Digital Packrat's Dream

I have been playing with Evernote for the last few days and I love it.  I had seen it around when I had my iPhone, but I never did get a chance to try it.  Now, I am hooked.  I am a digital packrat, I like to collect  stuff I see from around the web.  For that, I had been using delicious (and will continue to for some stuff).  Delicious is great because I can bookmark, tag, and store links for stuff I find around the web.  To the extent of storing a link, delicious is the most awesomeness tool.  But, what if I wanted more? Evernote offers the "more" part.  I can easily save a whole page or the juicy part of the page into my Evernote notebook by highlighting and clipping.  This can't  be done with delicious.  What this lets me do is save the actual page and make it searchable in my Evernote database.  This also makes the page available even if the original page has been taken down.  And, the best part is that the Evernote application for my Windows Mobile phone lets me read the pages without much fuss. But, it all goes beyond that.  I can email links, text and photos to my Evernote notebook and it will get stored.  I can make audio notes that will get stored in my notebook.  Text in photos get "OCR'd", so that if I take a picture of a page in a book and the text is legible, that text is made searchable.  Win! The emailing part is nice because with delicious, I had no way of saving links to delicious on my mobile phone.  I could send an email to myself with the link and that would work.  Using this same technique, I send the link to my Evernote notebook and it gets stored there.  Much cooler since it makes it searchable. There is a Firefox add-on that works across all platforms that I use (Windows, Linux and Mac).  It makes clipping from the web über-easy (btw, "uber" is not as über unless you have umlauts!). There is also client software for Windows, Mac, Windows Mobile and iPhone.  The Windows client can install itself onto a removable drive and be taken anywhere, that is a neat feature.  The client software itself is very useful.  You can run it without having it sync up with the Evernote servers -- in other words you can keep your stuff private.  Or, you can run it and sync some or all of your notebooks with Evernote servers -- this is nicer since it allows you to have access to your digital mind anywhere. Evernote also has a web interface for your notebooks, so you don't have to have to install client software to access your information.  Notebooks can also be made public, so you can share some of the stuff that you are collecting. All-in-all, I am really love Evernote.  It is a very useful service and I will continue to use it.  This is a digital packrat's dream service.