Introducing Evernote Site Memory

Did it ever happen to you that you said: "I have read something about this in the web?" Where you ever curious what it was? Let me tell you: in the last year I was always able to find it again. How? I no longer rely on bookmarks to find pages I was interested again. Bookmarks can become outdated. I store the whole page content!

I added a new gadget to my blog. The Evernote Site Memory button allows you to store my blogs quickly in your Evernote account.

What is Evernote? Evernote became my searchable memory, my external brain. If you are a knowledge worker like me you would often like to remember the content of the page you've once read. A friend at work wanted to tell me something about the a specific IT topic. He went and looked up all the bookmarks he had tagged with the topic. Of five pages one was still accessible. He was only able to provide me with a 5th of what he thought was worth remembering on the topic. I would have been able to provide all five pages.

Evernote allows you to store any webpage (in fact any data) into a repository. Right from the browser. Once set up you only click the Evernote button and the page is saved. You can than search within Evernote and find it again. You can browse or search search for a word within the content, like "GTD". Evernote does even an OCR scan on your pictures, recognising text in the picture. Next time you want to find a picture of a mindmap, I hope you put it into Evernote. If it says "Crucial Conversation" on the mindmap Evernote will find it for you. Evernote can be accessed in a web only manner, or with a client on your computer.

Actually, Evernote does more than storing web content for me. I scan in my paper stuff nowadays. Since I pay for the premium account (45$ a year), Evernote does OCR on my scanned PDFs. Looking for an old bill? Thames Water? I just type in "Thames Water" and it comes up. I use it with a Fujitsu ScanSnap S300M. The combination is fantastic: scanning of several pages takes only seconds. Within a minute, I can start searching within the document. At home. And through the web if I am currently on holidays.

Are you interested? Well, just click the green remember button with the Evernote elephant logo and start memorising. Enjoy!

[Update 30/09/2010]: Now I get my personal results included in every of my Google searches: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/EvernoteBlog/~3/Q3kxfLvda8s/

Creativity by John Cleese

John Cleese on creativity on YouTube:
http://www.youtube.com/v/zGt3-fxOvug?fs=1

Key lessons for me:
* The unconscious mind is working in your favour - if you let it.
* We don't know where our ideas are coming from.
* You need boundaries in time and space to be productive/creative
* "To know how good you are at something requires the same skills as it does to be good at that thing." And this has implications...