Every week as I put together FierceContentManagement I have to deal with a lot of content. I go through countless blogs and websites in Google Reader, and I watch my social networks for articles that will make good candidates for the various sections of this newsletter. I also get press releases directly from vendors. How do I track all of this material? I use a program called Evernote, which I find to be an indispensable content organizing tool. I use it not only to organize material for this newsletter, but for all of my writing and even maintaining lists like purchases for the year (which comes in handy at tax time).

Free or fee

First of all Evernote is free for most users. If you surpass 40 MB of storage in a given month, they ask you to upgrade to a professional version, which is still a grand bargain at only $5 per month or $45 per year. For that you get a whopping 500 MB of storage, which I can tell you is virtually impossible for an individual to reach. There are so many wonderful aspects to this tool, but perhaps the best is the way it syncs across your smartphone, web and desktop accounts automatically.

The desktop app

Your first stop is to download the desktop version. They have a Mac and PC versions, but no Linux, sorry. While you're there, grab the Web Clipper tool, which you can add to your browser's tool bar. As you cruise the web, and you find an article you want to save, click the Clip to Evernote button, and the Web Clipper dialog opens. Enter some notes, some tags and assign it to a folder. You can clip the whole page or just part it of by selecting it. If you're looking to preserve your online storage space, you may want to just select the text in a blog post for instance. If you're in a hurry, go for the whole thing.

The smartphone

There is a version of Evernote for the iPhone, Blackberry, Windows Mobile, Palm and Sony Ericsson. I can only speak to the iPhone App (although I assume the others work in a similar fashion). With the phone app, you have a number of tools including a picture note, a voice note or a typed note. I've found the voice note indispensable as a writer. I've been driving and had a blog post idea pop into my head almost fully formed. It's not really very convenient to type a blog post on the iPhone, so when I get to my destination, I add a voice note with the gist of my idea. I've also used it to remember things like a wine label at a restaurant. I take a picture of the label and I can reference it later when I'm at my local package store (that's liquor store in Massachusetts parlance).

The great thing is that because it's constantly syncing across all three platforms. When I get home and open my desktop app, it syncs with the Evernote cloud and my voice and pictures are downloaded to my desktop app automatically.

The web app

Finally, there is a web version of the application that is always tracking everything you add to your phone and desktop. If you're on the road and you and you need to access your notes from a computer you don't normally use, you just access the Evernote website, log into your account and there is is all your lovely content just waiting for you.

More than web and pictures

You can also generate notes on things you want to remember, save emails and documents, and all kinds of stuff. You can drag pictures and pdfs directly into a note. You can even drag Mac iWork or Microsoft Office documents into a note and get access to them through a Quick Look feature that lets you see the entire contents (at least on the Mac side). In short, you can organize and track your entire work and home life in Evernote.

Not perfect

There are a number of features I would like see such as being able to right-click an email in Mac Mail and send it to Evernote, the ability to highlight text in a note and check off notes you want to revisit later. It would also be nice to be able to mark a note as a favorite or add a note to multiple notebooks from the Web Clipper (even though I understand I can find it using tags and search).

In spite of these limitations, I've tried lots of organizing tools like this in the past, but none have stuck because the tools lacked a natural workflow. With Evernote, and its ability to sync across multiple platforms, I can capture and access information wherever and whenever I need it, and I've found it to be one of the key tools in my arsenal. I highly recommend this application to anyone who has to track, organize and access large amounts of information. You'll wonder how you lived without it. - Ron