Google Notebook to Evernote

I'm sad that Google has discontinued its Notebook application, I was a fan. Evernote announced an import path to get Google notebooks into Evernote today. It works really well. Although they say "We even maintain the creation date", but that didn't work at all, the imported notes had today's date on them, but otherwise it was fine.
I really like Evernote, it is powerful and very well-designed. But it makes me nervous. There is still no decent export. If Evernote goes extinct would I be able to recover the information? Probably not. Yes I can export in Evernote's weirdo xml format but then what? The GNotebooks are exported as atom xml from Google then imported into Evernote. I only hope that this means that Evernote have solved their note to xml translation problems and a sensible export will appear very soon.

Firefox 3 and Add-ons

I really love the new Firefox3 release. I've had beta version before but just updated and all my add-ons are also updated and are working nicely. The firefox Add-ons page can be found here. I previously managed to seriously confuse my bookmarks by upgrading and then downgrading to Firefox2. Don't try this.

I have also now swapped to using del.icio.us the social bookmarking site. This has really nice integration with Firefox3, adding buttons to quickly bookmark a site. The best thing for me is that the left panel where bookmarks are typically listed in a browser can now toggle to display del.icio.us bookmarks complete with a searchable listing of tags. It is really slick. Very quick, well designed and much much more useful than tradiational bookmarks. I had got to the stage with Firefox2 where I was Google searching for sites that I knew were in my bookmarks because it would be faster to find them that way! The tag-based approach to data is so powerful I just groan when I see programmes not supporting tags.

Also in my add-ons is Zotero. This is an extension to help collect, manage and use bibliographic information. I'm an academic and spend a lot of time collecting journal articles. Zotero deserves a post by itself, soon I hope.

Lastly is Google Notebook. I don't really use this as a notebook for manually typing information (I use Journler). But Google Notebook has a great web-clipping function. OK this is also found in other software too but Google's implementation is pretty fool-proof.