(this post requires a basic working knowledge of Evernote)

It is no secret that I am an Evernote fangirl. I love the fact I can send pretty much everything I find online, into one huge vat of stuff.

Recently I decided to take this one step further and use Evernote to read and process all of my emails.

The Method

• Use the FORWARDING feature in Gmail to send all emails to Evernote
• Tell Gmail to keep the email, but mark as read (this means I can still access the messages via Gmail if I need to, but they won’t show as unread in my inbox on my phone)
• Within Evernote, you can SHARE notes, so simply paste the email address into the SHARE facility, and reply to email.

The Positives:

• EASE – Evernote is far less clunky via desktop than Gmail
• IT WORKED – I had been having problems using Gmail through Thunderbird and other desktop email apps, but Evernote worked
• TIME – I was forwarding so many emails, it seemed to make sense to forward them all, and delete the ones I didn’t want.
• ATTACHMENTS –  You can merge notes so send several attachments to one person (easier than adding attachments via normal email)
• INTEGRATION – Sending my emails into Evernote immediately puts them in the mix with my documents, PDFs, articles etc  - where they can be easily searched and grouped.
• TAGGING –  being able to integrate your email with other information I had stored, documents etc meant I could group project information together, and tag items that required action.

The Negatives (and why it eventually failed as a process for me)

• SPACE: I use Evernote premium (which allows you 1GB of uploads per month) and for normal usage, this is perfect. Unfortunately, this month I have found receiving a much higher volume of emails (due to several projects and the subsequent discussions). I have already used a quarter of my upload quota and I’m only a few days into my month.
• REPLYING: when you receive an email in Evernote, it shows the SENDERS email address, which means you simply need to copy this and paste it into the SHARE box. Simple. Unfortunately, as Evernote is not an email system,  it does not show when the email has been CC’d, so they would miss out on any replies. In the end I was having to use my old system for replying to group emails
• UNRELIABILITY: Several times emails have simply not arrived.
• SPAM – Some of the emails were ending up in spam, and some users were not spotting this – so the email was not received.
• CLUTTER – Again, as Evernote is not an email system, it does not have an UNREAD facility so I was often missing emails in my inbox, as it was in amongst the posts, tweets etc that I was sending.

The Solution

If you have any suggestions of how I could overcome the above problems, I would love to hear from you, but for now, this is my solution:

• Download the new version of Thunderbird which seems to be coping with Gmail right now. (I am also trying a free trial of Postbox, although this is £30 if I want to use it beyond a month)
• Forward emails into Evernote that require action (I could potentially use IFTTT.com to autoforward anything I tag with TODO in Gmail, but I have found IFTTT.com strips too much formatting from an email rendering them often unusable)
• Forward emails into Evernote that need archiving – articles, information etc.

SOCIAL NETWORKS

The brainchild of the guys behind Fourseventy Media, a local media production company specializing in audio, The Hidden City is a not-for profit project funded by donations and sponsorship. All money raised will go back into the project to cover costs, (eg travel expenses)

With local newspapers shutting down and broadcast newsrooms co-locating out of the region, this site hopes to focus attention back on the local people, stories and events happening across the region and are inviting the public to submit story ideas. Once these ideas are submitted, the site will either assign it to one of their reporters, or help the member of the public to cover it themselves.

Checking the site out at today’s launch, at Brewsmiths Coffee shop in Birmingham’s Jewellery Quarter, there are a handful of stories up there, as produced by the FourSeventy Media guys, and a small army of local media/tech students from Birmingham City University. Reports currently on the site deal with subjects including squatters rights, the history of UB40, an old-school barbers shop and street sport.

Right now these are accessible through ”pins on a map”, housed on the front page (See screengrab below) – although they are not categorized into subject area/themes. (there are plans for themed/colour coded pins in the future)

I was concerned about the issue of quality control. Right now, the site houses some top notch content – produced by a professional company, and students trained by them. I was assured that content standards would remain high, and that all submitted work would be either produced entirely in-house, or under supervision/editorial guidance from the in house team. There is also common sense here – with the guys clearly going for quality over quantity – there will be 2/3 audio slideshows (or audio/video in the future) uploaded her month.

Overall, it is an interesting project and I wish them all the luck!

Usefully, the Guardian has posted the numbers on their Datablog and I’m starting to munch through the data

Here’s the first set of findings – by subject area grouped into discipline, thanks to Wikipedia’s List of Academic Disciplines

Let’s see if that’s the case.

Taking 5 dishes mentioned in the article above – I compared them to an equivalent TYPE of dish at Wetherspoons, Walkabout and All Bar One. (click for larger image)

Sources:

http://www.jdwetherspoon.co.uk/

http://www.allbarone.co.uk/

http://www.walkabout.eu.com/

And special thanks to @keridavies (http://www.keridavies.net)

A lot of talk recently about embargoes, after a journalist for the New Yorker posted a review of the new David Fincher film, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo ahead of an agreed embargo date.

You can read the email exchanges between the reporter – David Denham and Sony here  but Denham’s points appear to be:

• They were trying to spread reviews to avoid a “jam up” of articles featuring the large number of important movies released at the same time
• His review was positive – he says he would not have broken an embargo with a “bad” review
• “madness” of early publication dates in the run up to the Xmas period and a need for serious content for this particular edition.

Sony retaliated by accusing him of doing  ”a deeply lousy and immoral thing“, that the glut of Xmas films is nothing new and that the needs of the magazine should not come ahead of an agreement.

—

Embargo’s are designed to structure the flow of information between a source and a journalist within an environment of trust and it is important that they are maintained. They not only offer an obvious benefit to the source (by controlling coverage) and the wider situation (e.g.protecting  police operations, court cases etc) there are also definite benefits to the journalist.

A journalist who is given access to embargoed information is working within a privileged position. The source considers their, or their outlet’s reputation to warrant this trust and in return the that journalist is given time to absorb and develop the story.

With the online information-explosion thanks social networks and blogging, it is important for traditional news outlets to play to their strengths. Whilst many are excelling in breaking news in innovative ways, they still have a definite advantage when it comes to their access to information. This head-start gives the perfect opportunity to prepare a well-researched, in-depth piece ahead of time.

A journalist who breaks an embargo is often punished in the future by missing out on information – it would be a shame if this becomes a habit and more journalists ignore this agreement that is there for the greater good. 

In the future, will the embargo become a more important tool or an obsolete tradition?

——-

Dear Wavers,

More than a year ago, we announced that Google Wave would no longer be developed as a separate product. At the time, we committed to maintaining the site at least through to the end of 2010. Today, we are sharing the specific dates for ending this maintenance period and shutting down Wave. As of January 31, 2012, all waves will be read-only, and the Wave service will be turned off on April 30, 2012. You will be able to continue exporting individual waves using the existing PDF export feature until the Google Wave service is turned off. We encourage you to export any important data before April 30, 2012.

If you would like to continue using Wave, there are a number of open source projects, including Apache Wave. There is also an open source project called Walkaround that includes an experimental feature that lets you import all your Waves from Google. This feature will also work until the Wave service is turned off on April 30, 2012.

For more details, please see our help center.

Yours sincerely,

The Wave Team

EASY TO DEAL WITH EMAILS 

UNWANTED EMAILS:

“NEED LATER” EMAILS

PESKY EMAILS (aka All the rest …)