Many thanks for all the informative replies so far. I've had a quick glance at Evernote, thebrain, Nepomuk (I'm loving KDE4 so far after switching a week or so ago), OpenKM and FreeMind and these seem promising. I've still to look at emacs' org-mode, and when I do I will try to put my vi prejudices aside ;-) Some of the other suggestions are rather good but aren't really what I'm looking for as they are either fully cloud-based (eg Google Docs, Wave) or one platform only (eg Sharepoint) or too expensive (hire a secretary :-P).
I like the idea of some of the "roll your own" ideas, eg directories + hard links, serving from a web server or wiki. The problem is as I progress though the medical degree, I am likely to have decreasing amounts of time to tinker with things if they have shortcomings; and to be honest they probably will as I am unlikely to have thought through the problem fully! Plus third-party solutions will definitely have substantially more polish than anything hastily dreamt up by me!
A shared wiki for my cohort / medical school / country may be an option on top of whatever comes out of this discussion, but I'd like something personal as... ah, let's say medical students have wildly varying standards of what is acceptable for notes ;-)
My supplementary questions for anyone still wanting to chip in:
- Do Evernote and thebrain/personalbrain have an "offline" mode? That is, can I keep things nicely organised locally instead of having to upload to the cloud? Evernote seems to suggest this is the case but at a very cursory perusal both seem to stop short of actually saying "you can use this to organise the files on your hard drive".
- Do any other docs / medical students want to chip in and say what they use? I suspect each solution will have practical considerations that may affect my decision or not. Sharing practical experience is very useful, even if it's just "I use Evernote and find it useful" as some have said above.
- Similarly, does anyone have experience of Nepomuk? Any drawbacks?
Thanks again for the helpful replies, Slashdot. You continue to impress me - I doubt I would have gotten such a useful variety of responses elsewhere. I hope this discussion is useful to other folk looking for something similar.