Ease of Access Over Information Organization

Recently, I’ve been experimenting with various ways to access information remotely from anywhere. My primary tool has been SVN, which works great for software projects, but it’s not as effective for document storage in my case. There are two reasons for this:

• You need a client (alternatively, there are web interfaces, but these have poor usability in my opinion).
• The complexity of the approach discourages me from using it regularly.

Lately, I’ve been exploring Google Notebook, which primarily focuses on the simplicity of working with information, especially for sketches, free thoughts, and reflections. And it is remote.

The application’s logic aligns with other Google tools and the Web 2.0 concept: simplicity and usability. We have a very simple tool that allows you to:

• Create notes (and label them).
• Bookmark websites (with the option to quote text from the page).
• Create sections for potentially structuring notes.

Thanks to integration with Firefox through an appropriate plugin, you can quickly note down parts of a webpage with the right mouse button.

That’s basically it (well, almost). The most important aspect is that you don’t need a lot of features to organize notes—simple tagging (ubiquitous in Web 2.0) and the ability to quote webpage fragments cover almost 85% of needs (don’t ask where this number comes from ;-)).

This way, I have a remote tool, moreover, it’s distributed—documents can be shared and even co-edited, and notes are loosely structured. For me, it’s great. It’s an interesting alternative for other data storage forms. Of course, as the name suggests, it’s more for notes than formal documents, but in that case, it’s worth investing time in SVN or other file storage methods on a remote server (hmmm… Google Docs!?).

It occurs to me that for information we frequently work with and want to keep handy, ease of use becomes more important than organization (see Google Notebook) compared to using tools like SVN or file servers.

On the other hand, this is yet another Google tool one can become dependent on, which is increasingly dangerous. There might come a day when Google monopolizes the world—well, it almost has already. The amount of data stored by Google about us is becoming increasingly alarming.

I’m curious about your methods of working with remote documents/files/notes, especially those requiring frequent editing and access.

(Text translated and moved from original old blog automatically by AI. May contain inaccuracies.)