7 Apps for Online Note-Taking

By May. 28, 2007, 12:00pm PT 91 Comments

If you’re like most of us, you deal with piles of unstructured information every day: phone numbers, ideas for later consideration, snippets of information from the web, recipes, phone messages…the list is endless. For the web worker, moving this information into an online notebook can be an attractive proposition. Rather than tie yourself to one computer, or even one operating system, you can get at your notes from anywhere that has a web browser handy. Not surprisingly, there are a fair number of choices in this arena these days.

For this roundup, I stuck to online applications that let you save freeform notes in some sort of organized fashion for later use. I skipped over others that are primarily designed as tools to annotate web pages, such as noteClip, and bookmark managers like del.icio.us, BlueDot, and Chipmark.

Google Notebook provides a relatively simple interface for storing snippets of text. You can have as many notebooks as you like; notebooks have sections; sections have notes. You can rearrange notes and comment on them, open up notebooks for editing by collaborators, and publish them on the web. There’s a FireFox extension that lets you clip text from a web page and store it in one of your notebooks as well. The best thing about Google Notebook is its integration with the rest of Google: you sign in with your Google account, and can export an entire notebook to Google Docs. But all in all, this is a pretty basic offering backed up by a big name.

mynoteIT is aimed at students. It requires you to organize your notes by classes (though you can name your classes anything you like, so there’s no reason that you couldn’t use GTD context names instead of course names), and entering a note is a relatively cumbersome process involving a rich text editor and more mouse clicks than most of the competition. mynoteIT includes a variety of other tools including a calendar for tracking assignments and group discussion functionality, but it’s probably too heavyweight if you just want some place to quickly jot notes.

Notefish, like many another Web 2.0 application, is still in beta. It lets you maintain a series of note pages, each of which can have many sections, each of which can have many color-coded notes. You can drag and drop notes around in 2D to rearrange them, edit them, and change their background color. There’s a browser extension to clip text and images from any page you’re viewing and stuff them in one of your Notefish pages. Notefish also lets you tag pages for easy searching. It’s simple to use and a bit more flexible than Google Notebook.

Notezz! is about as simple as you can possibly get in this space. You pick a username and password, and you get to maintain a list of notes. Each note has a title and text. You can view a list of titles, and you can add, edit, and delete notes. There are no browser extensions, fancy hierarchies, graphics, or any other frills here, just simple management for whatever you want to jot down and a single username and password to remember.

Stikkit is perfect for the developer who wants to tie their notes to other applications. Though you can treat it just as an attractive way to store yellow sticky notes online, there’s a whole sea of complexity lurking beneath that friendly surface. Stikkit understands dates and reminders and tagging and bookmarks and e-mail and sharing; it actually looks at the text of your notes and tries to act intelligently on them. There’s a whole API you can interact with as well. While the learning curve for Stikkit can be steep, if you’re the sort of user who digs applications like QuickSilver it’s worth a look.

Yahoo! Notepad is on the simple side. You get a single note-taking area, which you can organize one level deep with folders. Inside of folders you store notes, which are just plain text entered through an old-fashioned web form. On the plus side, this application should run on just about any browser anywhere; on the minus side, you won’t find any advanced features, not even browser extensions or tagging.

Zoho Notebook is the most visually complex and impressive of the bunch. If you’re familiar with Microsoft OneNote, you’ve seen the basic Zoho Notebook interface: you can have multiple notebooks, each with pages, each with sections, each with notes that you can drag and position on a 2D canvas. Pages can be entire web pages or Zoho’s own online spreadsheets or documents as well as notebook pages. If you’re working on a notebook page, you can add text or HTML or RSS feeds or audio or video clips or images, among other things. You get versioning and sharing and commenting and publishing as well as a Firefox extension that can clip text and images from any page and shoot it over to an open notebook. The service has just left beta, and I’ve seen some reports of pages not being properly saved (though I’ve not experienced any trouble in my own limited testing). For building up a rich notebook of varied content, Zoho Notebook is currently to one to beat.

Overall, which direction you go depends on how highly you weight various factors. My own recommendations: Google Notebook for dependability, Stikkit for integration, Zoho Notebook for flexibility, or Notezz! for simplicity.

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