Creating your own personal knowledge base system in 5 simple steps using Gmail

Objective

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 lives

So 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!

I think Google Code is better than SourceForge.net

Yesterday Google launched their very own open-source projects hosting site called Google Code. Once again its the clean interface that is going to make this site my favourite open-source project hosting site. Searching for projects is also made to look very much like the usual Google search function, I wonder whether the projects are indexed by the Google bots as well or there is a separate bot for this.

Google engineering manager Greg Stein announced Google Code during a talk at the O'Reilly Open Source Convention in Portland, Ore. see this article on Cnet. There's also a short review of this site on the Google Operation System blog.

Getting the most out of Flickr

I must say, I am addicted to Flickr, the more I use it, the more I like it. Certainly Flickr makes online photo sharing and discussions one of the most addictive pastimes (or even wastetimes) ever ! However, the help or FAQ provided by Flickr themselves are either so unstructured, or very sparse. Once in a while we come across some good guide or write-up about how to use Flickr. This one comes from Flickr themselves.

The post-client/server world

Benioff prophecies the post-client/server world.

The CEO of Salesforce.com, Marc Benioff, is one guy who really preaches about the on-demand model. Sometimes his rantings pushes the envelope of credulity. Yet somehow, his message is becoming more acceptable these days. With the likes of Google, Yahoo, Salesforce.com and others like them, maybe the days in which the client/server application is beginning to look numbered. Web 2.0 is the latest buzzword.

Comparing 9rules and Squidoo

Another blog search engine? 9rules was started in 2003 and have only just begun to be noticed in bloggsphere. Can it even be compared to Squidoo. Well, I did a Google Trends comparison and 9rules didn't even figure in the results as its search volume was too low. Conceptually, 9rules and Squidoo are similar, click on the title to this post to find out more details.

My own opinion on this is that 9rules is an exclusive club of bloggers who become exclusive members of a community who helps one another to promote their blogs. Squidoo on the other hand consists of content in chunks called lenses, which are not really blogs. I have personally found that using lenses in conjunction with blogs is a great idea.

Back from my June holidays and business trip to Osaka Japan

Hi everyone,

You might be wondering why I have not posted any thing since 17 June, well its because I was on holiday in Sarawak with my family, and then it was off to a business trip to Osaka Japan. Well, I am back once again. The photo you see above was taken at the Marriot in Miri, Sarawak, Borneo Island. The sunsets there were really beautiful.

Well, it was a good break. On again with my posts for technologies that impact ordinary lives !

People who don't matter to technology anymore

My recent post on who are today's movers in the technology world contrasts with this list of who don't matter to technology anymore. The people on this list are not neccessarily has-beens. However, their influence on the changing landscape of technology has been waning for sometime. Click this link and see who these people are:

http://money.cnn.com/2006/06/21/technology/10dontmatter.biz2/index.htm

Who are the most influential people in technology today?

Technology is today influencing many parts of our lives today. The main topic of this blog is about how technology impacts our ordinary lives. But who are the people who are influencing technology? Is it still Bill Gates, the richest man on earth? Can it be the founders of Google Sergey Brin and Larry Page?

Follow this link and tell me if you agree with this list:

http://money.cnn.com/magazines/business2/peoplewhomatter/index.html

I prefer Flickr over Picasa Web Albums because of its community

Today, 13 June 2006, Google launched Picasa Web Albums. In case you’re not familiar with Picasa, it’s Google’s free desktop photo management software. Picasa is a quick download that makes it easy for people to organize and edit their pictures using something that’s simple and clutter-free. Google is now trying to bring that same experience to online photo sharing with Picasa Web Albums. The official Google Blog was the first to break this news on 13 June.

A blog post entitled Google Picasa Web Albums Review with Screenshots in computers.net does give quite a detailed description and screenshots of Picasa Web Albums functionalities. But what was more interesting were blog posts which compared Flickr with Picasa Web Album (I wonder why no one bothered to talk about WebShots, another photo online storage service). Picasa Web Album -vs- Flickr gives an unbiased comparison of the two services. Flickr vs Picasa Web Albums does give an excellent comparison between the two services in areas such as price, storage limit, and so on.

My Experience: Why am I so attached to Flickr? Well, that's because the application is built around the community aspects of online photo sharing. Allow me to elaborate. Everytime I logon to Flickr, out of habit I would go to the "comments you've made" link on my Flickr home page to check whether there are other people who have commented on the photos that I commented on. The nice feature here is that every photo that you have commented on will be shown here, together with the comments on the photo, as well as a link to the profile of the people who commented on the photo. This serves as a pseudo bookmark of the photos that you were interested in.

I especially like the links to the people who commented on the photo because I would spend hours just surfing the links of many people whom I do not know. If I like their photos as well, I would be able to make them my contacts (i.e. bookmarks to people I like to interact with in Flickr). I can also leave messages for these contacts. I am encouraged that the community in Flickr tend to be quite friendly and approachable. If somone commented on my own photos, their comments can be found at the end of the link called "recent activity". It has become quite a reflex action for me to click that link immediately after I logged on. You can also create discussion groups centred around interesting topics such as "Beautiful Sunsets". People on Flickr can then contribute their photos into the group's pool for everyone's enjoyment.

As can been seen, the strong bond within the community is truly rewarding as people get to share their photos, interact and become friends. So Flickr is not just an online photo storage website.

My verdict: Use Picasa Web Albums as an online photo storage service that is tightly integrated to Picasa itself. WebShots is another such online photo storage service. If you want to be part of a vibrant social community of people who loves photography and who loves to interact with one another, then Flickr is your best bet. For me, I choose Flickr.

Seth Godin's 56 ways to drive traffic to your blog

One of the things that I've noticed was that bloggers who have very popular blogs do not post on weekends. I have no conclusive proof of this but I have noticed that there are more hits on my sites during weekdays. So if you have breaking news, its best to do so on weekdays. Reading Senth Godin's blog post on 56 ways to drive traffic to your blog seems to indicate that what I felt all along was correct (see point no. 41 of Seth's blog post).

The other thing I noticed was that if you submit stories to digg on weekends, they tend not to make it into the front page. Somehow there are less readers to digg your story, and because of that the secret digging algorithm sort of relegates your story to the end of the digg queue after a couple of days.

The other thing I noticed was that if you announced breaking news (e.g. the advent of Google Spreadsheets) you will get a substantial increase in traffic to your blog. This again was confirmed in point no. 8 of Seth's blog post.

Seth's 56 ways is certainly a list seemingly full of contradictions, humour and good advice. A must-read for all bloggers.

The Person-centered Information Services

Many people today use several devices over the course of their daily lives; mobile phones, laptops, PCs, amd PDAs. With advances in technology, we will see the internet becoming more pervasive and appearing in everyday applicances such as TVs, refrigerators, cars, toys and much more. The day will come when we have to interact with so many different kinds of devices connected with the internet that the neccessity of person-centred information services becomes paramount. Otherwise each device that you personally interact with gives you its own context and that can become downright useless and confusing especially when there are so many other devices around.

The latest announcement by Google regarding the Google Firefox Synch Extension I belive is a step in the right direction. It gives each of us a personal context regardless of which computing device we use, provided of course it runs Firefox. Nonetheless this becomes a step in the right direction where our personal context gets stored somewhere in the internet. And it doesn't matter where we are or what computing device we are using, we get to see what we were doing when we last interacted with the internet. Sun Microsystems tried to do this with their SunRay initiative, however, this was too much of a hardware dependent solution.

I believe more research will be poured into the person-centered information services and Google will be seen to be pushing deeper into this very soon.

Squidoo 101

After all the excitement over the last few days over Google's Spreadsheets, its time for me to come back to another Web2.0 favourite of mine, Squidoo.

Since the inception of Squidoo, it has been getting rave reviews around the internet. Just what is Squidoo? With there being tons of information going around in the internet, what impact does Squidoo have on our cyberspace lives? Today, data and information abound in the internet. In fact, there's so much information out there that it creates an information overload problem. Anyone who has done a Google search can testify to that ! Squidoo simply faciliates the focusing of information into knowledge by the use of squid lenses.

Well, I have just updated my Squidoo lens called Squidoo-101 which takes you through the basics of Squidoo and how to build squid lenses.

Other blog posts that I have done in the past regarding Squidoo are:

1. The Role of Squidoo in Blogosphere
2. Creating Dynamic Content in a Squidoo Lens
3. Combining the use of del.icio.us and Squidoo
4. Squidoo Tips and Tricks
5. Why Squidoo Won't Work
6. Making Money from lenses in Squidoo

Google's Web Office

Whether or not Google's intention is to unseat MS Office, one thing is for sure. With Writely and Google Spreadsheets, the foundation for Google Web Office has already been laid. Would people want to use a Web Office from Google, definitely. I believe that for the most part, people will use a Google Web Office for less intensive kinds of work like writing personal letters, making notes for their latest book, keep track of shopping lists and so on. As far as corporate users are concerned, I think the heavy lifting will still be done by MS Office. Even OpenOffice is not there yet. Google's Web Office by Dan Farber from ZDNet records an interview with Dave Girouard, vice president and general manager of Google Enterprise on what is the company's plans for building corporate type applications.

Google Spreadsheets - the day after !

Well, its been a day since Google Spreadsheets was launched on 6 June 2006. Phew, there are tons of blog postings and articles in the internet about this latest offering from Google. I have read through many of them and decided that I should give a really short digest of those postings and articles which I think are more interesting and "authoritative" for those of you who have just tuned in on this latest buzz and who want a quick update on what its all about. Here goes !

1. Inside Google Spreadsheets, Google Blogoscoped, Philipp Larsen.

This post is interesting in that it contains two movies showing Philipp putting Google Spreadsheet through its paces. No sound though ! Good overview, not much details on the actual features.

2. Microsoft: Google Spreadsheets is so 10 years ago, InternetNews, Nicholas Carlson.

This article discusses the product from the perspectives of the Google product manager, Jonathan Rochelle, as well as the views of Microsoft spokesperson Heather Gillissen. No details on the features of the product here.

3. Google Spreadsheets: A Good Start, GeekMix.com.

This blog post gives a bit more details on the workings of the spreadsheet as well as what is not so good about it.

4. Google Spreadsheets has fewer functions than MS Excel, San Francisco Chronicle, Verne Kopytoff.

This article takes a fresh but contrarian view of Google's latest offering, the author preferring Excel over Google Spreadsheets.

5. Google Spreadsheets: Very Basic, Pretty Interesting, Harry McCraken.

What I like about this article is that it gives a pretty detailed account of the functionality and features of Google Spreadsheets.

6. Google Makes Strides in Online Office; Microsoft Lags, Forbes.com, Kate Dubose Tomassi.

This article discusses about what how Microsoft lags behind many startups today in the area of online applications.

7. Google Spreadsheets Beta: A Review, Brian's Blog.

This blog gives by far one of the most detailed account and description on the functionality of Google Spreadsheets. Lots of pictures available.

8. Other links include:

a. Spread a Little Google by Michael Calore
b. Google Spreadsheet - its not about Microsoft by MarketWatchh

9. Thanks everyone !

Google Spreadsheets is out !

Yeah, I just got my hands on an account for Google Spreadsheets and have managed to put it through its paces. I do not intend to do an indepth comparison of Google Spreadsheets with MS Excel, I just want to try to use the spreadsheet to see if after so many years of using Excel I would be able to switch to something else.

Verdict: I think most of us can survive without Excel !

Google Spreadsheets is quite intuitive to use. It does take some adjustment for those of us who grew up using Excel. From my first looks, most of the usual formulae are there. Almost what you can do with Excel, you can likewise do with Google Spreadsheet. Click the title to this post to go to a very very short tour on how to use the tool, not much here but nonetheless enough is mentioned about the basic functionalities.

What I miss is the Format Painter tool which we can use to copy a format from a cell and then paint it on other cells which require the same format. I tend to use this quite a lot and I can't seem to find an equivalent in Google Spreadsheets.

Conclusion: Might not be suitable for the heavy financial or scientific kinds of applications. But will be able to meet most of the needs of everyday personal or business applications.

More on Digg - A Complete Digg Tools Collection

Back to Digging. Over the last few days I found Digg to be quite useful as a site which serves up technology news. Due to the community based editorial concept, you get to see news that you would otherwise not see on other traditional news sites, e.g. Yahoo Technology.

Now if you really like Digg, then you would like this website, the Complete Digg Tools Collection. It has got the most comprehensive widgets on Digg that you can find on the internet !

The Future of Personalised Start/Home Pages

Personalized Start Pages is a growing, but fiercely competitive, market. So what are they? Predominantly they're homepages for Web information, gadgets and widgets. The impact they will have on our ordinary lives is that they are going to be very personalised homepages to which we will go to everyday of our lives. They will contain our favourite news sites, RSS feeds, photos and much more.

The kingpins of this domain are still Yahoo, Google and Microsoft. And then there will be a few more start-ups on the periphery. Personally, I find that the most comprehensive is still My Yahoo. Google's is more customisable, but not as comprehensive as that of My Yahoo; and I must confess that I tried getting myself to use MSN but gave up after a while.

I believe that personalised start pages, together with news feeds (e.g. Findory, Digg, CNN, and so on) and RSS feeds, will have a combined effect that is more far reaching that each on its own. Imagine that we can now have information and news that we want presented to us from different perspectives on a single page. Imagine that we can also assess this page from our PCs, and our mobile phones. With the internet becoming more ubiquitous, it will not be long before we have personalised pages on our TV sets, our PCs, our mobile phones, our refrigerators, our cars, in our airplane seats, and ...... the list goes on.

What an impact that will have !

Digg and the news junkie

The internet has definitely turned many ordinary people today in addicts, news junkies that is. And believe me, there are many ways to get your daily news fix; Yahoo News, Google News, MSN, CNN, blogs, and many more. News news news .... we get buried in information and news. Over the last year or so, I've sort of narrowed down to using only a few sources of information for my daily news fix. These are Yahoo News, del.icio.us, findory and now Digg. I use these sites as mechanisms to discover breaking news and trends. They perform this task faily well, and as a result, many people check such sites nearly every day. (Reference: Delicious, Digg and the new balance of power).

Admittedly, most of the users of Digg are more of the "technie" kind. More than half its news are technology or science in nature. Digg has a real-time view of all the activities that happen in the site, including new story submission, Digging status, etc. Now who would want that except geeks and techies? (Reference: spying on Digg).

Now, let's take a look at the social framework or community that makes Digg work. Afterall, news in Digg are submitted by its community, voted and commented by its community, and even buried by its community, i.e. news by the people and for the people. Alex Bosworth's blog gives a very good description of the dynamics of this community. According to Alex, there are several groups of people that make up this community. What's really interesting about these groups is that each of them is required for the system to function, they all came together relatively quickly, and each of them have different and complementary rewards for what they do. In general, this is both good and bad. The bad part is that the news are shaped by the behaviour of the community. (Reference: the Wisdom of browse).

Lately I've observed that people who submit links as news to be "Dugg" by the community are becoming very competitive. They scour the internet for hot and news worthy links and rush to be the first to submit those. I have read many angry comments by people who fight with one another over who submitted links first, very much like children who say "I saw it first !!!". In Digg, there is a feature to bury stories by reporting them as problems, duplicates or inaccurate. I have also seen people who use this as a weapon against others by deliberately burying their rival's stories. There are also people who are so prolific as story submitters that they submit a story every few minutes, 7 days a week ! These become celebrities with huge following.

So if you are new to Digg and have suddenly been caught up with the excitement of submitting and Digging stories, do be prepared to get flamed once in a while. Some comments can be real nasty as well.

In conclusion, Digg is good for those of us who are news junkies and need our daily technology or science news fix. You do not get many business and finance type of news here. Forget about health, sports, entertainment or other kinds of news here. All-in-all, Digg is good. I also kinda like the fact that it saves under your profile all those stories that you Dugg, sort of like bookmarks. The only problem is that they do not have good search or tagging mechanisms for you to manage your bookmarks, especially if you have many of them. That is why I balance my diet for news by using del.icio.us, findory and Yahoo News (more about these later).

Have a nice new-sy day !

Limiting The Digg Effect

In my previous blog post, I talked a little bit about Digg, a community driven, tech-news site. Its users post links to articles called stories. If enough people find the article helpful or amusing, they "digg" or vote for it. Once the article has enough diggs, it is moved from the mildly hidden back-end of the site, and put on the front page for anyone going to Digg.com to see. This article, gives a few simple steps on how to Limit The Digg Effect.

Dig this - Digg Digg Digg !

Now this is interesting. Although I've heard about Digg for quite some time now, I've just begun to use it in the last week or so. For those of you who have missed this (where were we?), Digg is a news website where users submit stories for review. These so called stories normally revolve around a link to a website, and your actual "story" about what was at the end of that link.

After you have done your story, you then submit the story for "review", but rather than allow an editor to decide which stories make it to the front page, called the homepage, the users do. Readers of Digg perform their voting (a la American Idol style) of your story using a "Digg" button next to your story. The more votes or Diggs you get, the higher in ranking your story becomes. Ultimately with more votes, your story keeps climbing up in the ranking ladder until it makes it to the front page. On the other hand, if you do not get sufficient votes after a certain time, your story drops out of the review queue (i.e. it gets booted out). At the end of it all, you get a community of users who both submit, read, and vote for stories.

"So what?", you might say.

So ..... the community gets to consume news or information that they themselves have selected as noteworthy. I kinda like that because I am beginning to use this Digg concept to source for materials that I need in the course of my research and writings. Digg also combines social bookmarking, blogging, and RSS. You are just one click away from bookmarking their materials. This you do after you register your profile. Those articles or stories that you have "dugg" will then appear within your profile area as bookmarks. With one click you can also blog about the stories. RSS is also available for lots of stuff like the frontpage stories, stories that you "dugg" and so on.

Digg is also a social networking website (what ?! Another one ?!). Stories that you have "dugg" may be shared with others in the community. You can also see which stories they have "dugg". Readers may also leave their comments on any story, this is also one click away.

In essence, as an information junkie I now use Digg, del.icio.us, Findory and Bloglines to trawl the internet for information to satisfy my insatiable desire to learn.

p.s. More about del.icio.us, Findory and Bloglines later !