With the release of the Google Desktop search tool I have been thinking more about personal knowledge management tools and how I currently implement them. I tend to experiment with several tools so consider this a work in progress.
In broad terms here’s what I am trying to accomplish:
* Store information both locally and online
* Share information with others
* Annotate information
* Discover information
* Colloborate with others
* Find all of the stuff I have collected
Store: Project files are saved in folders by project. I keep them fairly well organized but the pdf files and other bits and pieces I collect while browsing tend to get filed away in various folders. I attempted at one point to create some organization but now I have c:\work\projects and c:\personal directories and I just dump stuff appropriately. We use Exhange here at work so my email is stored online. At my previous job I had a POP account so I stored all of my mail locally and backed up the .pst files on a regular basis. I read weblogs and other news feeds using Bloglines and if I want to capture something for later reference I post it to my weblog using the JustBlogIt! extension in Firefox. I’ve written previously about the friction involved in posting or “reposting” reference material to my weblog. JustBlogIt! is working out very well. I have also just started using del.icio.us to capture and store bookmarks online and am using Jeffrey Veen’s perl script to grab links that I post each day and save them to my weblog. I just started using Flickr to store my photo archive. I have experimented off and on with wikis. At first I ran one on my laptop and used it to store and organize research. I decided to install one on my server and have been using it sporadically. My primary usage to date has been a way to capture and organize ideas. I used the IdeaMiner template and created it as a wiki. I want to like wikis, I really do, but I think they are best suited for collaboration. I used to keep most of that type of information in Outlook and will probably go back to that at some point.
Share: I share content with others in multiple ways. I email it, post it to my weblog, collect links in del.icio.us, upload photos to Flickr or share files via networked drives. My weblog and links and some photos on Flickr are open to everyone. Access is limited with email, networked drives and Flickr if I mark images as private and specify a group. I like the control Flickr offers.
Annotate: I annotate information in two different ways. On my weblog I can add my take or commentary on other blogger’s posts and I do that on occasion, but rarely take the time. If I have posted the piece it is something I’m interested in and either have read and want to save or will read it later. The other type of annotation I am doing is tagging. This occurs in both Flickr and del.icio.us. When you upload photos to Flickr you can tag them with our own terms. For example, I just uploaded several images from a trip to China I made several years ago. You can search for tags and see what others have posted with that tag. Here’s a sample of photos from Flickr that have been tagged China. You can do the same with del.icio.us. What is even more interesting is that I can subscribe to these “tagged feeds” using RSS. If you take a look at the Flickr page of China images you’ll notice an RSS link. Subscribe in your newsreader and voila – you’ll see each new photo added to Flickr that has been tagged “China”. Yep, you can do the same in del.icio.us. It is an interesting way to see links related to a particular subject or tag.
Discover: Discovering information represents the biggest shift in my work habits. I still read various print products, but most of my information gathering these days is done online and it comes to me via RSS feeds in my aggregator or newsreader. I’m currently using Bloglines, a web-based aggregator that includes some nice features. The interface is pretty straightfoward and I can scan and read through the 100+ weblogs I subscribe to fairly quickly. If I missed a post or read it but forgot to blog it, I can redisplay items based on a time parameter such as last 24 hours or month or all items. I can also search through just the weblogs I subscribe to, all weblogs or the entire web. It is getting to a point that if they don’t offer RSS feeds I don’t read them. RSS is connecting all of these disparate sources together in very powerful ways.
Colloboration: Wikis are wonderful tools for colloboration and if you are working with a team on a project they offer up a great solution for documenting and recording your work. They can be daunting to the less technical but with the advent of SocialText and Jot they are easier to setup and use. Groove is another candidate for this space but I last took it for a spin four years ago and can’t comment on how it has evolved.
Find: The holy grail of personal knowledge management has been cracked with the launch of Google Desktop search. I have been taking it for a spin and you know what? For the most part it works just like you would expect Google to work. It is fast, the interface is minimalism at its best and the relevancy is good enough. Since I use Firefox I had to install the Slogger extension in order to get it to index the web pages I have looked at, but otherwise it has gone on its merry way and indexed my Outlook email (I no longer use LookOut for search) and all of the files on my hard drive. It seems to be behaving nicely. If it is consuming a lot of resources on my machine I am not noticing it. Since I am using my weblog and del.icio.us to store much of my online related work I’m not so interested in storing everything I surf. Slogger gives me the ability to enable or disable page logging. If I want to capture a particular session I turn it on. I did notice that my Google mail is not indexed unless I view it with page logging turned on.
I like the way that it mixes results from your desktop with web searches. I did a search for “storytelling” the other day and discovered that I already had the files stored on my laptop.
While it does most things really well, here are a couple of things I wish it would do:
* Index networked drives that I am permissioned for
* Let me point it to a url and have it crawl that site (my weblog or wiki for example)
* Let me point it to my images stored on Flickr
* Instead of controlling page logging via Slogger, would it make sense to do this in the Google interface?