EverNote – 10 reasons why journalists and researchers should love it

Over the last few years a number of notebook applications have elbowed their way into the mainstream market including Google Notebook, Zoho Notebook, Ubernote and iLeonardo. A few of these apps were discussed in this Mashable post recently. One of the most recent note-taking apps to emerge is Evernote – an incredibly powerful creation that works on both Macs and Windows. I’ve looked at Evernote from the perspective of a journalist and researcher and found ten reasons to love it.

1 – It does the basics really well. I hope the people at EverNote never lose sight of this. Journalists and researchers use notebook apps so they can quickly and efficiently file away snippets, web pages, documents and pictures into subject files. They also need to be able to dump this content into the note-taking app in a variety of ways and access those notes easily. Evernote has this mastered.
2 – EverNote works on the web and your desktop. Sounds like a source of confusion but the automatic syncing means both operate seamlessly. You can, however, create notebooks only on the web version or only on your desktop.
3 – You can publish your notebooks to collaborate with colleagues on projects.
4 – You can tag notes. Making it easier to search for notes across and within notebooks.
5 – Notes can be emailed easily. Single or multiple notes can be selected and then one click attaches those notes as PDFs to a new message window from your email client.
6 – You can email notes directly into your EverNote account.
7 – EverNote search includes image recognition technology. While not universally applauded, this image recognition capability means you can automatically search through pictures that carry text. If you have taken snaps of business cards, for example, you can search them automatically.
8 – You can import and export. This means that as you build data using the service and catalogue items you can export them later to a different app on a different platform.
9 – The web and desktop interfaces work beautifully. You can view notes in various forms, zoom in and out, view specific notes in one column or work on a specific note by adding text or images.
10 – It’s about to get better. Yesterday EverNote announced released its all-access API which means that developers can mash the service with other apps. The company hopes, for example, that it can be integrated with scheduling services such as Ical and Remember the Milk. This also means that the social bookmarking element of EverNote (published notebooks) may become intergrated with other social networking sites. It also says that new Mac and Windows scripting capabilities mean that you can automate specific processes and add functionality such as RSS feeds

There are other reasons why EverNote has attracted praise; for example, I’ve yet to explore how easily you can create and browse notes via mobiles. One downside might be that the free version allows a maximum data upload of 40mb per month. Even so, $5 will give you access to 500mb which is enough to store 5,000 snaps.

More on Evernote mashups soon.