Wrapping up my first series on Cloud Computing and web apps, today I'm writing about organizing and synchronizing information.

One concept that is probably as old as the web browser is the favorites or bookmarks feature. We all have had to deal with the headaches that organizing all our bookmarks and folders can cause - it's particularly hard when researching for a school or work paper. The main flaw on the traditional concept of bookmarking is the fact that sometimes you will have a link that belongs inside two different folders and some other times you will probably lose that link because it was misplaced.

Over the years Google became such a great search engine that sometimes it would be faster to search the topic all over again than to go through the bookmarks list. Another issue that bothered me was the fact that I lost access to my favorites if I used another computer.

So, a few years ago, Delicious and all the social bookmarking trend came up with a solution: just store all your bookmarks online and the problem of computer-hopping is solved! They also introduced the concept of tagging instead of storing inside folders and, thanks to that innovation, searching for the bookmarks became somewhat easier. Also, installing something like the Delicious extension for Firefox on my main computer has made me happy ever since.

But when you're researching, bookmarks, and even social bookmarking sites, still aren't a perfect solution. When you need to articulate so many different sources like webpages, PDFs, photos, emails, some great ideias jotted on random pieces of paper, etc. etc. and keep using different computers to work on, it gets tricky. That's what got me looking for a better way to organize information. And I found it on Evernote.

Evernote is a web service that allows you to collect, store and organize information from different sources and formats and makes it searchable and accessible from anywhere. I've been using it for a few weeks and I know I'm still not taking full advantage of what it has to offer but, so far, it has been great. Evernote allows you to create notebooks (folders) where you can store notes and add tags to them. So far, so what? Well, things get interesting right now. Those notes can be something you typed on your computer, a bookmark with full or partial (you choose) web-page content including images, an email which you redirected to your Evernote account, and - drumroll - thanks to Evernote's character recognition capabilities that note can also be a handwritten note, a photo, a business card or just some old handwritten document - anything with words on it. That's right, with a camera or a scanner you can capture some text you want to attach to your notebook and Evernote will make it searchable. The only limitation being that at the moment the character recognition feature only works with English or Russian dictionary words, although they are planning to add more languages.

As for accessibility, Evernote has a mobile site, besides the main one, that allows you to access, write and search your notes. It also provides desktop clients for Windows and Mac OS X as well as mobile phone clients for the iPhone, Windows Mobile, Blackberry and Palm hand-held devices. The download of these clients will greatly enhance the usability, especially on mobile phones, allowing you to instantly record voice notes, take pictures, add some text and Evernote will automatically upload it as soon as you're online. With this service you will have all your information synchronized across devices.

Good enough? And all this is for free, but if you go Premium you will also get 500 MB of monthly allowance (instead of 40 MB), PDF searching, SSL encryption, the ability to open your notebooks to collaboration with others and the ability to upload and synchronize any file type you attach to your note.