The knowledge base problem
February 3rd, 2006Everyone–but especially a writer–needs some form of a personal knowledge base. Blogs do an exquisite job of providing a searchable, organized, highly available collection of such knowledge.
However, for very quick notes, something even more lightweight is required. And that’s where EverNote comes in. The fact that their system
- runs locally (as opposed to being available on the web)
- doesn’t synchronize with a PDA
…means that they just aren’t quite the general solution that many of us need. So, blogs are still better for some things. But for trying to consolidate and understand information scattered around a corporation (and let’s face it, that’s a pretty good description of your job, isn’t it?), EverNote is really impressive.
Another key feature is the ability to configure EverNote to automatically drop backups into the directory of your choice, as often as hourly. This means that you’re pretty well protected. Combined with the “no need to ever explicitly save anything”, this makes for a very comfortable ability to just pour your ideas and observations into the system, without the usual background fear of data loss.
Let’s hope it grows up fast. And for the sake of diversity and choice, let’s hope they port it to Linux, Mac OS X and all the rest.
