The one joy of being behind with cpd23 is that I can look at what other people have thought about each ‘thing’ and absorb some tips in the process. The blog entries I’ve come across for thing 9 on Evernote seem to fall into one of two categories – ‘I’ve been using Evernote for ages and find it really useful’ or ‘I don’t really see what the fuss is about – Evernote is not for me’. I have to say that the second categories seems most popular.
To attempt to introduce myself to Evernote, I used the webclipper (I do appreciate the little elephant logo now on my browser) to store and sort all of the blog entries I read about Evernote. After giving them all the tag ‘Evernote’ , it all got a little inward-looking and I was reminded of that ‘If you google Google will the computer explode?’ joke.
Nevertheless, from exploring Evernote I am starting to get the hang of it and can see how it would be useful. I think the biggest problem is that it’s a little clunky and not instantly easy to use – but with a little patience it starts to make sense. That perhaps explains the ‘I’ve been using this for years’ positive comments.
A good example of Evernote’s usefulness: I vaguely remembered that one of the blogs I read about Evernote described it as clunky, so I typed in ‘clunky’ into my Evernote and it searched all the text of all of my notes to remind me that it was the Neon Librarian. Useful! I can imagine that will be really handy when I start the masters if I can get into the habit of clipping relevant Library websites and articles to come back to later.
Another criticism I’ve seen is that alot of people will not be able to download this atwork – but you can easily access it on the web by signing into you account on evernote.com. The web version doesn’t seem to be quite as good but it all syncs together so you can tidy them up a little when you get home.
I can see myself using Evernote a lot whilst at UCL so hopefully me and the little elephant will become good friends…
