Latest new toy is EverNote, an interesting note-taking tool. It has the potential to be a useful thing for making stream-of-consciousness type notes. It's paradigm is that of an infinitely long piece of paper (toilet roll?) that you type your notes into. It has a level of formatting roughly equivalent to html and you can insert pictures. It is very easy to use, just enough features. Each new note is tagged with the date and time of creation and you can assign it to multiple categories (aka tagging, a concept I like).
It supports XML export and it automatically backs its database up to an XML file every day. The XML is very comprehensive and includes any graphics you put in the notes. It is entirely feasable I could knock up some python to chuck these notes into a blog.
I am using the free version of EverNote, there is one you can pay for but that seems to be targeted at tablet users or people who want handwriting recognition (like OneNote but better designed).
If I had one criticism of it (looking this gift horse in the mouth) it is that it is a little too fiddly to assign notes to categories: you have to drag/drop or select them from a list. For real rapid note-taking I'd rather type keywords into a little box, with maybe some autocompletion thrown in. Instead I can just type the categories into my notes myself.
My latest note-taking paradigm is this:
.blah notes This is a note about going blah. Don't do it: it's a waste of time.
The first line is a list of tags. The leading . denotes this. The rest of it is the body of the note. What's missing? A title. Who reads titles? The principle is, don't waste time thinking of titles, let the tags and the content do the talking. Dave Winer, illustrious inventor of blogging, rss et al is famed for his title-free posts. If you want a title, start the post with a headline (<h1>).
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For the past 6-8 months I've been using TiddlyWiki as my singular note-taking system - its implimented purely in javascript & DHTML and runs under pretty much every browser - but as it's now broken under Firefox 1.5.0.1 (what isn't?) I checked out EverNote.
As for easier tagging of categories, open up the properties of a category and go to the 'Filter' tab: this lets you auto-assign categories based on a range of criteria. By setting up a filter for '.project', I can start a new note '.project whatever-its-name-is' and it'll auto-tag it with the project category.
Thanks for the heads up on the app.