Note Talkers

Last semester was the first full semester I had a Tablet PC, OneNote, Windows Journal, and other things we talk about on this blog. Here are the lessons (in no particular order) I learned from my experience. This is part 1 of a two part series.

1) Tablet PCs are cool

I thought Mac owners were in an exclusive group but Tablet PC owners are in a more exclusive and cooler group. Besides the wow factor of the Tablet PC, I found it very useful and handy. I wrote all of my class notes and homework assignments on it. In fact, I stopped carrying pen and paper to class.

2) Weight/Battery Life Issue

I own the Gateway Tablet PC and it is a whopping 8-9 pounds. This include an extended battery and a second modular battery. From my personal experience, I loved having 10-11 hours of battery life. I could go to classes in the morning and return home in the evening without worrying about battery life or bringing my power cord along. To me, the weight is worth it and as an added bonus, my biceps are stronger.

3) Computer/Software Crashes

Once in a while, my OneNote and/or my computer would crash during lecture. Lets just say I let out a big “Nooooooooo!” What did I do about it? First, I kept my computer free of viruses, bugs, spyware, etc by downloading latest updates and actually running those programs once a week. Second, I invested in a system optimizer (System Mechanic) that optimizes my computer. Third, during lecture, I would close down unnecessary programs like music players (yes, I listen to music during boring lectures) and only kept my note-taking program running.

4) Powering Up

In the beginning, I would turn on my computer at the start of each class and turn it off at the end of each class. Don’t! No matter how fast your computer is and how fast it boots, it will still be “slow” when you realize the teacher went over the entire test in the 50 seconds it took your computer to boot up. Plus, those boot up and welcome noises distract the class.

First, turn of the boot up and log-in sounds. Second, start using stand-by and hibernate. I come back to my work in less than 10 seconds with stand-by or hibernate.

5) Staying Organized

Towards the end, I had many different types of files on my computer. I had class notes, lecture notes, homework assignments, programming assignments, pdf files, mind maps, etc. Unfortunately, all of these were created in different programs. I kept the files in the default folder of the application. So, OneNote stayed in “My Notebooks” folder, Matlab files stayed in Matlab folder. This method was not perfect because information for one class was scattered everywhere, but it was better than no system. Staying organized is a continuous process and I will continue to find ways to better organize my information.

One a side note, I am looking forward to Windows Vista and its “virtual folder.” I think this will help solve some of my organizing problems.

Hey everybody. All the submission are in and I am in the process of distributing the entries to our judges. This should take a day or so and then the judging process will begin. We will announce the winners as soon as we can. Until then, I wrote my “Top 5 Things I Learned From Running a Contest”

1) Planning Takes A Long Time

Believe it or not, but we have been planning the contest since the end of February and it was announced the first week of April. That was one month of planning! Here are some of the things we did.

1. Contacting and working with 6 companies
2. Lining up 3 outside judges
3. Creating a free advertising program in exchange for prizes
4. Figuring out how to advertise
5. Exact wording of the contest (Very Important!)
6. Legal issues
7. Getting Everything Approved by Everybody

Those are just off the top of my head. There are plenty more I probably forgot.

2) Choose a Deadline Wisely

We believed having a month to submit entries would be enough. We launched at the begging of April so having an early May deadline would be great! Right? Wrong! By having our first deadline in early May, we missed out on many student submissions. Most students (including me) have final exams in early May and they literally don’t have time for anything else.

3) Underestimating

Today, people lead very busy lives and juggle many things and one month is a very short time to learn MindManager, create mind maps, and submit mind maps. It is even harder to learn Camtasia and MindManager together and create a screencast in a month.

4) You Will Always Miss Something

We thought we had covered all of our bases. After all, we had one entire month of planning. Right? Wrong again! Two weeks into the contest, we were contact by an eastern European website asking if their readers could submit entries in other languages. Oops! We totally forgot to write rules about foreign languages.

5) Get Amazing Judges

We had three outside judges and each has contributed a lot. Gaelen from Mindjet has been with us from the beginning. She helped with each process of the contest and we couldn’t have done anything without her. Betsy from TechSmith, is our screencasting expert and donated the Camatasia software and bonus prizes. And then there is Warner. To us, Warner is a demi-god. All the trackbacks and coverage we received from the big players in the tech industry are because of him. Let’s just say he has connections! Thanks Warner!

Mindjet has set up a teaser site for MindManager for Mac. Click here to go to the teaser site. If you are a Mac user and would like to review MindManager for the Mac for Note Talkers, let us know!

Past:

We started this blog because we believed we had interesting things to discuss. Initially, I wondered which of our blogs would be more popular. OneNote Powertoys, our sister site, had a head start, a niche topic, a loyal reader base, and great contest. Note Talkers was in new and uncharted territory.

Present:

It’s official, Note Talkers has finally overtaken OneNote Powertoys. At the time of this entry, Note Talkers is getting more visitors and has more RSS subscribers than OneNote Powertoys. We are really excited about this because Note Talkers is only three months old!

Our success has been made possible by three things and we want to thank them. First, our thanks goes to our readers. Without you, this blog would have died a long time ago. You make us write every week and we love your feedback. Second, our contest has been more successful than our wildest dreams. Our readership has grown tremendously because of it and I want to thank Mindjet, TechSmith, and other companies for helping with the contest and a special thanks goes to our judges (Betsy, Gaelen, and Warner). Third, the blogging community. Having a great contest is nothing if no one knows about it. I want to thank all the countless blogs, sites, newsletters, etc that helped spread the word.
Future:

We still have lots more to do. Here are some of the things we are planning.

1. New Design. We want a new design and new header images for both our blogs and hopefully, we will have something soon. Our budget is very limited and are looking for a designer to design the sites in exchange for advertising. If you know someone or are interested, let us know.
2. Webinars. As mentioned in a previous post, we are really bouncing the idea of Webinars. We are still looking for more user feedback to help us decide.
3. Building a community. Our traffic and readers are increasing, but our community is still small. We want to create a sense of community for our blog. This means more user feedback, post comments, interacting with other readers, etc. Our first priority is post comments. Currently, we average to zero comments per post . Lets change that. Also, if you have any ideas on how to do this, please tell us.
4. More Products and More Coverage! Here are just some things off the top of my head. OneNote 2007 Beta 2 (yay!), Wikis, Google Notebook, More coverage of GoBinder and Evernote, and many more.

Just a reminder, today is the last day to submit entries for our MindManager Contest.  All entries must be sumbitted today (May 15 2006) by 11 pm EST.

There are many forms of “Social” Services available on the internet. Since all require a sizable amount of time and effort to build a “reputation”, I’ve decided to focus on the what I believe to be the best starting point for quickly increasing website traffic/links… Social Bookmarking. I’m also approaching the subject from a webmaster point of view and not a personal productivity enhancement, so your results/experience may vary greatly.

The hub for the sharing of internet links is Del.icio.us. It remains at the center of almost all of the other services, despite numerous innovations and presentation methods. The first step before trying any of the other sites needs to be a decent collection of bookmarks in a Del.icio.us account. My suggestions for doing so are…

Create a new Del.icio.us userid based on your website/blog name.

Create as many bookmarks as possible that relate to your topic/theme and add multiple tags.

There are many extensions/plugins/browsers available to make this easier.

Remove links that are very personal or totally unrelated, like your bank or insurance companies.

Keep some links that are somewhat unrelated to show you have other interests besides just the topic/theme of your website/blog.

Add links to your site and most of the posts/pages on it.

Maintain a decent balance of links to your site versus others. Don’t appear to be only about self promotion.

Remember that this is creating an online “personality” and that all bookmarks are viewable by others. Your collection should be representative of yourself and your site.

Export as XML and HTML files. They can be used for importing at most of the other services.

Now you are ready to move on to the next step and sign up at some other sites. My Top 5 suggestions, based enhancing marketability with the least amount of effort are…

Simpy

Groups, watchlists, and notes.

Easy sync with Del.icio.us (under Third Party Tools)

Simpy API (REST) can be integrated with Java, PHP, or Python.

Can add your AdSense account and they only show ads to non-members.

Ma.gnolia

Groups, ratings, saved copies, and community focused.

Lots of Add-ons available. Not just bookmarklets and toolbar buttons.

TagTooga

Submit your bookmarks to 11 other social bookmarking services. (Create an account, then go to Settings – External Accounts. Don’t do this with just the default IP address based account.)

Taxonomy for tags. (Intuitive names of topics and one of the better directories I’ve seen recently)

MySpace Organizer (Friend Import) and Friend Space Gen

REST API and examples of how to build queries.

Shadows

Import postings from Del.icio.us based on Tags

Plugin for WordPress to automatically bookmark your posts.

Your “Shadow Tag Cloud” can be posted on MySpace or WordPress

Groups, comments, ratings, etc…

Spurl.net

Spurled bookmarks can be setup to automatically add to Del.icio.us

My spurls -> Analysis can show broken links and archived versions.

Additional information can be found in the Word (or OneNote 2007) version of my notes. They are not as complete as I would like, but I’ve run out of time.

Google Notebook will be going live this week and presents a wonderful opportunity to test Social Bookmarking on a brand new site. Just be sure to add a link to http://www.notetalkers.com!

Tracy of The Student Tablet PC thought we “had fallen to a common blogger foe: The Real World”. Turns out she didn’t have our feed in Outlook 12. Apology accepted.

In reality I (AdminID) did fall victim to The Real World recently. Last month I discovered that I had Type 2 Diabetes. It was a rough road physically and mentally getting back to decent blood sugars. The biggest challenge has been my changing vision and development of cataracts. I can’t drive or read paper, but it is slowly getting better and I can use the computer again (with the help of ZoomText to magnify and invert the colors.)

Sid has graciously picked up the slack and I owe him a big THANKS.

To the rest of our readers, I apologize for not being able to post much the last month. Life is much better now and I plan to re-kindle some of my series, as well as start some new ones.

BTW – I’m 32 years old and skinny. Not the “sterotypical” Diabetes patient. Quit reading this, put down the potato chips and soda, get out of your chair and start excersing!

This is way off topic for Note Talkers, but this was such an awesome book that I can’t not post about it. I read it many years ago and it was life changing. Not as extreme as Dan’s story, but I erased quite a few VERY bad habits I was doing at the time. I’m currently in another life altering stage (more in another post) and came across Dan Millman again. It’s too hard to tell the real quality of the movie from just the trailer, but the book was AWESOME and I highly recommend it.
The Peaceful Warrior Movie

I just noticed an update for OneNote 2003 in the latest Microsoft patches. This one came with Microsoft Update. Microsoft update is similar to Windows Update but it checks all of your Microsoft products (including Windows) for updates. The update for OneNote 2003 is called “KB917148.” The update can be manually downloaded here if you don’t have Microsfot Update.

Here is Microsoft’s description of the patch:

“This update fixes an issue that occurs when you write with the pen on some touch screen devices. The pen stroke is visible only as long as the pen is touching the screen.”

The patch failed for me for some reason. My guesses are I have OneNote 2007 and OneNote 2003 installed or my touch screen device is not affected. Is anyone else having problems with the patch?

As mentioned by Chris Prately, OneNote 2007 Beta 2 will support blogging via Word. Beta 2 will support MSN Spaces, Blogger, Sharepoint, Communitry Server, and other blogging services. So far, you can edit, publish, and categorize posts. No word on tagging or technorati support.
Personally, I am very excited about this new feature. Blogging was my biggest gripe against OneNote. OneNote 2003 is a great tool to for collecting information, organize ideas, and write drafts. All bloggers go through these step and finally use a blogging tool to publish. Now, I can do everything in OneNote!

There is some sad new thought, Matt from Windows With Ink had been working on a blogging powertoy for OneNote. Because of the latest news, he won’t release it anymore. It was very sad to know that before he began his hard work, he contacted the Microsoft guys and they never told him about the planned feature.  I don’t blame the Microsoft guys because they were under confidentiality agreements. (Update: Matt wrote back and said he might finish the powertoy.  I encourage all reader to post on his blog and ask him to finish it.)

For all the information about the new feature, please read Chris Prately’s blog and Joe Friend’s blog.

Once I get my hands on Beta 2, I will write all about the new tool and post screenshots and screencasts of it (assuming I can under the non-disclosure aggrement). In the meantime, here are the screenshots from Joe Friend’s blog.