Maryland Football

Maryland's loss to NC State today brought the 2005 football season to a close with a losing record. This just means it's REALLY basketball season now.

Personal information and online tools

I wanted to throw out there two websites that I just started making more use of, and have found quite interesting:
* The first is backpack (http://www.backpackit.com/) which is basically an online notepad, but really much more than that. It's nice to be able to put this information somewhere that I can get to it from anywhere (like home or work) but it also has access controls so I can set who can read and/or edit the pages.
* The second is del.icio.us (http://del.icio.us/), an online bookmark manager. Similar to backpack, it's nice to have the bookmarks accessible from any web browser, but it adds some very interesting abilities due to it's community nature. You can view popular bookmarks, and find other links that are related to the links that you have set based on what other people have linked.

These two pages have been interesting finds in my quest for the holy grail of information management. Those who are loyal readers of my blog (ha!) will know that I've done a lot of searching for what I call a personal information server. It's somewhat frustrating to me that in all the software that's out there, there doesn't' seem to be anything that really fits the bill for personal information management on a variety of devices and in a variety of connected states. The first obvious hurdle is multiple locations, which means accessing information at home (multiple locations in the house), at work, or on the road. The next hurdle is the platform, which includes Windows, Mac, Linux, and for an extra twist, Symbian or Palm (phones). Finally is the connected state, since a phone isn't always on the network or Internet. It may only be connected while in Bluetooth range of a computer, or it may have mobile Internet connectivity. Okay, so we have hurdles with platforms and connectivity, but what information do we really need? When I speak of personal information management, the primary requirements are contacts, mail, calendar, to-do, and notes.

The first attempt to answer the problem has to be web-based tools. This really does solve most of the problem, since it can be accessed from anywhere with an internet connection (home, work, and potentially on the road), and from any of the major software platforms (usability from Symbian or Palm can be debated). And for the most part there are tools in place to do this. I've been using the My Yahoo! portal for quite a while, which has all the basic tools you need in a PIM. Now there are new tools like the ones I mentioned at the top of the post that really enhance the abilities of an online information store. So what's wrong with it? Well first, it doesn't really work well with the cell phone platforms. I've only danced around the issue of sync'ing, but it's actually the serious downfall. Sure, I might be able to load a browser on the cell phone, but for the contact list to really be usable, it has to sync with the native software of the phone. This isn't to mention that the phone usually isn't connected to the Internet. The other main problem to me is that no matter what platform you're on, web interfaces generally aren't as usable as native interfaces. The cell phone is an example of this, but I'd make this claim for Windows and Mac as well. I think everything should have a web interface, but only as a secondary interface. For instance, having a webmail client is great (and useful), but it doesn't replace my imap client.

So, it's nice that web tools can get me most of the way, but I'm really looking for a set of tools that will accomplish this better. It might be peer-to-peer through a syncing mechanism (like iSync on the Mac but a larger scale), or it might be client-server. Email and the IMAP protocol is a pretty good example of what I want. I can access it with native tools (thunderbird on several platforms) or through the web, but its centrally stored on my server so I always have the same information. Right now I have no decent way to access contacts in the same way. LDAP just isn't designed for this use (or at least the software to access it and modify the data), and it doesn't answer how I'm going to sync it to my cell phone.

To throw an even bigger topic into this whole mess, I want groupware functionality. Technically, much of what I've described is available in groupware. Microsoft Exchange does a lot of the things I've mentioned very well, but it isn't the answer (and not just because of the cost). A groupware server in the traditional definition isn't what I'm looking for, but some of it's aspects are. The ability to share information with others (with limits) is definitely required. For instance, my idea of an ultimate address book would be the ability to have shared contacts with others on the system, so when a phone number is updated, everyone with that contact gets the update.

I'm not sure if I've defined the problem well enough, or where I stand with the answers, but it's something I hope to sort out my ideas on through this blog. I will say there are a few websites I've found that del with this subject and lay out their thoughts much clearer than I've done so far. The best is WikiWeblogPim. I won't say the "elephant" he describes is the same as mine, but this page does a great job at capturing thoughts of what roles different types of software have, and how they fit together. The other page is a series of blog posts on Learning and KM insights. There are several items on this page and links elsewhere that are very interesting reads about knowledge management.

Probably more posts to come on this topic...

My blog has fallen under criticism as of late for each post being more useless than the next. Perhaps I'll try to improve, but it's unlikely.

In order to make this a more meaningful post, I direct you to the The Best Baseball Clip Ever. The clip never fails to make me laugh.

The real reason for logging on to blogger for the first time in months is to link to Ad Homonym to improve his value on Blogshares. I'm not sure I'm actually going to help his value at all, since my blog stinks. So in the event anyone is actually reading my post, go to his blog instead since there is content there that is sure to please.

Finally, I was shocked to actually have to edit a line of HTML to change the links on the sidebar of this page. I thought one of the major selling points of hip new web software like blogs and wikis were that you didn't have to edit HTML. However, I was actually somewhat relieved to find that I could edit the code using tags that I learned in the past, instead of new codes that you have to learn for wiki software.