Several months ago, I mused about mining my own personal data for various purposes. Several areas that interested me had to do with what I read, especially online. So having recently discovered Evernote, I think this will work perfectly. For the last couple of weeks, I literally clip every single article I read online. Well, except for the ones that bore me so much that I bail after the first paragraph or two.
Yes, this means that if I read your blog post, or a news story, or anything else from Hacker News or Paper.li or Twitter, I clip it. Usually, I’ll do this with the Clearly extension for Chrome, unless I find it when using my phone. Later, I go through whatever is in my inbox notebook and tag it before moving it to an archive notebook. This has the effect of building up data for a decent tag cloud, although I haven’t built one yet. And if I can even remember a snippet of an article, I can go back to find it.
Of course, Evernote has other use cases, but so far using web clipping as a sort of external memory has stood out as the primary one for me.
