Somewhere out there!

Like many people these days, the internet is now an extension of my brain. I find new knowledge and skills simplely by googling it. In the complicated world we live in, there is only so much you can hold in your awareness at one moment. The internet provides the opportunity for near-line memory. A hook into billions of other brains. The question is how to control it, search it and like any good memory system cross-referrence current knowledge with past expereince. So many times I’ve remebered something I’d see on a webpage that would help me now, but I for the life of me could could not find the bookmark or the right google expression.

I’ve thought for a long time about it, and in fact before google existed, I thought it would be nice to have a personal google like system. Some time that integrated email, tracked your progress though the net, archive pages and generated cross-references. Suggestion new lines of investigation automatically.

There are so many different tools out there, this blog for instance. Nothing is quite there yet though.

Today though I discovered this blog entry by Ed Taekema. It talked about “Social Bookmarking and Furl … Bookmarking++”. Furl along with del.icio.us and Spurl definitely look like steps along the way.

Something to investiage further.

Now all we need is to mix in FacetedNavigation, email thread tracking, Bayesian classifcation and shake.