On Friday, Will asked a simple, basic question: What’s Your Process?
Seriously. I want to know. What do you do when you read a couple of sentences in a post or article that really resonate? How do you capture and organize those snippets? What tools do you use? How often do you recall those sentences, access them? How do you search for them? Is your process working?
As of this evening he had received more than forty really good responses. Most of the software/web sites noted in the comments are those you might expect – Bloglines, Google Reader, del.icio.us – but there were a couple of unique tools.
I was a little surprised that only a couple of people mentioned using audio recording as a way to collect their thoughts.
I would have thought that the tech-savvy crowd that Will attracts might be trying some kind of multimedia solution, but maybe that due to the fact that we don’t really have an efficient way to search audio files.
Several people mentioned Devon Think, a program I got in a bundle deal at MacZOT but have never used. After watching the review recommended by one commenter, I’ll have to open it and take a look.
For right now, my process of keeping track of everything I run across is pretty simple.
If the item is something I might want to use in a training session or presentation, it goes into delicious. If it’s something that might turn up in a post here, I use ecto to grab the URL and a relevant clip.
Of course, it also helps to have a lot of feeds from some excellent sources sitting in my aggregator.
And a great network of colleagues to exchange information and ideas with.
For taking notes online, I haven’t found anything simpler and easier to organize and use than Google notebooks.
Basically, I mark the text, right click, then choose “note this.” I can create a new notebook in a couple clicks and can have as many notebooks as I want.