Problem is most people aren’t aware of what is possible and aren’t really taking advantage of  the latest technologies to make their life easier.

For taking notes during meetings, at a conference or planning for an events or occasion I simply have not come across a more elegant solution than Simplenote.

If you are looking for a full content management system that supports web clipping, audio and rich text, you should look no further than Evernote; but if you are looking for a simple, fast, no frills note taking solution, Simplenote ticks all the boxes for me and trust me when I say I have tested my fair share of note taking systems!

Ever since the first version of Simplenote, the team at Simperium has kept to their core strategy and focused on being a simple, no-frills note taking solution. But don’t be fooled by the simple looking interface as the platform has evolved over the years and is now an incredibly powerful note taking platform. Some of the things that makes Simplenote such a effectively note taking system today include:

1. It is True Multi-Platform

Simplenote has dedicated apps for iPhone, iPad on top of the native web client through any browser. Through its mature API and developers program, Simplenote now also has a large number of third party desktop and mobile apps. Simply put, you can access Simplenote anytime, everywhere and the synchronisation works flawlessly.

The true power of a multi-platform solution is demonstrated when the note I just took on my iPad during a meeting is instantly available to me on my desktop through the browser when I am back at my desk. In digital form ready for editing no less! I can’t imagine how much time Simplenote has saved me over the years just in organising meeting notes.

2. It is Fast!

It might seem odd to attribute fast as an important features of a note taking solution, but often it is the very reason people stick with their pen and paper solution. The no-frills approach of Simplenote means that it is incredibly fast. It is fast to launch, it is fast to create a new note, it is fast to edit a note, and it is fast to retrieve and open an existing note. There is also something to be said about how intuitive it is to perform these actions, something that has to be experienced to be appreciated.

It should be noted that there is also a simple, intuitive tagging systems to help with organisation and retrieval, but it is definitely not forced upon you to have to tag your notes if you don’t want to. You don’t even have to give your note a name if you are really in a rush!

3. Search Enabled

If you need one feature to convince your friend to go digital and abandon your moleskin notebook, the ability to search through your notes instantaneously would be the obvious choice.

Simplenote supports note searching across all of the supported platforms, and the improvements the team has put into the platform over the last year means the search process is incredibly…. FAST!

There is something akin to magic when you type in a client’s name in the search box of the iPhone Simplenote app and retrieve a meeting note you created two years ago when the name was mentioned. All without you having to do anything extra to enable it.

In addition to search, the ability to tag and pin certain notes make note retrieval even easier for other usage scenarios. Example of this is the use of tags to group meeting notes by clients and pin your shopping list so you can get to it instantly.

All in all, Simplenote is an incredible useful note taking platform that is well implemented and more importantly,  well thought out from the user’s perspective.

If you believe you have a better note taking system, leave a comment as I would love to hear from you!

I have been a huge fan of the iPad since day one and had taken full advantage of it to satisfy my information addiction. With it’s unique form factor, large touch screen and constant connectivity, app developers have been on a roll, with new innovative apps appearing on a daily basis. As consumers of information, it means that we can now consume more content, at more places, with a level of ease never seen before.

Here are some of the ways I am using the iPad for content consumption and the apps that I use to turbo charge my content consumption on the go.

1. RSS/News Feeds

The iPad’s big screen and portability means it’s a great way to catch up on all your RSS feeds. The ability to store articles locally on the iPad also means that there is no excuses not geting through all your feeds on that long international flight :+)

There is a huge number of RSS readers in the app store today, after trialling a number of them, I have settled on the Reeder app. The reeder iPad app has an elegant and highly efficient interface. After years of update, it has all the features you can think of including  Google Reader integration, social media sharing and offline reading (see point 2 below).

Most importantly, the reading experience on the reeder app is effortless and inviting, all important attributes as you get through your mountains of articles and work out wether to share them or archive them for later reading.

2. Read it later/Offline reading

Before the iPad came along, I often lose websites that I need to read when distracted by other urgent matters. Even when I do consciously make a note of a website and come back to it when I have a spare minuet when I wait for my coffee, the process has always been cumbersome and not ideal. It all changed when bookmarking/read it later services came along.

I now rely on the Read it later app to track website I need to read effortless across multiple platforms. Whenever I come across a useful website that I can’t quite finish but wanted to read next time I wait for my coffee, I simply click on the save button enabled by the Read it later Firefox extension. And I am DONE! Next time when I am having a coffee or have a spare moment, I open up the iPhone or iPad app, the article is there synced and ready to be consumed. Works almost like magic and I now never miss any important article.

The other very popular read it later app is Instapaper. Both app offers similar functionalities so it really is a matter of taste. I like the extensive cross platform integration of the Read it later app but many people find the simple, no-frill reading experience of Instapaper a winner.

3. Personalised Magazines.

The best way to explain apps like Zite is an “Interactive magazine tailored just for you”. These apps analyses your reading habits as well as your social network, then presents highly tailored contents for you in a visually rich layout. You then interact with the contents and articles as if you are reading a magazine. It is an unique experience that can only exist on the iPad and the app takes full advantage of all of the capabilities of the iPad.

Apps like Zite (which I prefer) and Flipboard have been all the rage with Flipboard even winning Apple’s iPad app of the year back in 2010. Not only are the contents highly tailored to you based on your reading habits and social network, the graphics rich, magazine like layout makes reading articles a wonderfully pleasant and casual experience. I, for one has replaced reading newspaper and now enjoy reading Zite every morning as I have my coffee and I thoroughly recommend it!

What about you? How do you like to consume contents on the iPad?

This almost religious belief in having empty inbox has allowed me to focus on what is really important and get more done throughout the day.

Regardless of how small or insignificant each individual emails are and how quickly you can scroll through them, people are often distracted (and often disheartened!)  and repeatedly waste their mental energy as they review their fully stacked inbox numerous times throughout the day. It is a big drain on productivity and simply  a BAD IDEA!

Here are three simple tips that you can try to start reducing the size of your inbox today:

1. Unsubscribe

   Do you really need to have those 3 newsletters hitting your inbox everyday? Do you really need to know what your frequent flyer balance is every single week? In most cases, the answers to those question are no. In most cases, we actually know where we could go to find the relevant the information without being kept up to date on a day to day basis.

   I never paid much attention to these “newsletter” email until they became out of control. The enemy of unsubscribing from these email is actually the delete button. We often find it easier to just hit the delete button without realising if we invested 1 extra click and clicked on the unsubscribe link, we would be saved from these emails FOREVER.

2. Automatic Filing

   
   For information that do need to hit your inbox and you do need to have a record of, the tricks is to allow them to land in your inbox but not stay there. Things like archived invoices, technical discussion lists and educational materials are examples of emails that you want to keep but don’t necessary need to read or review the actual emails.

   Most email clients today (web or desktop) have auto filing or archiving functionalities that allow you to file archive email automatically (and remove them from your inbox) based on certain rules that you have defined. Perhaps you want to automatically file all emails that are from a particular discussion list, or contain a particular keyword in the email title.

   Here are the instructions for Microsoft’s Outlook and Google’s Gmail. Start being precious about what actually lands in your inbox.

3. Don’t use it as a todo list

   
   This is the evil of all inbox explosions. People often happily let their inbox built up because they treat it as a Todo list. After all, you can’t have an empty Todo list?

   The inbox is a BAD Todo list because you have no control what actually goes in there! It is also a BAD Todo list because there are no obvious markers or obvious context that differentiates the important from the un-important tasks. 

   Outlook has a very good Todo section and there are also a number of very good web based Todo systems that works with the GTD principle such as Toodledo and RTM. Start filing your email away and use a separate Todo system, not only will your inbox become smaller, you will also tick off more todos :+)

What about you, do you suffer from inbox explosion? Do you have any tips on how you keep your inbox under control?

Evernote is a multi-platform tools that aims to to replace your brain and helps you remember everything! Not only does it take basic things like “Taking Note” to the next level. For some people it also makes the dream of going “Paperless” a reality.

I personally am a big fan and assume that you have at least tried it if not also an active user. If you not a user currently, I highly recommend that you get started and Michael Hyatt has a a great resources page dedicated to all things Evernote related to help you on your way.

Just like that thing between your ears, a brain is only as good as its ability to retrieve information stored inside. What I want to focus on for this post is how you can take Evernote to the next level through better understanding of its search and retrieval capabilities. Here are 3 Evernote search related tips that you must know:

1. Use Tag, Notebook and Stack to improve efficiency. It might sound counterintuitive to focus on structured meta-tagging when all you want to focus on is search. But as you fully embrace Evernote as a memory repository, you will quickly find yourself being overwhelmed by the amount of stuff in it and making retrieval difficult.

To make it easier for you to find stuff, Evernote has some very powerful capabilities to help you put some structure in your repository including Tag, Notebook and Stack (Stack is a relatively new feature that allows you to aggregate notebooks!).

Once setup and organised, Notebook and Stack  give your memory repository a basic high level structure and allows you to search within just the “Work” or “Family” stack quickly without being overwhelmed. You can easily search at either the notebook level or the stack level by clicking on it first then entering your search query. So if all you are interested is in Japan related stuff in your family stack, click on the Family stack before you run your search to avoid including all work related stuff that are related to Japan!

Tags in term gives you another level of filter to further arrow down your search, say if you only want all things Japan related in your family stack that are about food, then all you have to do is also click on the food tag to further narrow your search down! Assuming you tagged correctly in the first place.

2. Get to know the advanced operators: It’s no wonder most people don’t really use advanced operators as Evernote hides its advanced search operators guide deep within its knowledge base! You can use the operators to apply the filterings discussed in point one above much quickly and efficiently. In addition, here are a number of handy ones to know that will make it all that easier to find that allusive note!

resource:image/jpg

Will return all notes that contain an embedded JPG image.

resource:audio/*

Will return all notes that contain some types of audio file.

source:mobile

Will return all notes created on a mobile application of some type

created:day-2

Will return notes that were created in the last two days. or x number of days if you replace 2 with x

3. Leverage the power of the machine! OCR or Optical Character recognition within Evernote is surprisingly good. Where your standard text based search comes unstuck with images of articles, whiteboards or documents, Evernote is able to pick these up after it’s server has processed the documents and recognised the characters within these images! Sound like magic and I must admit when it works it is a bit like magic!

Not only can you now skip jotting down everything on a whiteboard after a meeting by simply taking a photo of it, Evernote will also allow you to now search within writings that was on the whiteboard! I guess the real tip I can give you here is to take clearer picture of whiteboards and write as neatly as possible as it will dramatically increase your ability to retrieve it later.

Are you an Evernote fan? do you have any other search related tips to share?

1. Windows/Mac Built in Desktop Search

In many ways, the role of a dedicated desktop search engine has been replaced by the default, built-in operating system search capabilities. The Apple Mac OS desktop search has always been very good, what many people don’t realise is that the new Windows desktop search (Windows Search) that is shipped with Windows 7 is light years ahead of the old, slow, clunky desktop search shipped with previous versions of windows. You can also download it if you are still on Windows XP or Vista.

If you have been burnt by previous versions of Windows desktop search (as I have) and have not tried the latest attempt by Microsoft, I encourage you to give it a go as I think you will be pleasantly surprised!

2. Dedicated Desktop Search Engine Software

On the other hand, why would you still consider installing dedicated, specialist desktop search software on your PC? I, for one, not only has a dedicated desktop search software, I even paid for it!

Whilst for most people, the default desktop search is more than adequate. A dedicated, specialist desktop search software engine makes a lot of sense for power users in a corporate/work environment.

Compared with using the default windows desktop search, I personally find that I am a lot of efficient and effective using the X1 dedicated desktop search software. Specifically, it offers the following features that justifies its additional costs.

• More file format support
• Better performance
• Instant file preview and quick access to file
• Better support for corporate environment
• Remote Search access through iPad/iPhone

Copernic is another desktop search software vendor that offers similar features and have gotten good reviews. Better still, both software offer free trial downloads for you to see if the benefits you get outweighs the costs of the software.

If you consider yourself a power user and am always looking for documents or files at work, then it is definitely worthwhile to give it a go!

“90% of computer users do not know how to use CTRL + F (PC) or Command + F (Mac) to search through a document or Web page.”

Oh dear me! and here I am preaching about advanced Boolean expression and specialist search engines.

I guess we better get back to some of the basics.

Firstly, for 90% of you out there, DO NOT scan your document anymore and use CTRL+F (PC) or Command +F (Mac) to search and go directly to the keyword that you are looking for! Immediate productivity gain, guaranteed.

Secondly, searching for keywords within a page is such a common task (for me anyway), shaving more time through further automation adds up to significant amount of time saved in the long run. Here are a couple more tips to shave off those valuable seconds.

• Avoid CTRL-F all together!

Within Firefox, there is a great feature whereby, searching for a keyword is automatically kicked off when you start typing. The option is under Advanced->General and is disabled by default.

Check it and you would wonder how you ever got by without it!

• Automatically highlight searched keywords.

This one I blogged about way back in 2008 and is still one of my favourite feature of the Google toolbar.

Once you land on a new page after conducting a search through Google, Google toolbar gives you a couple of options in terms of navigating through the keywords you used during the initial search.

You can easily get to the keywords within the document (as show on the tool bar here after a search for “search poor craftsmen statistics) by clicking on the keywords themselves from the toolbar, or you can click on the yellow highlight pen icon (as demonstrated below). All the keywords will then be highlighted with different colours, allowing you to easily navigate and find the ones you are looking for.

I would have happily paid Google for the toolbar just to get this feature.

How about you, do you use CTRL-F today? Have any other tips to offer?

Well, you could always try searching on twitter.com/search which I think most people will probably fall back to. By digging into advanced search options, you can indeed be quite effective searching using the twitter.com search engine. There are however, alternatives for people who wants more capabilities and features when it comes to searching through twitterspehere.

Topsy is one such search engine that has been in this game for a while and according to their website, differentiates by:

“Topsy’s algorithms dynamically identify influencers within the Social Web for any searchable criteria, using these influence calculations to rank results. This means realtime search results are highly relevant & devoid of noisy stream of conscious content.”

Here are some of the reasons why you might want to try it out:

• You can search through twitter archives. According to their website, their index goes back as far as three years, and according to them, is the largest on the web today. Search Engine Land has an interesting post on why this might be useful, such as finding Ashton Kutcher’s (or anyone else’s) first tweet?
• The benefits of keeping a large archive of tweets is that they can try try to present results based on relevance and not just timeline.
• Whilst the default twitter search engine also claims to give you relevant results (when you choose “Top” results”), Topsy is a bit more transparent and allows you to drill into why certain tweets comes out on top and who the key influencer is on a topic.

Finally, I think the most impressive feature, (one that no one, including twitter offers) is the ability to filter the results based by date. You can do this easily by going to their advanced search page.

Could be really useful if you want to filter out a particular period of time when there are lot of noises about the topic you are researching about.

What about you, what do you use to search through twitter?

The simple premise presented during this seminar is that search personalisation where search engines track you and try to tailor the results based on your past searching and clicking history has gone too far.

The funny things is that not that long ago, “Results tailored to you” was supposed to be a positive, now somehow its a bad thing? I think personalisation still plays a role when it comes to fact based searching. For example, being in IT myself, I am perfectly fine with search engines filtering out things related to Java (the coffee variety!) and focus on the programming language when I do search for the term “Java”. For a coffee lovers on the other hand, the results should focus on the other variety.

It’s only when you you bring in the context of subjectivity that things get a little murky. This is especially true in a political context, since you typically click on things you “AGREE WITH” you tend to get more of them. So it is alleged that the same search for “Barrack Obama” will yield two completely different result sets with one set more focused around contents from “MSNBC” (supposed to be more pro-democrat?) and the other set more focused around contents from Fox news (more pro-republican?). The worst part of it (hence the bubble that you can’t get out!) is that it becomes a vicious cycle.

So how do you get out of the search engine personal bubble? Alternative search engines such as Duck Duck Go presents itself as the solution. In fact, they have dedicated a whole URL to try to explain this key differentiation point of theirs. The whole idea is that they don’t track you, don’t lock you in a bubble and the search result you see is exactly the same as someone on the other side of the planet. The associated benefit being that since they don’t track you, don’t store your search history, they are the web’s angelic angel when it comes to protecting your privacy.

I think the verdict is still out on this one….

It’s no secret that the Internet is a fantastic resources to search for cheap airfares, holidays ideas and accommodation recommendations. The mix of extensive commercial contents and user supplied material means that as long as you know where to look and how to find the right information, you can really leave nothing to chances when it comes to planning for your next trip.

Here are a few tips that I have used over the years to help me take trip planning to the next level and help me plan for the perfect trip by leveraging the power of the Internet and Search Engines!

• Bing Travel Search

If you live in the USA or are traveling to and from USA, the Bing Travel search engines have some cool features to help you sort our your airfares. Whilst many website allow you to search for the cheapest flight tickets, one of the big feature of Bing Travel search is the ability to predict flight fares going forward and recommend you to buy it today or wait for it to get cheaper.

It also offer the ability to fine tune your search and when you click on the flight will take you directly to the address where you can buy the fare from the vendor.

I must admit, I don’t live in the USA but from what I can see, the features seems comprehensive and I would certainly use it if I were to travel within the USA and hope Bing bring the same search engines to other countries.

• Research the location

Got an address of your hotel? If you do, there are a whole lot that you can do today before you leave home to find out about your destination. Firstly, Google Map can show you where the hotel is on the map, what the front gate looks like, what the surrounding environments are like, all highly useful information when you are staying at a brand new hotel, particularly ones that you are offered very cheap rate! For example, here is a satellite view and front gate view of the Versace hotel up in the Gold Coast in Australia.

Secondly, want to know if you can get a decent Pizza near your hotel? A quick search on Google map, once again reveals where to go for a late night feed when you get there!

• Use forums for reviews

When you do come across various web sites about your destination or accommodations, chances are its filled with pretty pictures and descriptions of how exciting and wonderful the place, such is the nature of commercial contents, they WANT TO SELL YOU SOMETHING.

But If you are like me and are interested in finding out what real people who have visited the place really think about a place or hotel, online forums offers a fantastic venue where people often debate passionately about their favorite (or most hated!) destination. Google now offers you the ability to search within forum via advanced options or you can use any of the specialist forum search engines to dig through people’s experiences and discussions about a holiday destination.

• What is going on today?

Whilst forums are great for finding past experience from people, Twitter search comes into its own when you need to find out the latest about a particular destinations. Latest discussions, sales or promotions, events, or even celebrity sightings! One of the coolest thing about search through twitter is the fact that you never know what you are going to find, so it’s always worth checking out the twitterspehere about your destination!

There you have it, the time you spend on researching and planning for your trip is definitely worth it, as you can leave the thinking at home!

Just like Google’s search, Twitter offers advanced search functionalities that can really help you find what you are looking for and filter out all the trash. Also, due to the real-time and conversational nature of twitter, there are some unique search operators you need to be aware of in order to search twitter effectively.

Firstly, to get a feel of all the advanced search functionalities, you should head over to the Twitter Advanced Search page where you can literally see all of the different ways you can search through people’s tweets. Just to help you get started, Twitter even provide an example page on how these advanced search operators can be used! By in large, the concepts are quite similar to the standard Google web search, but here are a few things unique to Twitter search and that you should pay close attention to when searching Twitter.

• BE GENEROUS WITH THE EXCLUSION OPERATOR

It is highly likely that your first search attempt on twitter will be frustrating as the results are littered with useless rubbish. This is why the minus or exclusion operator should be your best friend in any Twitter Search. Be adventurous and generous and add more minus operator as you search to help you narrow down to a particular area by excluding areas you are not interested in. Sometimes it takes several attempt to really zero in on the area you are interested. This is particularly true when there is a viral topic going around that you are not particularly interested in and every second tweet has the keyword with the viral topic, in this case, simply use the “-“ operator to zap away these tweets.

• DATE SENSITIIVE

Another great way to zero in on your search is to limit the date range using the “until” or “since” operator. If you know are only interested in people’s reaction about a particular topic from a particular date then limit tweets produced between the date ranges you are interested in. For example, if you want to find out about people’s expression and comments around Michael Jackson’s death, you would use “Michael Jackson since:2009-06-25” since he died on June 25 2009.

• FROM THE RIGHT AUTHOR

Whilst you can search for mentions of persons by including his or her name in the search strings. You can also search through tweets from a particular person by using the “from” operator. This is useful when you want to search through a tweets of a person or accounts that you know provide useful, relevant or trustworthy information.

Together with the “to” operator, it allows you to search for specific tweets sent from a particular person to a particular person, very useful for backtracking and following conversations effectively.

For example, here is a search for all the tweets directed towards Demi Moore and are all the tweets produced by Ashton Kutcher. Adding additional keywords in the search will hopefully produce some interesting results!

• HASHTAG

The use of hastag has caught on as an unofficial way of tagging a particular conversation. Hashtags.org lists popular and hot tags that you might want to include in your search string.

Most major events these days also tend to have an agreed hashtag that everyone use when they comment or joining on the conversation, once you know the hastag, including it will often dramatically increase the relevancy of your search results. For example the tag “#inauguration” was used as people were discussing and commenting on Barack Obama’s presidential inauguration back in Jan 2009.

Do you have any other tips? What’s your killer twitter search trick?