Saturday, September 08, 2007

Mining data in your bookmarks using your Gmail personal knowledge base in 5 simple steps

Objective

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.















Step #3: After you have clicked the "Feed / Blog" link, Yahoo Alerts will take you to this next screen below:

















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.

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