Using Evernote to Blog One Step Ahead of Yourself

You can’t remember everything, but the Evernote tool is a system that can remember everything for you. Having raised another $10 million in funding earlier this month, the mental bookmarking tool plans on further building out its service. For bloggers, Evernote is a tool that helps you become a better writer in the professional sense. The capabilities around future Evernote updates an the evolution of the space entirely will make for a great partnership between Evernote and bloggers in the coming months.

Evernote operates by letting you bookmark your real life, organizing it into folders fr you to access at a later date. The beauty of Evernote is that it operates the same way your brain does; contextually. This makes the retrieval of content easier on the human level, enabling Evernote to become an extension and digital representation of our memory.

It’s the contextualization of your bookmarked content that makes Evernote so useful as a personal service. For bloggers, that means that Evernote can be quite handy for jotting down notes to yourself, sparks of inspiration, ideas for future articles, etc. It also means that there is a centralized location to keep all the web clippings you want to save for later. In this way, Evernote becomes a research tool, letting you track stories pertaining to a topic of interest or a collection of services to use for your next “Top 10 Best…” list articles.

See a billboard on your way to a meeting, and you think would make for a good article on mobile phone marketing? Take a snapshot with your mobile phone and send it to Evernote. After your meeting, you exchange business cards and send a mobile snapshot of your new acquaintance’s info to Evernote. The text from the billboard and the business card are saved in your Evernote time line, and the text is recognized and is used by Evernote for tag words when you do a search. When you go back to remember the address of your business acquaintance but don’t’ remember his company name, you can do a search for that billboard you saw because you recall that you saw the billboard on your way to the meeting. The clippings for the billboard and the business card are connected through the context of your activities that day.

The ability to capture the contextualization of our brains in this manner is how Evernote can help you as a blogger. The main point of my previous post on stockpiling content for your blog was that your inspiration does not have to be lost, but it can be captured, saved and utilized on an ongoing basis. This continual process helps you in your writing and clears up a great deal of time and stress that would otherwise interfere with the time you have designated to work on your blog.

Evernote has been a recommended tool on BloggingTips, but this past year has been particularly significant for Evernote. A number of updates to its service and a strong mobile initiative has made Evernote even more useful to you as a blogger. The mobile-specific apps are going to be a major point for Evernote moving forward, and bloggers will also find that they will be increasingly able to utilize their phones for blogging purposes. As I mentioned, Evernote’s even more recent funding shows promise for the growth of this necessary tool.

But will Evernote be the ultimate tool? Only time will tell. There are competitrs in the space, and those that are playing around with semantic web concepts could eventually one-up Evernote. Twine is one service that collects bookmarks from individuals and turns it into a shared plane of data that can be accessed in order to answer your questions. The bookmarks can be shared on multiple levels, with auto-organizing by Twine in order to create that searchable archive. Associated with the human context of tags, notes and other aspects of web interaction, Twine hopes to answer your search quieries instead of merely redirecting you to another area of the web.

Google Applications are some other opportunities for Evernote to be threatened. The combined effort of various Google Apps that work together across multiple devices is an even more personal an relevant point of access to a user’s life once aggregated. As Google moves from the web to the desktop and the mobile phone, it is clear that Google is hoping to become that point of access for contextualizing much more than the web clippings and mobile photos we can’t let ourselves forget.

Written by Kristen Nicole from Kristen Nicole
Posted on November 25th, 2009 and filed under Blogging
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