Sturgeon's Law #090
12 June, 2008

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Music from PMN, Enter the Haggis

Trailer - Vindicatum episode 2

Segment 1:

So I'm a big user of all things Google, right? Gmail, yes. Google Calendar, yes. Google Reader, yes. Google Docs, absolutely. Google Notebook... well, no. Not any more, that is. Not since Steve of the Wicked Good Podcast turned me on to Evernote on a day where I could land an invite code to their beta.

Not that Evernote is new, exactly. It's existed as Mac and PC applications, I believe, for some time, but that didn't interest me, as I use several machines and I need to be able to get to my notes from all of them equally well. That's why the version 3 beta got my attention -- it has a web version as well, and if you use the application versions, which I do, they synchronize with the web hosted central version, giving you something that is and is not a web app, but at any rate is synchronized across multiple locations. Compare this to Google Notebook, which is a web app and only a web app, which is fine until you're not on a network and want to dig into your notebook.

There are other upsides as well, though. Evernote handles images very nicely, and, even more impressive, can search text in the images through, one assumes, the magic of OCR or somesuch. This turns out to be more than just a gimmick; it's darned useful. You can also encrypt notes, which is pretty cool of course, and of course there's the obligatory tagging, but also saved searches, which I quite like in principle. You can embed checkboxes in your notes to make, well, checklists, and indeed, this is how I do project lists now and it's a real boon.

Are there downsides? Yes. I'm very frustrated by the lack of a Linux application, particularly when I'm on my Asus Eee. Yes, I can go to the web-based version, IF I'm on a network, but that kind of defeats the whole portability point of using it on the Eee, plus the web interface is... not so great, in my opinion, and it wastes an enormous amount of screen real estate which is of course a scarce commodity on the Asus. The Windows app has some quirky behavior but nothing you don't get used to... eventually. But it works very solidly and the features are excellent. Worth finding someone with an invite.

Final comment: my notes for this show were, of course, typed and stored in Evernote. Among many, many other things.

Segment 2:

I've discovered plurk.com, and believe me, saying plurk out loud makes it all worthwhile. plurk plurk plurk. Anyway, what is plurk, you may ask? Well, more or less it's a competitor for twitter, I suppose, conveniently rising in prominence about the time twitter's having downtime struggles. Again. But it's not just a clone by any means; plurk has a unique presentation of messages, putting abbreviated forms on a scrolling timeline that to be honest I just can't quite describe. Additionally, it has excellent features twitter lacks, such as a permissions system whereby you can make subgroups of your friends and lock messages to particular groups; for another example, instead of users forming a convention for replying to posts, plurks have comment lists almost like blog posts.

One more thing that really sells it for me is the very simple thing of autoupdating the page title with unread message counts, making it easy to just leave plurk open in a tab and glance at the tab title for new messages, instead of pounding reload on a page all day or whatever. Sure, this basically means that plurk was made learning from the lessons twitter got the hard way. So what? It works. Will it survive enormous usage in a way twitter hasn't so much? Time will tell if the question even arises. It's had occasional downtime due to the speed at which they're developing, but it's been brief and seems to be getting less frequent. Random says: check it out. I'm rfrancis there as usual.

Segment 3:

Nick Mamatas, who's been interviewed on here a time or two and whose books Move Under Ground and Under My Roof I continue to whole-heartedly recommend, has a new -- well, publically new -- service available for writers, aspiring and otherwise. Let me quote you some scanty details from his livejournal post on the subject:

"Anyway, here is how it works . if you have a manuscript, I'll read it for mere $2 a page, mark it up with insightful and hysterical marginal comments, write an extensive editorial letter, and have a conversation with you over phone, IM, or email, about revisions and marketing."

and from his FAQ:

"You email me at nick.mamatas@gmail.com asking for the service -- we talk about your goals and a deadline. I give you my address and you ship to me your ms in standard manuscript format along with half the fee. Then I meet your deadline and send you the ms back, email you the editorial letter, and then we talk about your work some more. Then you send me the rest of the fee."

Some of you might know that Nick is also the editor at Clarkesworld online magazine, and having submitted a story there and gotten his critique back, I have to say it's amongst the most useful I've ever gotten, up there with Gordon van Gelder of F&SF at least. And I wasn't paying him for that. Many, many people have reported the same. So I have to think that Nick is offering something really beneficial here. Yes, to send him your 500 page fantasy epic you're going to have to cough up a grand, but cripes, getting extensive editorial input from a professional? That's gold if you're trying to beat the hoi polloi into publication. Anyway, something that might interest some of you, and if I direct some dollars Nick's way, well, we all go home happy. Livejournal link's here.

Shout Out: Doug Rapson of Geek Acres