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In the doldrums?
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Posted by Stephen Zeoli
Jul 25, 2008 at 01:19 PM
Dan,
Thank you for the comprehensive review of EverNote’s features. Of particular interest is your discussion of the value of tags. (By the way, MyInfo also does tags, and Surfulater is adding them.) My own opinion about tags is somewhat complicated. I can see their value, but also their shortcomings. One of the earliest programs I recall using tags is Personal Knowbase—although they call them index words. This approach appealed to me early on, but I soon found that my list of index words (tags) grew longer than my list of actual notes. (For this and for other reasons I soon stopped using Personal Knowbase, although it remains a program I am fond of.)
Now that I’ve got one foot in the Mac OS side of things, I find that most of the information managers for Mac use tags, too. I have yet to make much us of this feature beyond a few simple tags (i.e. I will add a tag to any serial numbers I save identifying them as such).
It occurs to me that tags probably work better when used as a subordinant form of categorization—at least for the way I work. For instance, I use MyInfo to capture data from web sites. First I drop the information into a specific database, then I add a tag, if appropriate. I agree with you, Dan, when you say that it is better to be able to add the tag at the time you capture the information, without having to open the application completely. That EverNote does this is a great benefit.
Nevertheless, I need more categorization than mere tags. It may just be as simple as multiple databases, but if I do this I want the ability to search across databases, not just in the current database—that’s the primary failing of Personal Knowbase. MyInfo allows multiple database searches, as does Zoot. Does EverNote?
Steve
Posted by dan7000
Jul 26, 2008 at 02:39 AM
>Nevertheless, I need more categorization than mere tags. It may just be as simple as
>multiple databases, but if I do this I want the ability to search across databases, not
>just in the current database—that’s the primary failing of Personal Knowbase.
>MyInfo allows multiple database searches, as does Zoot. Does EverNote?
Yes, you can search “all notebooks” in EverNote. And you’re right - I do find myself categorizing stuff by putting different types of items in different notebooks. I find myself wishing that there was one tag set for each notebook, actually - so I wouldn’t have to see a list of irrelevant tags when I just want to focus on one type of data.