If you have read the text or some of the postings at this blog, you’ll know that I’m a believer that we’re seeing David Weinberger‘s small pieces,loosely joined philosophy come to pass with many of the most important Web tools for legal research. Instead of trying to build the best all-in-one application, build the fundamental application and make it fantastic. Then let others build add-ons and enhancements that users can opt to add or not.
Evernote is a great, free tool and the new add-on site, Evernote Trunk, only provides more power to an already great tool. Trunk? Check out Evernote’s elephant logo! If you’re a Twitter fan, you can use the Seesmic add-on to send your Twitter messages from your Apple iPhone or Android smart phone directly to your Evernote notebooks. Not using Evernote yet because you’re still using paper? No problem! The Office Drop add-on let’s you use the postal service to send your paper documents, where they’ll be scanned in and uploaded to your Evernote notebooks. Not the typical add-on but still a clever enhancement for the service.
The announcement of the site caught a lot of buzz, but I think it was this Lifehacker post that really grabbed my attention. It lists 5 add-ons that are particularly good, including a Nitro PDF plug-in that enables you to mark up then save PDFs to your Evernote account.
If you haven’t yet tried an online notebook, you should definitely look at downloading and installing Evernote or trying out their Web-based site. It could really change how you prepare cases for trial or manage your legal research notes and information.
