Tools - Google Notebook

One of my favorite free tools is Google Notebook. If you haven't tried it, I highly recommend it! It has three levels of organization -- The Notebook, the Section, and the Note. You can think of a notebook as a screen. For any given notebook you can have any number of sections. Your notes go in each section. You can expand an entire notebook or collapse the different notes or sections. You can even expose the notebook to the world if you like.

I use Google Notebook to write dreams, ideas, word lists, and more. I use it heavily for work -- writing notes about different technologies. The power of Google Notebook is that it's simple and accessible. Also, something most people don't think about, is that you organize your notes BEFORE you write them. How about that?!

Another great tool with similar functionality is Microsoft's OneNote. However, it's not free. I don't use it anymore because I've grown weary of having to rely on software that I may not always have access to. If you plan to use only one computer and sufficiently back it up, then I would suggest OneNote. However, if you rebuild your box every few months or if you work on multiple computers, you would probably be better off using Google Notebook. Now you CAN make OneNote post your data to a central location, but that's not really trivial to do, especially for non-technical people, plus you have hardware, maintenance, storage, and access issues. Google takes care of all that.