I have long been keen on keeping notes electronically. The main reasons for this are that it make it easier to search them and that it makes it easier to share them. Working as an interim, you never know when you might need to be able to do (or get someone else to do) something you once did. If you can email a note you prepared earlier it saves a lot of time. Better still, if it is a frequently asked question, you can share it and start creating a knowledge base.
Until this week, my electronic notebook of choice has been
Blogger. I use a blog as a notebook and only share it if appropriate and then only to those who need to see it. Often cutting and pasting part of a note is enough. I am now taking a serious look at
Evernote.
Evernote and Blogger are both simple to use (Evernote is simpler). They have many similarities including one click tools to grab content from your web browser. The table below highlights the differences:
| Blogger | Evernote |
| Cost | Completely free | Free for upto 40MB upload each month - probably enough for most people and $5 a month above that for 500MB. |
| Offline availability | No. | Yes. A desktop version is available for PCs, Macs and most phones (not Nokias though). |
| Levels of heirarchy | 2: spearate blogs per subject then each post can have multiple 'labels' which can be easily filtered on. | 2 and a bit: separate note books are equivalent to Blogger's blogs, multiple 'tags' are equivalent to Blogger's labels. Evernote does allow saving search criteria which could give a bit more flexibility. |
| Display | Designed as a blog so notes are vertical | Designed for notes so can show thumbnails |
| | |
