Evernote

The Evernote tagline is "Remember Everything" and it really does help to deliver on that promise.  Evernote is a combination note-taking and storing application with some great features to help categorize your notes using either notebooks and / or tags that are then easily searched.  You can quickly and easily add images, web pages, emails, and whatever you can think of in addition to basic text editing functionality.  Evernote will even scan through the images and other documents (if you want) so that everything is searchable.  As a bonus, Evernote is available on most platforms (including the Mac, web, and iPhone which are the ones that I use) and synchronizes between them all.  You can also share your Evernote libraries selectively with other folks who need to see or edit them.

I use Evernote for almost everything at this point.  On the work front, I'm using it to keep track of design decisions and brainstorming (including images of the whiteboards), take notes in meetings, track my to-do lists for everything, and keep a list of readings and technologies to follow up with (to name a few).  On the personal side of things, I keep track of other to-do lists, travel information, recipes, and my grocery list.

Evernote is also Free, though there are some bonuses for those willing to get the premium account, and I find it is well worth it.

Evernote is also extensible, and a number of 3rd party developers have put together some pretty neat solutions.  My favorite at the moment is EgretList for the iPhone.  EgretList is a to-do list manager that pulls in anything that has a checkbox from your Evernote library into a set of easily organized to-do lists that can be grouped by urgency, location, project, or whatever you can think of. 

Twitter (and blogs, and facebook, and …)

At the simplest level, Twitter is a tool that let’s you publish short notes (140 characters maximum) that can include images and pictures. People who choose to “follow” your twitter feed can read your “tweets” whenever you post them, and you can of course follow other people’s twitter feeds. For the rest of the details, I suggest you check out their web-page.

There are many other tools that also let you post information and / or follow the information that your friends and colleagues are posting, including blogs and facebook.  I currently use all 3 (you can see the twitter feed I use to discuss my courses: here ). Furthermore, the importance of all of these social networking tools are discussed widely by many knowledgeable people, so I won’t reproduce that here. I will however offer three suggestions that I believe bear repeating:
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Skim

I recently discovered (as in: a colleague suggested this to me) the freeware app Skim for the mac. This is a great little tool for taking notes within a PDF file that I find much much more usable than acrobat pro. Also, the notes are stored in the file-system, not in the actual PDF so that you can then email the pdf to a colleague or student without the notes.  It supports attaching notes, highlighting, circling / labeling, a presentation mode, and a host of other handy little tricks.