In the listing, you see the item title; you also get a number of icons that let you flag it, add a notebook or tag, toggle its privacy status or delete it. To see the entire item, click on the title -- the single entry will then take up the space where the listing was before.

Ads in Springpad appear mostly in the more formatted, commercial entries (for example, one "product" note listing a printer included a price comparison listing from Pricegrabber), and the company obviously has relationships with a variety of commercial entities, such as Amazon and Netflix. In addition, a recent blog entry mentioned that users will probably in future.

Are you an information omnivore who voraciously gathers all types of data from disparate sources and doesn't care about categorization? Or do you precisely classify and organize your data so you can later see at a glance what you're dealing with? Depending on how you answered, you might find yourself more drawn to one of these tools than the other.