A very good list, but you should also check out www.mynoteit.com which has tons of other utilities besides note taking for students to use.

http://www.mynoteit.com

Once again I’m seeing Slawesome listed in a “W2.0″ list, this for a site that hasn’t functioned for me for quite a while. It’s a great site when working, and I used to use it a lot. Have you used it successfully recently? I contacted the site creators awhile back and was told that they had moved on to other projects and didn’t have the time or interest in fixing and maintaining it.
I just checked it again after seeing it in your list, and still cant get it to work.

Thanks, Godfrey for giving me the update on it. I had used Slawesome not too long ago and seemed to work fine, but I just ran a test now and your right. It doesn’t seem to save the recording, although does send and save your notes. That’s too bad. I’ll keep an eye out for other voice recording services.

I have updated the article, leaving it there in case it is to work again, but with an update saying it may not work.

Thanks!

actually i am really looking for a web based solution for making mindmap. mindmap is good for you to organize your ideas, notes, or whatever. there is local app called freemind in java. looking forward to any web implementation on that.

Staul - Thanks for the comment. I hadn’t thought about mind mapping for quick notes. I usually use them more for outlining.. but I can definitely see it being handy and will try it sometime.

So, to answer your question:
http://www.mayomi.com/

You may want to check this free flash based mind mapping tool. Works very well and has a unique and simple system. (SW Review)

You may also want to keep an eye of Gliffy:
http://www.gliffy.com

However, Gliffy is more more then just mind mapping. It’s mainly built for diagrams and flow charts. Works great, although it is in private beta still. (SW Review)

Thanks. Hope that is of some help. Maybe I should add these to the article?

You should share your secret of how you keep track on where you took your notes Brian ;)

Gmail btw. is also a pretty nice tool for taking notes, especially if you come up with some naming conventions for the subject line - then you can use filters to automagically label and organize them and so on.

thanks, Brian. i checked mayomi the other day, the problem is that it does’t provide *private* storage of personal stuffs. everything created on it is public to all.

gliffy is promising, but no luck to have chance to try it out yet. after all, i doubt its goal of being a general diagram drawing tool can lead to a really full fledged mindmapping tool like freemind. i mean, drawing stuffs in freemind is optimized for organizing ideas rather than giving you the feeling of drawing circles, rectangles, texts and lines connecting one another.

sure, gmail, and drawing tools are nice to be on your list:) thanks for your effort!

to Saurier, gmail is simply great for almost anything. but to me, taking notes really should be fast. gmail is almost the fastest among webmails, but not yet fast enough :)

great resource

Note taking software - great list! For an offline, “later publishable to the web” option; check this: object-oriented, non linear personal wikis - entirely editable and self-contained HTML files - more info at http://tinyurl.com/gmtla and example at:

http://www.gov20.info/files/jag.html

That’s a great list…I always had trouble taking notes in college!
http://www.FreeTrialOfferGuide.com

I prefer a pen and paper.

I don’t know if this list is just for online services, but OneNote isn’t on the list and probably should be listed.

Excellent List! My current issue is reducing the number of different places that I keep notes.

For now, I’ll use your list for checking out the alternatives.

Thanks,
John

Evernote
http://www.evernote.com

First of all let me thank you for talking about another Cynapse (www.cynapse.com) service, Brian. We’re not really pushing SyncNotes very hard at the moment, but the free service has its share of new people signing up every day. :)

Let me first say that SyncNotes is *very* different from all the other services in the list. I guess that’s what they all say, but the key difference in SyncNotes that is not present in any other service (as far as I know) is:

Synchronization.

SyncNotes doesn’t really stop at making “the note taking application that will allow me to quickly take down notes and let me refer to them whenever I want”.

SyncNotes takes your notes and *synchronizes* this information with the notes that are present on the central SyncNotes server. This lets the SyncNotes service provide you your notes, literally, any where you want to. SyncNotes will let you manage your notes from any Windows desktop machine. Your notes are available directly on the website as well. What if you don’t / can’t lug around your laptop? SyncNotes will even let you manage your notes on any Windows Mobile PDA. Don’t have / can’t afford a Windows Mobile PDA? SyncNotes even provides a full-fledge WAP interface to manage the notes.

Another functionality that’s often missed out by most reviewers is that SyncNotes lets you directly send a note to anyone on the Internet! If the recipient has a SyncNotes account it get’s directly displayed on their desktop! Otherwise it lands in their email Inbox. Now is that cool or what?

Anyways, I’ve not even touched on the different ways that SyncNotes enables me to have my information available anywhere I need it. The SyncNotes forums (only visible to signed in users) is a community activity place. Do check it out when you have the time - and share your experiences, as well.

YES, this comment was first typed out on a SyncNote. :)

Check out my user review on www.neobinaries.com/apps/syncnotes.aspx
for more goodies.

:-x Maybe it’s just me, but I find applications like OneNote and EverNote more troublesome, cluttered, and consisting of way to many features for my liking. Keep things nice and simple. 37signals does a great job at it, and that is probably why I use their products so much. Believe me, EverNote and OneNote are nice applications, they just don’t grab me like the ones I have listed.

Haha, thanks for the writeup, Dhiraj. SyncNotes certainly is great and it certainly is different from the flock. I saw its potential and felt it very much so deserved a place in my list. I’ll be poking around with SyncNotes more this week. Thanks!

Nice. We just launched iFaves.com which, while primarily a boomark manager, also lets you add and tag (and share with contacts!) simple notes.

There is Simpy, which lets you take notes, tag them, keep them private, do tag or full-text searches on them, in addition to doing all the social bookmarking and group stuff.

http://basket.kde.org/ for KDE,
and
http://basket.kde.org/webasket/
web-based.

another ajax related website at www.ajaxchat.com

For note-taking nothing beats my Palm T|X…it’s always in my pocket, is instant-on, and I’ve been using it long enough to be able to do 40-60 wpm with the built-in Graffiti text entry. If you don’t want to deal with Graffiti check out CalenNotes from Pennovate at http://www.pennovate.com … full page handwritten notes using an innovative interface.

Obviously, you took pain to collect all this information. However, I don’t know if this information is really useful unless one has 50 hours to test out each of these applications. It would be much valuable to me if you had given the applications some kind of rating or at least mentioned the ones you liked most.

SJain, Thanks for the input and you are right. It would have been better for me to rate them, but the way I see it is I can’t really rate them because user preference is different. I prefer as simple as it gets, while others that commented like advanced systems.

You did say that I should have mentioned what ones I like the most. Throughout the descriptions of services, I mention on some of them if I use it often or like them in parenthesis. Also, the last paragraph states:

And for those of you curious as to what solutions I use most often, I tend to use Google Scratch Pad, Netvibes, and Writeboard the most and have recently become addicted to Sabifoo.

Thanks, SJain. Next time I make a roundup, I will try to use some better method of pointing out the ones I feel are best, possibly with some type of rating system or rank of 1-10. I can definitely see the value in that.

sabifoo is awesome. Thanks a lot for presenting this.

I use Neomem ( www.neomem.org ) to record various bits of information everyday.

for simple notes, i always compose Gmail and save as draft because my Gmail is always on mood.

for url/bookmark i’m using http://del.icio.us and http://www.google.com/bookmarks/

I use UltraEdit. I have customized the shortcut in the Start Menu to add a shortcut key, [Ctrl-Alt-N]. Then, whenever I need a note, I’m just one keystroke away. It loads quickly enough that I can even use it to take impromptu notes while on the phone.

If I didn’t have UltraEdit, I’d do the same with Notepad.

Have you checked out Cebase? I have checked out almost every online database service and find it the most powerful I’ve seen so far.

It has a fully featured database at the backend so you can setup relationships and build some very complex applications. Ofcourse you can also manage your notes in it with ease.

Check it out!

http://www.cebase.com

can anyone suggest some apps that work for Mac OSX?

Thank you, Brian. It’s a great list! Perhaps Firefox’s Scrapbook could be added. May be it’s just my ignorance, but what is Google Scratch Pad?

Great list, Brian. I read about Sabifoo earlier today - certainly an interesting way of making a note.

I still prefer to just make notes on a paper pad though, personally. :)

Interesting broad overview. But I miss one powerful solution: TiddlyWiki. May be all its benefits are not obvious when you see it the first time. But give it a try and you’ll see.

I like to take notes on paper and then type them.
http://www.DCguide.com

I have Opera browser open all day and its Notes sidebar is also good for quick notes.

Also you can’t beat the simplicity of just selecting text, right clicking, and selecting “Copy to note” (or Ctrl+Shift+C). That also preserves the URL of the page you copied from, for cases when you don’t remember anymore where that snippet of text was from. Just double-click on the note and that URL opens.

Check out iJot.net. It’s a neat service for those who like writing outliners.

Just thought I’d post here and mention that I’ve been doing a lot of work on Sabifoo over the last couple of days. There are two very notable features: 1) now supports unicode! 2) addition of a customizable gateway API allowing you to relay posts to Sabifoo to a custom web service of your own making. I think that has great potential for interfacing with custom blogging software via Sabifoo (and other fun things like that).

Thanks everyone who’s tried it out! And thanks Solution Watch for spreading the word. :-)

With so many options listed on the web site, one could hardly choose the right one. In my opinion, the best way of annotation of your thoughts is the methods used by Winston Churchill, who was strolling around his room with microphone when he was dictating texts for his books. There are many people who need this way of dictating and annotation when they are writing something.

THANK YOU so much for collecting so many great resources. I work in education, and have found some links that I can share with teachers…RIGHT AWAY!

Some more basic note taking:
http://tagfacts.com
http://ournotepad.com
http://www.myyellowpad.com

Excellent list!

There are two other services that you might be interested in:

Remember the Milk - an online todo list manager
http://www.rememberthemilk.com

Thinkfree Office Online
http://online.thinkfree.com

Thinkfree Office has been around a while, and is cross-platform, Microsoft Office-compatible software suite developed in Java - and it now has this online counterpart.

There is also goowy, an online “desktop”:
http://www.goowy.com

51 : My-eNotes.com
http://www.my-enotes.com/

This is awesome - thanks for taking the time to compile this.

Great list, Brian! Thanks for mentioning Zoho :)

A small notebook and my favorite pen or pencil does a terrific job.

A very powerful high-end note-taking tool: TINDERBOX (http://www.eastgate.com/Tinderbox). It’s a full-fledged hypertext system, so you’ve got internal and external links. You can build _agents_ that help organize your work as you write and extend it. You can choose notes to act as _prototypes_ and inherit data and metadata — which saves you typing and gives you lots of knowledge management power when you need it.

Love it Brian!! Excellent, just what I needed. But I failed to see a bottomline in the end telling which according to you is the best!!

Cheers!

~ CC

You forgot about Dvorak’s Start Page!

great list something I can’t seem to find much of in a search one more is http://www.sunnynotes.com

i prefer Stickies for my notes. I think its an all time classic!

Should be “51″ ways to take notes. Web based post it note application called posticky. This site is cool and very productivity. lets you create sticky notes from anywhere, anytime.

check it out http://www.posticky.com .. curious to know what other folks think.

-n

For basic note-taking and list-making, Ta-Da Lists (37 Signals) are pretty indispensable.

Thanks for the list. I got to know about a lot of new note taking tools, that I hadn’t heard of before.

I wonder if any tool exist that allows for combination of voice recording, written notes and tagging, that would let me record audio notes on a MP3 recorder, tag it simply by saying the tag, and then uploading the mp3 files to an online service. On the service I should be able to create tags and attach a voice labeling of each tag, so that it through voice recognition could place the voice notes under the correct categories/tags. Do you know if a thing similar to this exist, or something that comes near it?

That’s quite the idea, Peter. Unfortunately, I have not come across such a service or application before but I will keep my eye open for it.

Syncnotes sounds like something to check out when I have time.

Personally, I find a desktop solution that is fast to launch with a shortcut-key the best. I love Evernote because it never asks me to give my notes names/save locations and searching is easy.
Open, make note, close. Works for me!

/ But what I’m looking for right now is a solution for managing/searching voice notes that I take with my MP3 player, along the lines of what #53 posted (except the I don’t need the online feature).
How do people organize their voice recordings/notes?

It’s great you have this list of useful tools but I think where I fall short in “note taking” is in the low tech realm. For instance at my church note taking is encouraged during the sermons. An outline is usually provided to write on but despite that I find myself still having a hard time grasping the key points to write down because I will get all caught up in what the speaker is saying to actually write the notes down. In school I struggled with either just listening or or trying to write down everything. Sometimes these applications are useless if you have had hard time getting in the habit to begin with. How can we transfter some of these software ideas to the low-tech realm?

I’ve been using TREEPAD for the past year which is an expandable outline format, but am very disappointed with the results of anything I printout… it cuts off the bottom portion of alot of the wordletters, and numbers.
Thank you so much for compiling this list, you just don’t know how much I needed this. ♥KUDOS

Hi, I left a comment early this afternoon about RallyPoint, which is a fantastic Online Collaboration Tool I’ve been using for a few months now. My account wasn’t working and I asked if anyone might have any suggestions. Please disregard that message, as everything is back to normal.

Most people seem to work mostly with a desktop, a standard keyboard and broadband.
I am mostly on the go, so SyncNotes wil be my first try.
But, if you read all the comments, you can also see what should be created : a fast mobile one hand bluetooth keyboard which is always on as should be the smartmobile to which it is connected, and the microphone and the earphone (through a Body Area Network), with which (the keyboard) you can either type alphanumerical signs and commands for the mobile, the microphone, the earphone and the local note-taker client on the mobile… which would of course synch with the on line web repository. To answer 2 questions above, when you type while the microphone or the earphone is working (recording or playing), the text “index” the recording … so that you can call that exact segment later…
I have the keyboard … (good enough to displace the pencil and for some of us, the standard keyboard), Who wants to create the application for windows mobile, symbian or Linux smart mobiles ?

The web 2.0 homepage Fold.com is no longer. Shame. I liked the service, it was more useful and better than Netvibs or Pakeflags.Seems they are now a company that sells Barcode Software.

Remember WikidPad:
http://jhorman.org/wikidPad/

If you haven’t already checked it out, could I suggest my own note taking site? It’s called Notecentric.

Notecentric is more university based, though, and automatically links you with your classmates, so you don’t have to actively find them. There’s also a demo account login if you don’t have a university email address.

How about the new service: Stud.icio.us ?

http://stud.icio.us/

It has a great UI and is really simple to use.

Awesome! Was just getting frustrated with the lack of ability within apps like Writely to let me process my thoughts like i do with a pen and paper.

Good thing I googled before actually trying to write something myself .. this post is the help I needed ..

Thankyou!

Now I gotta work through and see which one is going to suit best.

bookmarked!!
i just found good resources, thanks for the article and also all the comment, couse they also provide another good resources… no need to googling again..
thank’s again

Check Out NoteStudio at: http://www.dogmelon.com.au/NoteStudio.shtml

NoteStudio resides on your computer for fast access.

It syncs. with any Palm Device.

Exports to HTML.

Easy to use.

Enjoy,

Robert in Hawaii
Robert@POBox.Com

Thanks for the list! The only thing I’d be worried about is my note site disappearing….with all my notes.

Protopage is the most fun way to create a homepage ever! I’ve been looking for a more creative version of a Google personalize home, and now I’ve found it. Thank you so much!

Thanks for the list! Just what I was searching for.
I’m worried only about if the site with my notes vanish.
I guess I’ll have to make back-ups from time to time.

Even after reading all of your ideas I still can’t take notes
The only way I pass courses is by listening in class but if I take notes I fail

Is there anyway I can take notes

Cool

First, the caveat: I am ALL about Web 2.0 apps; can’t get enough. That said, I have searched high and I have searched low, but I just haven’t been able to find anything that can remotely compare to… Oh God, here we go… MS OneNote. Has anyone here used it? I really would like to find a comparable Web 2.0 substitute. MS OneNote really worked for me because I do a lot of research from various sources on various topics; I also have multiple projects going at once, in addition to journal entries and personal writing, and it made for a great way to store it all. The app had to be widely functional across various fields of interest and purpose, from professional to personal.

The features that made the difference:
* Notebook has multiple customizable tabs on top for headings or subject matter.
*Under each tab, there are side-facing tabs for the running along the side for the pages. Can also do sub-tabs.
*Very visually oriented, like a real notebook, but also well organized in a linear sense.
*Full formatting capability: fonts, backgrounds, image, templates, clips, embedding, etc. Can even draw.

So… any suggestions?

Tanks for the list! I’d like to ad 2 open source projects that I like
www.neomem.org
and www.seonote.info/
both are outliners for windows.

Hello Brian, I was hoping you could help me. At 42, I’m going back to College after getting laid off. I’m looking for anything that will help me be successful and thought about note taking/study software. I looked at a product called RecallPlus, and was wondering if you have any comments or suggestions. Thanks, Mike

Looking for something similar to EverNote (www.evernote.com), but that can be used online - I had too many notes in Evernote now and it is very slow…
Can anybody recommend something?
Thank you.

Forgot to mention: I tried to use Google Notepad. It does allow clipping from any webpage. However, it does not allow to organize in a tree-like format by several subcategories and it does not allow to assign several categories to one note.

i’ve been using a tag-based online notes resource called CribNote at
www.cribnote.net
It’s kind of like del.icio.us, except private notes (not public links). Just a very simple app. Two paws up.

I am looking for a note taking program in which I can assign tags to each individual note, and then search for notes based on their tags. I also want to be able to make a tag heirarchy to make it easier to navigate the tags. I am an amateur stand up comedian and such a system would help me store jokes. Are there any sites or programs that work like this?

-I prefer a pencil just in case you make a mistake

big juan: check out cribnote.net. It has note tagging.

With Jott (jott.com), you call Jott’s number (it’s toll-free) from any phone you register and you record your note. Jott then takes your recording and turns it into text, which it then emails to the address you’ve specified. Very useful for sending myself reminders about stuff I think of while driving.

Great, thanks!

Zia
www.ziarezvi.com

Why use another complex app with another username and password?
Try yPen instead, this is what simplicity is. Do you want to figure out how all the stuff works and register for an account, or do you want to just open a page and write down a vital couple of lines?

Guys and Gals,

There is a cool online note taking tool now. Check out http://www.fruitnotes.com
This is a real cool site. You can even record your voice notes here … A very powerful tool… you must see it.

enjoy,

I found www.fruitnotes.com very interesting, thought
to share it with you guys here.

they have cool ways of storing notes online

1) call a number and record your notes! (I found this very useful, I can record anything at anytime from my bed, from bus or car whenever anything pops up in my head, I sometime use it to record conferences or meeting minutes)

2) Write text notes - this is wonderful to search my notes later at anytime and share my stories with friends.

3) Attach video, audio and images to your notes.

And its all for FREE!.

Godfrey, Very great checklists. I really like to use Short Text to make my Long URL to become short and easy to read. I will check the other list here. thanks

goonie

hey! You guys forgot the one notetaking tool that launched startups into Fortune 500:

the napkin.