b.cognosco

Joining a Diet Club

terrywfrazier@gmail.com — Tue, 15 Jan 2008 20:34:00 GMT

My friend Matt has been following my low information diet plans. Today he announced that he reduced his RSS feeds to the point he could read them all in 20 minutes.

Congratulations, Matt. I have gotten mine to the point they can be read in 5-10 minutes, no more than 20 even if I wait a week. I continue to prune the e-mails by watching for new, low-activity lists as time passes. I don't feel like I'm missing a thing.

I do find myself looking for some sort of fidget activity to take the place of checking e-mail or RSS. I have to stop myself. I also have to make sure that I'm not arbitrarily wasting time on making blog posts, substituting one fidget for another. But I want to chronicle my progress in case it is of value to me or others later on. I will limit this to no more than 1 post per day and no more than 3 per week. That should be plenty.

Jerry Michalski's Brain is Back Online

terrywfrazier@gmail.com — Sun, 02 Oct 2005 22:03:43 GMT

Jerry Michalski has put his brain back online. Its a fascinating study in how one person can build a personal taxonomy. TheBrain, and PersonalBrain, were among the first successful attempts to give users a friendly interface for building a relational taxonomy. It was, and is, a fascinating application. At one point I had close to 10,000 thoughts in my own Brain. Sadly, its been rendered largely unneeded by the advent of simple, web-based tagging tools such as delicious. TheBrain still does things that we cant begin to do with the web tools things like create parent/child and child/sibling relationships and displays them in one of the most intuitive ways Ive seen. A couple of years ago David Buchan developed some marvelous thought patterns and processes using PersonalBrain. But the benefits are no longer sufficient to make me leave the simpler web tools for a PC-specific app locked to the local file system. According to Jerry, efforts are underway to add things like online editing and commenting. Can technologies like AJAX be used to turn TheBrain into a lively, responsive, editable web app?

My Brain is back!
Harlan and his team at TheBrain have set up an enterprise Brain server, loaded it with my PersonalBrain's data, and you can go get lost in it here. Please log in as guest/guest.

No need to install TheBrain, this is a Java applet that will download the first time you visit, then run more quickly thereafter.

I've thrilled to have my Brain back online. It's been too long. My Brain now has 64,000 nodes (called thoughts). Just crossed that threshhold today.

Personal Knowledge Management With delicious

terrywfrazier@gmail.com — Wed, 28 Sep 2005 21:59:22 GMT

I switched to delicious several months ago as my personal bookmarking tool. It’s a great Web 2.0 service that solves several previously intractable problems. I grew tired of having my bookmarks scattered across multiple browsers on multiple computers, and never knowing where to find the one I wanted. I’m also lazy and rarely changed the bookmark name to something that would make sense to me six months later. Worse, I never made note of why it was important because there was no convenient way of tagging bookmarks. In short, bookmarks were only useful for things I used regularly. Using them to mark reference material was nearly impossible. delicious fixed that, with a simple interface and universal accessibility (as long as I’m online.)

David Buchan began using delicious recently as part of his personal knowledge management toolkit, and highlights several key benefits:

On how del.icio.us is working for me
I started using del.icio.us a couple of weeks ago. I was initially hesitant at needing to match my tags with the tags of everyone else, so I didn't bother, and that's what has let me get to the power of the tool.

My del.icio.us account has taught me that:

Creating tags according to what is important to me is encouraging me to bookmark items I wouldn't have in the past (I've never really been a bookmark person because of the complexity involved - del.icio.us takes that away by mapping in a non-hierarchical direction.)

It is a great way to share my readings with others on my team. Now if we're talking about a topic which is new to them, I can simply point them at my research; which has already been collected in one place. I recently did this when explaining the benefits of RSS.
References for a training session can be given a common tag for the participants e.g. http://del.icio.us/quantumgardener/nct for a session on Newfield Conversational Technology

I can branch to the tags of others when I feel inclined, but otherwise how and what others tag is of no importance to me. This is critical because I don't have to filter through people's different understandings of use of a single word unless I have the time. That said, I may take up some of the practices in a recent Denham Grey article on Using Social Bookmarks

Using as many tags as possible to describe each item makes me think about its importance and makes for a richer retrieval experience

I especially like David's description of how and why tags work for him. As I noted in Why Tagging is Like Sex, tags are best served with some context – context that comes from having a shared understanding meaning. I almost never search for tags used by other people because they’re unlikely to have any relevance to me. For instance, I may want to tag with the word “georgia” because that’s where I live. It’s a geographic tag for me. But others may use the tag for the former Russian state of Georgia, artist Georgia O’Keefe, or the screen font Georgia.

Context only exists for those who know me, or know something about my interests. It’s unlikely my bookmarks will have any substantial value to random strangers. That’s why I see little benefit to massive tag search engines like technorati. But that’s another story…

Knowledge Capture Mindmap

terrywfrazier@gmail.com — Fri, 02 May 2003 03:53:22 GMT

Matt Mower has created an excellent visual summary of the key elements in knowledge capture. Contrary to a lot of what's written in the mindmap literature, creating a good mindmap is not easy. Condensing thoughts to a single keyword or two, aligning them into patterns that add context, and keeping it clean are much more difficult in practice than in theory.

Nice job, Matt.

Thinking about capturing knowledge.
[Curiouser and curiouser!]