In October of ’07, I posted about my move to Google Notebook as my primary lab notebook. It has not only continued to serve me well since then, but now serves me even better with the addition of a few features:

• Auto-dated notes: I’d be happier if I could opt for auto-timestamps as well, but Google now adds the date a note was created (not sure if it updates it when edited but I don’t think so) to the upper right-hand corner. Now instead of putting the date and location at the top of each note, I just put the location.
• Sharing: It’s now easy to share with others. I’ve shared my notebook with my advisor so that she can follow along if she likes. I used to do this on our lab wiki as well. It would also be possible to have a shared notebook between all of the people on a project, almost like a private blog. I think this latter use has a lot of potential
• Labels: Google has added labels (in practice the same thing as ‘tags’), making it possible to tag each entry with the projects to which it is related. Pulling up all of the notes on a project is then as simple as selecting the appropriate label.

It keeps getting better. Hopefully, they will add those automatic time stamps at some point.