Chris Pirillo » evernote

Research Web Pages Smarter with Scrible

Chris Pirillo — Fri, 06 May 2011 06:43:43 +0000

If you’re a fan of Evernote, you’re going to love Scrible. This simple-to-use bookmarklet will make your research SO much easier. It doesn’t matter if you’re trying to find something for school or work… Scrible will be able to help you mark what you need in a way that makes sense to you. It may only be in beta form right now, but I have yet to find any real “issues” with it after using the service for a few hours tonight.

There’s nothing to install or download, and you can choose to use it as either a bookmark right on your toolbar or as a browser extension. To use as a bookmarklet, simply drag it to your browser’s bookmark toolbar. To use Scrible as an addon, follow the steps provided for your browser of choice.

As you can see from my screenshot, you have several different options available to you once you click to open Scrible. Highlight text just as you would with those little yellow markers on a physical page. Click on the color changer, choose a color and highlight any words you want to change the color of. Underline, bold, italicize or even strike through any text you decide needs to stand out a little more. Click the little note button to add notes to the website – anywhere on the page – and even choose which color you want them to be. You can place tiny little sticky notes everywhere!

When you are finished marking up the page, you aren’t really finished. If you choose to sign up for a free account, you can now save your annotated web page to your Scrible account online, making it simple to retrieve later. Additionally, you can quickly send an email copy of what you’ve done to yourself or anyone else… right from the bookmarklet. Best of all, there’s no chance of losing your work accidentally. If you attempt to close or change the page before saving a copy, a nice warning box will pop up asking if you really want to navigate away without saving.

You won’t have to head to the website to sign in each time you use Scrible: click the login button on the left end of the toolbar. When you’re finished and want it out of your way, click the large X at the right side. And of course, you can drag and drop Scrible anywhere on the page at any point in time.

This, my friends, is web research done right. Grab Scrible for yourself and let me know in the comments what you think!

Research Web Pages Smarter with Scrible

Top 5 Reasons to Use Evernote

coupons — Sat, 06 Dec 2008 04:57:38 +0000

Top 5 Reasons to Use Evernote

This is Tyler Tufte’s submission for the HP Magic Giveaway. Feel free to leave comments for this article as you see fit – your feedback is certainly welcomed! If you’d like to submit your own how-to, what-is, or top-five list, you can send it to me. Views and opinions of this writer are not necessarily my own:

What is Evernote? Evernote is a free, cloud-based note taking and organizational tool. It is beneficial to those who use multiple computers, travel or those who are sick of their desktop being cluttered with sticky notes (physical or software based).

All your notes are just a couple mouse clicks away from anywhere in the world. A simple login to http://www.evernote.com will give you access to view, edit, or create notes. Windows and Mac users will also enjoy the benefit of using the client based software which will give you access anytime, online or not. If you are a Firefox user, you will also be able to select text and/or images on a website and click a toolbar shortcut to save the selection directly to your account.
Creating notes is as simple as typing in a document. You can customize your notes with fancy fonts and colors. Organization of the notes is also a breeze. Notes can be grouped into customizable “Notebooks”. They can also be tagged with user-defined words. This is useful if the subject matter has multiple descriptions or key words. Just tag it with whatever words best describe the note. Then you can filter through all of your notes by tags. Of course you can always type in the search bar to search through any text (tags, OCR, text within notes, etc).
Say you are at lunch with some business partners and the napkin becomes the destination of all the important decisions. Now what do you do? Retype everything? What about those great diagrams? Problem solved. Just use an iSight Note. This uses Mac’s built in iSight camera to snap a photo of hand written notes, business cards or any other information that you do not want to loose. Best off all, Evernote’s servers will do OCR text recognition on the image and automatically index any words it recognizes so they will be searchable. All those who use Windows Mobile, an iPhone or an iPod Touch will be able to take advantage of Evernote’s mobile application. Your notes will be with you all of the time and you can even utilize your camera to snap notes directly from your device or even make voice notes.
Another feature of Evernote is the ability to share information with anybody. Say this Christmas you decide to build your Christmas list in Evernote. With a simple checkbox, you can make any note accessible to anyone via a public URL. The cool thing is that your note becomes a downloadable PDF for anybody to enjoy, as long as they know the correct URL.
If security is a top priority for you, then you can upgrade to the premium service for a small monthly or yearly fee. Now, your account will be protected with SSL encryption and will have more monthly allotted bandwidth for all of you power users out there.

I have been using this service for several months now and I can honestly say that I would be lost with out it. The ease of use made my transition from an ad-hoc mess of papers, software stickies, and plain text files to Evernote an enjoyable one!

Top 5 Reasons to Use Evernote

Keep Warm with Geeks

Chris Pirillo — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 10:40:26 +0000

Keep Warm with Geeks

Is it just me, or is it freezing outside? Suddenly, we’ve jumped from Fall – right into Winter. It’s not officially Winter yet! Why the heck is it so cold?! Is this another one of those “getting old” symptoms? Well, whatever. At least crappy weather gives me a great reason to stay inside and see what’s going on inside of both Lockergnome and Geeks.

Lockergnome Posts

Geeks Blogs

Geeks Posts

Keep Warm with Geeks

Are You Organized?

Chris Pirillo — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 06:58:58 +0000

Are You Organized?

Recently, I posted a video about Evernote. Evernote allows you to easily capture information in any environment using whatever device or platform you find most convenient, and makes this information accessible and searchable at any time, from anywhere. It’s an excellent way to keep yourself and your data organized. Here’s what some of my friends had to say about Evernote.

Chris I would also like to hear what you to say about the security of these services. If everything is moving up to the cloud so to speak. How can I really trust services like Evernote to keep my data secure from data loss or even data theft? This is something I’ve been really thinking about for a while. And in this case is why I went to a desktop app like Together. – Chris Rodgers

Skitch, skitch, skitch…heck Skitch has got to be the baddest desktop app of the year. – Zee from WeDoCreative

I find that Gmail works just as well, though with less organization. The upside is significantly more space, great search capes and offline client via IMAP. – Steve Rubel

most of my notes are in regards to what I am doing at the moment, so I just jot them down in quickbooks online, which I use to keep track of my billing. Other than that, I regret to say my company has a sharepoint site. – Tim Wright

I use a personal wiki called TiddlyWiki. It’s a self-contained wiki in a single html file that I carry around on a USB stick (with backups to my main system frequently). I allows a lot of tagging and has decent search capability. I also use this as my todo journal for work so I can always go back in time to see what I was doing at a given point in time. – Bryan Hunter via twhirl

A Moleskine and a black Pilot G2 pen. – Cecily Walker

Agreed, I am a big fan of Evernote. Together is nice, but I like that i can sync Evernote against both my Mac and PC. – Scott Watermasysk

A Moleskine and a black Pilot G2 pen you are speaking my language, those are my exact tools. – Kyle Hebert

anyone experienced with google notebooks? – Trixie Ferguson Gray

I use MS OneNote. I like the folders and notebooks and the pages are whatever size you need them to be. I like being able to put notes anywhere on the page. I use the clipping tool to catch a shot of anything that pops up on the screen that I may need later. I just started trying out Zotero, a FF add-on, for research notes. – Maggie Longshore via twhirl

OneNote w/ UMPC. I have my OneNote files synced w/ laptop and desktop with FolderShare. Works nice. – Rodfather

I use ballpoint pens and several notebooks or just plain paper with it. Since I also like to draw it is good thing to have those around everywhere. This reminds me of that I should start to take more notes of things in life. Also, I have found out that digital camera is great tool to make notes since you can take photo of item or store so you could remember it later when you view what you have taken. – Daniel Schildt

Currently alternating between Evernote and OneNote on a Tablet PC – Warner Crocker

I use onenote on my 2 laptops and my desktop, files stored on my Dlink Nas device. Evernote on my MB Proand windows machine. Then Foldershare to access everything from each machine. – Stephen Kennedy via twhirl

In a text editor, using Textile for markup. I also always carry a moleskine with me – Deepak

When using computer, I mostly just write notes to Gmail message and sent it to myself or save as draft. Could use Google Docs more but it’s too slow compared to basic text mode of Gmail. – Daniel Schildt

Evernote is my new brain. The old one, she no work so good no more. – Marci Maleski

The irony of looking up notes in his spiral pad notebook to describe an online note taking app… – Ricardo Vidal

I use my Livescribe Pulse Smartpen (http://livescribe.com) most of the time, and Evernote if I’m near a computer. The Pulse pen is awesome, I highly recommend it to anyone that needs to take notes on a regular basis. – Donato

the idea of writing on a computer, a tablet pc, is so appealing to me… – edythe

I just discovered Zotero while looking for something to highlight and annotate webpages. It does much more than that, and I’m looking forward to working with it. – Tom Landini

Index cards, Evernote and iPhone notes. Together looks REALLY nice, I’m truly impressed. However, the ability to get to my notes on my Mac, my iPhone and on my PC at work has me hooked on Evernote. Still waiting for MS to release OneNote for Mac. OneNote just can’t be beat. It would be nice to see Evernote develop a richer feature set, something closer what Together has. – Jack Collins

I used to carry around a pad or notebook. But now I just e-mail myself, that way I don’t have to re-transcribe. – clarke thomas via fftogo

On the iPhone – the notes app, though I can’t stand Comic Sans. On the comp, (at the moment) Todoist as a to do list. – (steve isaacs)

Poorly. I usually scribble whatever down on paper or I just use the old "C n’ P" (Copy and Paste) method in Notepad – Outsanity

I usually take notes by hand too and then publish using Google Docs. – Larry Kless

How do you take and organize your notes? Are you still writing them out by hand and then typing them into a text editor later? Do you type them into a laptop as you take them? Or are you some super-genius who doesn’t need any notes at all?

Are You Organized?

How do you Take and Organize Notes?

Chris Pirillo — Sat, 05 Jul 2008 08:26:16 +0000

How do you Take and Organize Notes?

Add to iTunes | Add to YouTube | Add to Google | RSS Feed

We all have to take notes at one point in our lives. Whether you’re in school or doing some sort of research for work or home, you’ll find yourself needing to organize information. In the ‘old days’, you just had paper to organize your notes in. What can you do these days? Luckily, there’s a free service that is tied into a free online account that will help you keep track of all of your data, research and notes. Evernote is available for both Mac and Windows.

Evernote allows you to easily capture information in any environment using whatever device or platform you find most convenient, and makes this information accessible and searchable at any time, from anywhere.

How do you get your stuff into Evernote?

Create Create new notes using desktop, web, and mobile versions of Evernote
Snap Take a snapshot using your camera phone or webcam. We’ll even recognize the text in the image.
Clip Clip entire webpages, screenshots, and just about anything else you can copy
Drag-n-drop Drag and drop content into the desktop clients for Mac and Windows
Email Email notes directly into your account using your personalized email address
Scan Scan receipts, recipes, tags, brochures, and anything else into Evernote
Record Record audio wherever you are and listen to it whenever you want

You should definitely give this a try. The future is keeping things online… not in a single notebook.

Download the video:

How do you Take and Organize Notes?