A while back I asked around on twitter about the best way to take notes digitally. I was curious whether people use digital pens, iphone apps, netbooks or anything else. There was a reason I was asking….
For the last 5 years I have kept hardback notebooks at work to take notes in meetings - a common system amongst developers. I’ve never felt it suited me - realistically its about the only writing that I actually do with a pen. My particular concerns were that I didn’t have access to my notebook at home or around campus, I couldn’t easily search for anything in it, and I had no real reason to refer to it. In short, it was non-digital. Everything else I interact with is, which means I am used to being able to search through text, access things from anywhere, and integrate across tasks to increase usefulness. My notebook was effectively useless - I constantly took notes that never became useful to me, and that I didn’t tend to read once I’d written them. It makes sense to me that I rid myself of the final bit of paper and become a paperless person.
Anyway, most people that left me comments said that netbooks were good (and didn’t take as long to boot as I’d thought), that digital pens sounded cool but no-one had one, and that mobiles provide good spur of the moment note taking.
I thought I’d share with you the solution that I came up with, and am currently trialling at work. After much searching, I found an online service called Evernote that lets you create an account, take notes online, save them and search them. You can tag them, group them, add URLS, clip webpages and include snippets. Poifect. But here is the cool bit…
- They have a Mac app that you can use as a client, and sync online
- They have a Windows app for the same purpose
- They have an iPhone app that also syncs with the online service, lets you take images, and can tag notes with your geo-location
Awesome. I have digital notes on my work mac, my home PC, my iPhone and on an Asus eeePC for meetings. I take the eeePC when I think I’m likely to need to take notes and the rest of the time I have my iPhone. If needed I can use any web-enabled PC to access my notes. I think I’m paperless…
I was lucky enough to see an advanced screening of ‘State of Play’ this weekend – a new movie with Ben Affleck and Russell Crowe. It was a good movie; not big action or anything but a good conspiracy plot and worth a watch. However, what I thought you might be interested to hear about was the sub-plot about blogging versus newspaper publishing in an internet era.
A theme ran through the whole movie questioning whether publishing a story immediately is the right thing to do. Just because you can publish straight away, should you? Are you doing it justice? Do you have all the facts? Can opinions really be formed that quickly or do they need to settle, be reviewed, slept on and formalised? This made me think about the recent #amazonfail tagging frenzy on twitter, where an outpouring of rage erupted within hours of the apparent removal of books with gay and lesbian references from the search ranks. Amazon have since cited an error as the cause, and much has been blogged about the initial online reaction and the way in which Amazon handled it. It confirms that we don’t yet have answers to the questions raised in the film – did people react too quickly just because they had a forum to do it on? Should they have waited for facts to emerge?
The online world needs to be careful that it does not become stereotyped as a hot bed of overreaction and scare-mongering. There is no benefit in a reputation for being the fastest off the blocks with news if the news always turns out to be over-hyped. That said, we cannot ignore the huge potential that instantaneous opinion gives us. Instead of a battle between print and digital news media, it would be good to see a complementary alliance between the two. Online, opinion can grow and change without fear of reprimand if it is understood that this is the purpose of this media. The printed word by nature is a slower beast, and as such is the perfect medium for measured reflective opinion. Both have value.
Ironically, because I saw the film early I am choosing to post this prior to the general release of the film in the UK. I did wonder if I should wait a while. Anyway, go see the movie – it is food for thought with a few geek jokes scattered around.
