Blurts

The President was in North Dakota visiting reservations.

OneNote, the content collection and organization site popular among MicroSoft users, is now truly cross platform and free (up to 7 gigabytes). You can now generate and view content across devices (I guess web access was available, but a native app works better)

Microsoft suggests this app and service (the storage is online) is a competitor to Evernote. I will save you the trouble if you are a satisfied Evernet and Mac person. You will find OneNote is quite serviceable, but not yet the equivalent of Evernote. I admit that my conclusion may be based on my personal word style, familiarity with Evernote, and evaluation of OneNote using my ipad and Chromebook. I could get stuff to work, but given equivalent pricing for the free version (I do have a Premium Evernote Account $45 a year) OneNote is presently a curiosity for me. For others, more embedded in the MicroSoft culture or just starting with personal archiving, OneOne may be what you are looking for.

Just to be clear, these are products that allow the collection of multiple resources, allow commenting on these resources in various ways, and offer the organization of resources into collections (the label for this process will vary with product – NoteBook would be a good prototypical term for a collection).

I use this type of product when I want to collect resources and do not want to leave the browser to take notes, copy and paste, or save URLs. For example, I will use EverNote while I make my daily review of my RSS feed or scan of Twitter. A similar process is applied when working on larger, more long term projects. The first steps are similar, but I organize what I save into categories and sub-categories, and I may add a few sentences of text to each resource to highlight an idea I had for what the content might be valuable.

There are a couple of features that support these processes. Depending on the device and situation, I can move content to the second application by sending an email to a designated address (think of this as having an evernote or onenote (me@onenote.com) address stored in your contacts list). Browsers I use have a “share option” and the “sure fire option” is to send an email.

The second feature is some type of “clipper” plugin. This means I can copy portions or all of a source and then send the content for storage (note I am not intending to republish this content but use as background material for something I might write).

The image below shows a OneNote screen from my iPad. You see the content from on source in the large window and other available resources from a notebook listed in the window to the right.

I do feel that setting up the system for submitting content by email and installing a plugin for clipping are essential for productive use. I had difficulty locating the methods for doing both from my iPad and so I am including the URLs for the pages explaining each below.

Locate email settings page – http://www.winbeta.org/news/share-any-document-your-onenote-account-emailing-meonenotecom – I set up my Gmail account as the default. The way this works may be confusing if you think about it – do not think. Every users sends content to the same address – me@notebook.com. The system must use the return address to identify the account in which to store the content.

Web clipper – http://blogs.office.com/2014/03/17/onenote-clipper-clip-the-web-right-to-onenote/ – the system uses a bookmarklet and you should be abl Continue reading →

The government in vs. government out argument is clouding the discussion regarding net neutrality. The argument that government should stay out and allow market forces to apply makes some sense, but not when there are no actual forces (no real alternatives). FCC’s willingness to allow municipal broadband may offer an alternative. It is not clear when this would be practical.

The unfortunate reality is that most areas in the country still have only one option for high speed internet. If there are two broadband providers in your town, then consider yourself lucky. And frankly there are still a disturbingly high number of areas in the United States without access to broadband at all.

The recent data from the PEW foundation on political attitudes shows party positions becoming more divergent. The trend reminds me of social psych research on communication and attitudes. If you determine existing attitudes and then group individuals for discussion either with mixed or similar attitudes, you find the average position in groups with similar attitudes become more extreme. So, the PEW outcome would be produced by a pattern of information access selected to be consistent with existing positions. Consider your selection of a cable channel for news.