Springnote: My New Virtual Three-Ring Binder

Just call me swag hag, but I'll generally follow orders for getting a t-shirt, so when I was sorting through the flyers in my Web 2.0 Expo bag and saw that Springnote wanted me to either sign up for an account or show them my account for a t-shirt, I thought I'd save time by setting one up during whatever spare few minutes I had.

Springnote is a nifty tool for organizing your life as well as your research notes. Much like my trusty old Trapper Keeper from sixth grade, Springnote allows me to keep track of URLs, notes, web clippings, and just about any information I'd like to keep in one handy location. Meal planning for the week plus research for an article plus a monthly organizer AND books I've read or am planning to read? No problem; Springnote keeps them all.

With as little time as I had during the conference, I skipped the tour, but was still able to get up and running fairly quickly. You can create new pages in your notebook from templates, and styles for each section are done via a simple drop-down menu. Once I figured out how to pick my way around, I was able to set up a quick link page for articles I was saving (which I'm still not done updating!) complete with article quotes.

The best part of Springnote is that it has additional plug-ins (for giving star ratings to books, for instance) as well as mash-ups, one of which allows you to add text from web pages and notepad to your Springnote without having to actually visit the Springnote web site. That's always a big sell for me, since the more times I have to switch sites or tabs, the more likely I am to get distracted and forget what I was doing in the first place. It also has some other extra-user-friendly features like a quick-button for OpenID log-ins that autopopulates the URL, leaving you to type only your personalization.

The site is still a little buggy; a quick try in Camino for a screencap made Springnote hurl all over my screen with no formatting at all. It looks find in Safari, but in Firefox, there are some glitches. Clicking on the Tags selection in the sidebar brings up pre-assigned tags, but the text runs over itself, and I'm unable to add any of my own tabs, which would further help my organization.

However, these small issues are barely a blip on my radar when I can note URLs as well as quotes for an article as I'm working and then export my page of clips out to a web page. No more leaving 100 tabs open as I'm working on an article just to grab the quotes when I finally start writing. No more tens of drafts in my blog editor as I try to keep all the information straight for articles I'm working on.

Well, I managed to barely set up my account while I was there, but never did make it over to the booth to score my t-shirt. I'm still playing around with it, but so far, I'm liking the idea of having a virtual notebook. I have a horrible habit of using either my desktop blogging tool or email drafts to take quick notes, which has them scattered all over my hard drive. Springnote gives me the old-fashioned three-ring binder with everything in one place and organized nicely, something that's tough with my current method.