Every few years I seem to shed my digital skin and grow a new one. This is going to be one of those years. Learning curves can be time consuming and scary (I’m writing this in Word 97), but once the process starts, I find, you just have to hang on and ride it out. It’s like watching Avatar in 3D. At first you feel the SD glasses on your face. The special effects boggle your mind. You get a little headache, feel queasy, jump when sharp objects seem to poke out of the movie screen. But eventually, you’ve crossed over. You forget about the 3D glasses and settle back. Your brain has acclimated to the massive shift in information. The trick is knowing how far to move into the curve of the future, and how much of the past to cling to. (Continued below)

This week I’m working on a column about technology. It is all because of Bill, my best fried for 50 years and now my IT guru. A former Hewlett Packard geek, he keeps his hand in the high-tech world, and when he thinks something applies to my work as a history writer, he sends a note. Or more likely, he sends an instant message. Or sometimes when I am sleeping late, he hooks the computer at his house in Massachusetts to my computer in New Hampshire and uploads somethiing new onto my HP computer. He’s pretty much got the run of my harddrive.

You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink. Or in my case, you can install new software, but you can’t make me use it. Not right away. Bill has been trying to get me to move to Gmail since Google released it. This week I moved – or rather, he moved me there. For anyone who spends 10 hours a day online as I do, switching email browsers is very big deal.

But after a turbulant week, we have safely landed on the new shore. Of course, Bill was right. Gmail is five times better than the browser I was using. It’s faster, more flexible, more readable. We’re still in the process of porting over the 56,000 emails from readers of this web site that I have saved over the years out of hundreds of thousands I’ve received. We’ve been playing around with the whole package -- GoogleVoice, GoogleDocs, GoogleCalendar, and other "apps" that suit my unique needs. I even considered buying the new Google phone this week, but the technology has yet to shake itself out yet.

Getting all the stuff I use onto my iGoogle desktop is not exactly a new experience. Back in the early 80s I used almost half my teaching salary one year to buy a $3,000 computer called an Epson QX-16. It was the most integrated early computer on the market with graphic drawing, spreadsheets, and word processing all in a single package. It had less memory than the strip on the back of your credit card, but it was state-of-the-art and everything I needed was in one spot.

AOL was like that in the beginning too, remember? You could search, do email, and chat to everyone insdie the AOL community. It was safe and comfortable in there. Getting my calendars and clocks, favorite games, communication software, to-do lists, financials, bookmarks, searches, written documents, etc all on a single Google screen is almost like going backwards. For years now I’ve been floating in a frightening world of disconnected programs that do not always work together. Apple owners have always had a safe haven, but for the 90% of us who operate a PC, it’s been a Wild West show. Google senses that and now I have been assimilated.

Sensing that I’m at the tipping point, Bill has been pushing a whole new range of programs and applications on me. And as usual, he’s right. Now that my aging brain is temporarily in a plastic state, it’s best to make as many chages as possible before the ossification process resumes.

Two more organizing sites

So I’m going to pass two more of his selected packages onto you. First is an application called Readability. As you may know, I have terrible eyesight. I use a magnification software called ZoomText that blows up everything I write and read roughly two times normal size. It also reads to me. But my "disability" software does not read everything well. And I still get lost in the online ozone. Even people with great eyesight must have trouble pulling the key written content out of a web page while ignoring all sorts of blinking menu bars, logos, advertisements and glitzy page design.

Readability simply takes everything off the page except the key content. Once you install it on your browser, just click the "R" icon and all the sound and fury disappears. You get a clean page of text, a hedline, and the key illustration. That’s it. The web page becomes insntanly readable – also printable and sendable. I customized mine so that all text appears in a large font with wide spacing between the lines. It works on almost every web page.

I have not yet tried the second program, but Bill has tested it and passed on a rave review. Evernote allows you to gather, label, sort, and search random bits of data. You can photograph images on your computer camera or digital cam, insert spoken recordings, scan in stuff, type in notes, move in files, or pull in info from web pages. Once collected everything is searchable either on your harddrive or in the "cloud" of data on the Internet.

Evernote can read words that are embedded in a JPG picture. So if you take a photo of a sign – which I often do while visiting historic sites – the software can recognize the words inside the photo and add them to the database. It can, I believe, transcribe clearly spoken words.

I once read an interview with an author who publishes many books a year. He has five books in progress at any time. He manages all that information, he said, by storing his notes in a "cardfile" style software.Most of us still use file folders and notebooks. But the more complex my projects become, the harder it is to keep track of thousands of bits of information over the years it takes to research and write a book.

Evernote stores an enormous number of pieces of data, both short and long. All the info goes into one big digital pot.Then the author uses the organizational capacity of the software to build these notes, in various media, into the skeleton of a project. It could be a book, or a school thesis, or a business presentation. When the writer finally fleshes out the story, everything is in the pot, easy to locate, easy to organize, and ready to be shifted around. We all did this with 3 x 5 cards in college. I still use those cards now.

About a year ago I asked Bill to look around for an organizing and data storage program that might work for my needs. I have over 400 folders with ideas and notes for new history articles. I also keep a dozen plastic storage boxes that contain future books in embryonic form. But myst stuff is all on paper, or sometimes on audiocassette tapes, or CDs, or I have stray photos, newspaper clippings, pages run off from the Internet, lists of contact names, random notes. I pretty organized, but just this weekend I spend three hours searching for a sentence on a lost scrap of paper.

Bill thinks this Evernote thing is the answer. I plan to try it out. But I need to do that quickly because once my thinking hardens, it’s like cement for the next few years. If it works, I’ll let you know.

Copyright © 2010 by J. Dennis Robinson. All rights reserved.