Google Notebook: My Documents meets Notepad

Back in the 20th century, I tried every PIM (Personal Information Manager) that I could beg, buy, or borrow: Sidekick, Outlook, Time and Chaos, Goldmine, the list goes on. On my technology memorabilia shelf, I still have a copy of Ecco (right next to a copy of Clarion). Eventually, I gave up the the search for a PIM El Dorado, and devolved to use a series of plain-old Notepad text files, organized by week. The Notepad advantage being I could just jot things down without worrying about pigeon holes.

Lately, instead of my trusty Notepads, I find myself turning toward Google Notebook . I remember trying it some time ago, and it failed to satisfy. I don’t remember why, but trying it again this year, it’s been working well for me. Maybe because I’m using it as a PIM, rather than a surfing tool.

The Notebook paradigm is a hearty step up from a plain-old text file. We can create any number of “Notebooks”, each of which contains one or more Notes. Each note is essentially a simple text file, but with some simple formatting options, like bullets, links, and fonts (oh my!). A Notebook can have zero or more Sections that contain zero or more Notes. A Google Notebook account can contain any number of Notebooks, and we drag Notes or Sections between Notebooks.

Like most Google critters, Notebook lives on the cloud. (Meaning the good news is that I don’t have to back it up myself, and the bad news is that I don’t have my own backups.) Being on the cloud, Notebook offers sharing options, much like Google Sites or Google Documents. I haven’t tried to share a notebook with anyone yet (but knowing VanDamme Associates, and our penchant for sharing, eventually I will!).

Two other organizational features (that I literally just noticed) are comments are labels. The comment feature provides a secondary tab where a collaborator can add a remark without editing the main Note text. Essentially, the label feature is a persistent search. We can list arbitrary labels to apply to any given note. As soon as we do, the labels panel is updated with the name of the label and the number of notes that use it. Selecting a label from the panel open a search result, listing the approptiate notes.

Whenever some bit of data comes along, and I need a place to tuck it away, I can pull up my Google Notebook and bang it in. Later, if I want to transfer the data to another artifact, up comes the Notebook, and out goes the Note.

Plain-old weekly text files do provide one great feature: Auto-archiving. Each week, I opened up a new text file and started with a clean slate. With the Notebook, I may need to do some occasional housekeeping to keep my data stream tidy. Film at 11 …

If you have any Google Notebook experiences, or PIM stories to share, feel free to post a comment!