A great free tool for information gathering and tracking

Evernote is a note-taking program that can run on your PC, your Mac, the Web, and your iPhone/iPad. You can create notes in various ways:

• Click on “new note”; type into the note
• Go to a Web page in your browser; click on the Evernote elephant icon, and the url and/or the page are stored in an Evernote note
• Select something on your screen, and click on the elephant in your menu bar or system tray
• other ways, depending on platform

What’s the big deal about Evernote? What makes it so useful to a book-writer?

• You can create or access your notes on any of the supported platforms. Capture a note on your PC, and moments later it’s available on your smart phone. Or on a public-access computer.
• You can capture Web pages with their urls, or just their urls.
• You can tag your notes and group them in different notebooks.
• You can email a note as a pdf or export it as an html page.
• Evernote will look for text within any pictures you save as notes, and let you search the text.
• You can capture a picture from your smart phone’s camera directly into Evernote.
• You can capture an audio note on your smart phone by speaking into your smart phone.
• You can scan text and images directly into Evernote.
• You can send material to on-line scanning services and have the scans delivered directly to your Evernote account.

And did I mention that it is free? Check it out.