Tuesday 16 August 2011

#cpd23, Thing 9; Evernote

...or Excuses for Elephants. Every good course needs elephants, I say.

The premise of Evernote sounds amazing. A way of tying together all those notes of cool things, to-do lists for different parts of life, documents, webpages and so on; and of accessing them from all possible platforms and devices. I should be leaning towards this like, well, like this elephant:

'balancing elephant' by paraflyer on Flickr
I ought to embrace Evernote

But the problem is, as I may have mentioned before, that I don't (yet) have a gadget with me at all times. Web-based solutions are great, as I use several different computers, but I don't have a smartphone, or even my own laptop, so a lot of my remembering still has to happen the low-tech way (pace my iGoogle to-do list). I imagine that eventually I'll follow the herd (see below) into the technological present and I'll be able to embrace this more fully.

Untitled by darnstotheradio on Flickr
Following the herd

So what can I do with this Evernote thingy?

'! danger elephants at Knowsley Safari Park?' by Adam Foster | Codefor on Flickr
What, indeed?

Well, I can write little notes, all formatty like a word-processor and tag them. And I can clip webpages, not just the URL but the whole thing if I want, and tag them up too. A quick search suggests that there are ways of getting Delicious bookmarks into Evernote if I wanted to transfer them across, but it doesn't seem that they would be so easily available to other people? There's a 'share notebook' function, so I could set up different notebooks and share some of them but not others. But is it possible to make individual notes private or shared? Sociability is much harder than these guys make it seem:
'baby elephant | playing in the water' by Adam Foster | Codefor on Flickr
Why isn't more of life like this?


'Feel me... touch me....LOVE me!' by ucumari on Flickr
The point. Geddit?
So, what's the point of this post? Apart from liking elephants a lot, I think the point is that I see that Evernote's something useful--I'm sure it could turn me into the productive, organised, efficient person I'm sure I really am--but I need to use to more to work out how it works. And I probably won't use it more in the very near future because of a lack of tech.

3 comments:

  1. Really like the elephant motif in this post. Well done! I sympathize with your "lack of tech." I don't have a smartphone either, and sometimes I feel tension because, as a reference librarian, I should be on the cutting edge of tech but it can be hard to stay in touch with the water when you're not swimming in the sea. Have you ever used Zotero or Diigo? Diigo is a social bookmarking tool that allows annotation of webpages, photo capture, etc.

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  2. Hello ForeverMan,

    I've pleased you like the elephants - I had a lot of fun selecting them all.

    I do use Zotero for keeping academic things, and think it's really pretty good. I haven't tried out Diigo, although it is on my radar as a potential replacement for Delicious, given the recent doubts about Delicious' long-term future.

    Katie

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  3. so, what about the cloud, shouldn't that be a platform free resource? And the other thing is, if everything could*Italics* be done online, whither conferences?

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