Ever felt that you can't keep up with the fast changing pace of technology? Suffering from information overload? I feel like that everyday! What I would like to do is to share with you how technology has impacted my life, and my experience in dealing with them.
Thursday, September 27, 2007
Trying out BlogRush
Monday, September 10, 2007
Harvesting information from the web for your personal GMail knowledge base
The purpose of this post is to examine how to gather information into your personal Gmail knowledge base using today's popular web2.0 social networking sites; namely Digg, StumbleUpon, del.icio.us and reddit.
Background
With the advent of web2.0 and the explosion of information in the internet today, many of us operate in
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However, with the coming of the social network or community based web2.0 sites, we now have community or human based ratings which serve to deliver webpages to us based on our preferences. So which of these sites should we use? Digg, StumbleUpon, del.icio.us, or reddit?
Analysis and Comparison
First, we really need to sit down and understand our own needs. Are we merely wanting to keep updated with the latest happenings via news? Or are we more interested in studying specific topics and concepts. In the former, timing is important because news become less relevant overtime. In the latter, content is more important than the time in which the information was first made available. Or perhaps we need a combination of both concepts in our lives; we want some news in order to be relevant, and we also need to target specific information for our own personal or work needs. Digg and Reddit are more socially driven news and content sites, whereas StumbleUpon and del.icio.us succeeds more in delivering targetted and specific content.
The need for news
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The relevance of targeted information
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Impact to our lives
So what is the impact of these technologies to our lives today? With the careful use of Digg and Reddit for delivering relevant news, and StumbleUpon and del.icio.us for serving up personalised and relevant websites, and pushing these information via RSS into our personalised Gmail knowledge base, we now have very very refined information that we can mine at our fingertips. This information come to us through a process of social collaborative filtering which makes them more relevant to us, certainly more relevant than a list of results dished out to us by Google everytime we do a keyword search. As a result, information harvesting becomes less painful and more relevant.
Saturday, September 08, 2007
Mining data in your bookmarks using your Gmail personal knowledge base in 5 simple steps
In my previous blog post, I talked about how to create a personal knowledge base system using GMail. In this post, I will talk about how to harvest information from the web using bookmarks and sending these information into your GMail personal knowledge base for future search access.
Background
Most of us make use of bookmarking systems or websites such as del.icio.us, StumbleUpon, Digg, Reddit and so on (by the way, these are my favourites and I use them extensively) to save links to web pages which we have visited. We might also want to share these links or bookmarks with our social network (made possible by the social networking phenomenon). I call this process information harvesting. The problem with information harvesting is where do we put all those information that we harvested and how do we find those bits that we need during our day-to-day activities. Well, if you have read my last post, you can now use GMail as your own personal knowledge system. What I will show you today is how to stream your bookmarks into your GMail personal knowledge system so that you can search and mine for them in GMail.
Step-by-step
We will make use of Yahoo Alerts to stream your saved bookmarks to your GMail personal knowledge system.
Step #1: First, go to Yahoo Alerts.
Step #2: You will see the following screen. Select the "Feed / Blog" link.
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Step #3: After you have clicked the "Feed / Blog" link, Yahoo Alerts will take you to this next screen below:
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In this screen, you now proceed to key in the URL of your RSS feed in Part A. After that make sure you type in your designated personal GMail knowledge base email address where you would want your bookmark stream to go to. Select whether you want to receive the alert everyday or as it happens.
Step #4: Save the Alert .... and you're done !!
Step #5: Give the alert system some time to work this out. Check your email inbox later and see your latest bookmarks streamed right into your GMail personal knowledge system. Now you can mine all your saved bookmarks anytime you want !
That's it for now. Thanks.
Thursday, March 29, 2007
Creating your own personal knowledge base system in 5 simple steps using Gmail
The purpose of this blog post is to help you implement a personalised knowledge management system using Gmail
Background
Have you ever wanted to find some information that you have read on the web recently but locating it was just impossible? In the early days of the internet, people would just use the bookmark feature that was in their browser to bookmark all those links that they would like to retain. Guess what, soon their browser bookmark tree became a tangled mess of links; ever felt that way? Then came the online bookmark sites, my favourites being del.icio.us, Google Bookmarks and Yahoo MyWeb. That really made our lives so much easier, with the tagging and tag cloud features of these sites, you are now able to tag and categorize all the information that you had read on the web. But then, searching for stuff required you to tag your resources correctly using a taxonomy that only you understood …. and sometimes forgot ! Not to mention when some of those bookmarks pointed to pages that expired or got moved, what a pain. At least for MyWeb you had the option of actually saving the page that you just read. But then, wouldn’t it be great if you could have a “personalized mini-google” for all your personal online information that you can just search in the manner that you now do with Google?
Also how many times have you come online and found that you have too much information staring at you; each email, webpage, news alert, and more screaming for your attention? Well you are not alone, we information junkies all suffer from the same “I need more information but I can’t read them all” syndrome. So what do you do with all those information that come from your searches, yahoo alerts, google alerts, RSS newsfeeds, emails, and your constant traversing of all the links in webpage that you are currently reading? Surely you can’t read all of them? Or do you just conveniently ignore most of them, only to regret it later when you get into a “now where did I read this piece of information from?” mode.
Well for most of us, knowledge management was not something we learnt in school and thus with the onslaught of information from today’s internet, we just do not have the method or means to capture, retain and distill all the information that hit us everyday, where we want it, and when we want it.
Not to fear, I would like to share with you some simple steps that can help you create such a knowledge base using something most of us use regularly (or not so regularly J) … yep, GMail. You heard me right …. your very own personal knowledge base using GMail. I was really inspired to do this by Steve Rubel in his article Turn Gmail into your Personal Nerve Centre.
Step-by-step Guide
Here’s how to create your very own knowledge base in 5 simple steps.
Step 1
Create a set of gmail tags that are broad categories within your personal knowledge base system, e.g. @DB, @KM, etc. The @ sign is very useful as it kinda sets apart your knowledge base from your other gmail tags that you would use normally.
Step 2
Download the latest version of Google Toolbar which has a Send To feature.
Step 3
Go to GMail and create an email filter with the “To:” search criteria being [Your gmail account name]+[Your Knowledge Base Tag]@gmail.com, e.g. christopher.yeo+@KM@gmail.com.
Still in the edit filter mode, remember to check the “Skip the Inbox (Archive It)” checkbox; also remember to check the “Apply the label:” checkbox and set the drop down list box to your knowledge base tag, e.g. @KM.
By doing this step, what you would have done is to set up an email filter that checks whenever it receives an email to your special email account with the special tag, e.g. christopher.yeo+@KM@gmail.com, gmail will filter the email, apply the label @KM, and then archive the email! Immediately, your email gets whisked away from your Inbox, reducing your clutter, as well as pushing the received email into your “tagged” email archives.
If you want to read more about this technique of using a special tag in sending emails to your personal gmail account, LifeHacker explains the value of this here.
Step 4
Now, go ahead and surf the web! When you come across an article or some information that you would like to save into your personal knowledge base, use the Send To feature in your Google Toolbar (see Step 2 above) and send it to your special gmail knowledge base address (e.g. christopher.yeo+@KM@gmail.com see Step 3 above).
Note that the entire text of the article, plus some of its useful links, get saved into your gmail account, appropriately tagged with your knowledge base tag, and whisked away into your archives bypassing your inbox ! Now you don’t have to worry about saving links back to that article knowing that links may expire because of some reason (website is down, article got removed, etc.).
Step 5
Now what happens when you want to access that bit of information that you read or saved sometime ago? Easy! Just go to gmail and in the search criteria, enter “label:@KM” and a keyword and ….. bingo! You now have your very own personal knowledge base that you can query …. Google style! You can then make use of all those fancy advanced gmail searches to do some serious mining of information in your very own personal knowledge base. Take a look at Gmail Tips for some cool query techniques.
With the size of gmail accounts these days (around 2.8GB for the free account and 10GB for the Google Apps accounts), your personal knowledge base will hardly chew up any significant portion of your gmail account capacity. I’ve got hundreds of gmail emails a day and I’ve hardly utilized even 10% of my gmail capacity!
Impact to our livesSo there you go, you now have a really mean personal knowledge base system in just five simple steps using Gmail! This will go a long way towards helping you manage your information in this age of information explosion. Have fun!