With more and more applications running in the browser, like Google Apps, the browser becomes the center of activity. If your little $300 netbook runs a browser real well, you can handle most of your daily duties with it.

Browser makers, Apple, Mozilla, and now Google are making their browsers more efficient and speedier, therefore limited power netbooks can run these applications just fine.

So for most of the users on the net, web browsing, Facebook and email are all they do and quite within the capabilities of a netbook.

The netbook is not meant to replace all computers; as soon as you want to do any serious computer stuff, like multimedia production, you need to have a more traditional computer.

We have met the junction between rising hardware computing power and lower resource needing software. If you can shift your tasks to the cloud, where the power is immense, you can use any little netbook to act as the keyboard and display. It's going back to Client/Server technology of the 80's.

One of the biggest areas of office productivity is in scheduling your day, tracking your tasks and taking notes. Google has supplied a calendar system to keep your dates online and recently they have added a task list function. The integration of these into GMail is limited but works.

Calendar

In Calendar, you can do all the normal stuff you'd like to do, with daily, weekly, monthly views. Reminders can pop-up or be emailed. Calendar is pretty good about the basic stuff. Additionally when you are reading your mail with GMail, Google scrapes your messages and offers up potential calendar entries. On the side bar you can click items to add to your calendar. Your task list is also available from within GMail and Calendar.

Sharing of calendars is also supported. You can see other people's calendars laid over yours. You can invite people to meetings and sync your calendar to some mobile devices.

So those who want to divorce themselves from Microsoft Outlook, Google GMail, Calendar and Tasks can be used, all in the cloud. There are ways of getting your contacts from Outlook into  GMail contacts.

Google Notebook

Note taking is quite another story. Google has offered a great Notebook applications called of course Notebook. There was great Firefox support for it. In fact it still does exist, but is only available for those who were already using it at the time Google killed it. They aren't signing up new users for Google Notebook, but if you were fortunate to have created a Notebook a few months back, you can still use it. Although there will be no more development on the product.

I suspect Google is hoping you'll just use Google Docs and enter your notes in a regular word processing document. But it doesn't really compare.

EverNote

The user community is still wondering why Google dropped support for Notebook and many are looking for alternatives. One such product that offers free notebook services in the cloud is EverNote. In addition to entering your notes within their online web-hosted servers, they offer a downloadable client software program to enter and search your notes on your local computer and have syncing capability built-in. So you notes are sync'ed with your online account.

EverNote certainly does more than Google Notebook did and was a considerable challenge to Google. But Google notebook holdouts liked the integration with other Google services. Alas, Evernote has taken the market by storm and has accured many new users, many of which are former Google Notebook users.

EverNote also has Firefox browser integration tools, so all is not lost. In fact with the additional functionality and local storage of your notes, EverNote is really a much better solution. The service offers free use up to a point, with low cost premium service for largers users.

Security

One must consider how many places in the cloud you want to keep your personal data. If you have bought into the whole cloud computing paradigm, then you have already overcome the security fear of having your data on some other company's computers. So it's a matter of "Who Do You Trust?" Since you already host your email on someone else's servers, will you place your documents, spreadsheets on the same servers and would you place your daily appointments and now notes there also? Since I've decided to trust Google with my data, I'd have to go with them for most of my data. But I was a little shy to upload my personal notes to EverNote servers. Especially when my notes contained user account data, passwords, and proprietary information.

So I searched for a locally stored database note taker. I thought there probably is a FireFox extension to take notes. While I couldn't find one, I did come across a Wiki program that runs entirely within a HTML file. Say What?

TiddlyWiki

One of the most famous Wiki's is Wikipedia. The basic idea is to post up a repository of related information into web pages and allow editing of the data from within the web page from any registered user. Most of these Wiki tools ran on servers and stored the pages of information in a database. So wherever you hosted your web site / wiki page, housed your personal data.

I finally cam across TiddlyWiki, which didn't use a server or database and was designed to run in a web browser and using javascript would store any page created within the HTML file itself. In essense it re-wrote itself back to your computer hard disk after each change. This made taking notes within our single application, FireFox, easy, secure and very powerful. It doesn't have the polish of EverNote, but it allows great freedom in formatting your notes and links between them. You do have to learn a Wiki language to fully appreciate the capability of TiddlyWiki.

The clincher for me were some plug-ins to TiddlyWiki that offered yet additional features, the one of interest was a data encrypter plug-in. This allowed me to password protect any particular wiki entry. I entered my web site account passwords and set up the password encryption. When TiddlyWiki saves the data to the harddisk, that particular 'tiddly' is saved as a bunch of random looking characters. So if my tiddlywiki html file was to be lost or stolen, my password data is protected. Cool huh? In fact, now I can upload my TiddlyWiki note file to any ftp server for safe keeping and be assured my private notes are secure. Of course I don't need to encrypt all my notes, just a couple of them.

Summary

So while I keep my e-mail, calendar, task list on Google, I keep my personal notes on a local USB Flash Drive using TiddlyWiki with the encryption plug-in. I know using this Wiki a little more than the average office worker is willing to do, but it is there. EverNote would be the better solution for a web-based notetaker and still runs inside our Mission Impossible paradigm.