Taking Notes and Planning Your Life Online

I’m of two minds about the whole Web 2.0 “do it all online” thing. I find certain functions like shared calendars very helpful. But I am wary of having to obtain Net access in order to get my work done. It seems the future will belong to apps that can function offline but reveal their best attributes when connected to the Net.

This all came to mind when I stumbled across this list of Web 2.0 apps for students. It lists nine categories of online applications:

1. Office Replacements
2. Notetaking
3. Mind Mapping
4. Studying
5. Bookmarking
6. Collaboration
7. Calendars
8. Calculations
9. Other Tools

I can’t bring myself to conduct more than a cursory examination of office replacements, because I’m often working with Word docs sent to me by someone else. It may be easy to use an online text editor, but I still don’t buy the notion that it’s somehow easier and faster than doing it directly on my Mac.

With notetaking, again I can’t see the real advantage. If I were sharing notes with other students, I suppose it could be quite helpful. But since I’m not, and OmniOutliner Pro has essentially become an extension of my brain, I again can’t be bothered to switch.

I’ve never found a mind-mapping tool that I truly grok. I think for these tools to be truly effective, you need to gain in-depth familiarity with them. OmniGraffle Pro works well enough for me, and I’m not sure that tools built explicitly for mind-mapping are worth the investment in time. Of course, I could be completely blind about this. For all I know, there’s a mind-mapping tool out there that would blow my socks off if I’d only give it half a chance.

The studying apps in the list aren’t terribly pertinent to study of the law, which is to be expected.

As for bookmarking, I’m all about del.icio.us. Once I started using it regularly, it became part of my routine. The vast size of the del.icio.us user community makes it particularly helpful. I find three or four new and useful pages a week just from the del.icio.us home page. I also really like the ability to send and receive bookmarks. It’s a great way of passing on a link to friends without burdening them with yet another “Hey, I found this great website” email. I tried Ma.gnolia several months ago, but found it slower and less useful overall, in spite of its prettier interface.

I was born too late for Facebook, which heads up the “Collaboration” list. Frankly, if you’re in law school, you should probably be thinking about LinkedIn instead. It’s a social networking site aimed squarely at business professionals. LinkedIn is surely less fun than Facebook, but it’s also where you’ll find experienced professionals over 30 years old (read: people who hire).

Several people have told me Google Calendar is rocking their world. I am already well-served by iCal + Basecamp, but if I weren’t already using Basecamp, I’d probably just sync Google Calendar to iCal instead. There have been a slew of online calendar app startups over the last few years, and some of them have already died off. It will be interesting to see if anyone can beat Google in this arena.

As for Calculations apps, I didn’t go to law school so I could run equations. When I need to, I use the Calculator widget in Dashboard.

In the Other category, Zotero is the one to watch. Several months ago I contacted the developers, but it was still in early beta. Since then Zotero has launched, and it looks like it could be very useful as a research tool. It’s a Firefox plugin that automatically captures citation information from web pages, and even automatically captures Supreme Court decisions, patents, and laws and regulations. It exports to Word, apparently. In the future I’d like to run a full review of Zotero (or one of you attractive and intelligent MLS readers could, for that matter) in MLS.

As usual, I’m sure my feelings about online apps aren’t universal truths. I’d be happy to hear how you use (or avoid) online apps, which are your favorites, and why.