do need what is really some sort of a secondary brain structure with a good memory.
The nearest I have been able to come to in external tools are the following:
1. Zemanta
2. Zotero
3. QuoteURLtext
4. Jarte
5. StickyPad
6. Screenshotcaptor
7. CopyShortURL
8. Windows Live Writer
My most critical tool of all Is Dragon NaturallyPreferred voice to text program. (Does tend to make me a little more verbose than I probably should be :-))
1. Zemanta has been my second greatest find since Dragon. It monitors what I write in Windows Live Writer and instantly does a search for relevant material across the Internet.
2. Zotero. For greater precision and annotations in technical searches.
3. QuoteURLText. This little utility is what keeps me using Firefox for the Internet. It allows me to select text on a page of a website, collect the URL, and auto insert specifically formatted detail into Jarte or any program of choice.
4. Jarte is a brilliant replacement for windows WordPad with very valuable additional attributes for file management.
5. Sticky pad. What else can I say?
6. ScreenshotCaptor. Should be a big improvement for me over my old Microsoft version.
7. CopyShortUrl. Very useful for condensing very long URLs cleverly. I only wish it could be automatically added to QuoteURLText.
8. Windows Live Writer. A very useful adjunct to Zemanta as both a quick tool for posting to WordPress or simply as a MS Word document.
Codicil : remember, these are the best tools That I have come up with during the last 10 years or so as a typically non-tech user.
For many, many years my mainstay for all bits and pieces collections of information was a program called NoteTabPro.
Just recently I was at a function where there were many old members from a Computer Internet Users Club that I started as a consequence of giving free introductory lessons to using the Internet at my city library. In discussion I learned that many of them were still using the programs that I taught them to use in those very early days notably amongst which was NoteTabPpro!
There we are, FWIW - my small contribution from the other side.