Building my own personal knowlege manager has been quite a journey. Over the last couple years I’ve taken a “piece meal” approach and slowly built up the features of my system one component at a time. One major feature that has always been on my mind is data portability. Last week I wrote an article on how to sync your digial scrapbook between multiple computers and even sync to your wiki. This feature had me thinking about how I could take portability to the next level.

ICTAC MEMO iPhone Apps for Education

I found a unique and visually stunning infographic on FlickR today:
Timeline of Major Trends and Events (Social, Technological, Economic & Political)

Peter von Stackelberg designed this complex timeline of social, technological, economic and political events …

“Consider a future device for individual use, which is a sort of mechanized private file and library. It needs a name, and, to coin one at random, “memex” will do. A memex is a device in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility. It is an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory.” — Vannevar Bush (1945)

Fast forward fifty four years, and we finally have the technology (hardware and software) to make the Memex a reality. My project has been primarily focused on fulfilling a small portion of the the original idea, but has only touched the surface. The Memex fully realized would be a system that completely (and automatically) digitizes experiences, memories, and interactions with the environment. The capability for Total Recall , offloading human memory to a digital space, is not too far away (think Cyborgs).

Nothing like combining my love of linux geekery and information visualization:

Click here to check out the interactive map.

Discovered this while Googling for Semantic Wikis and Personal Knowledge Management (PKM)
Abstract. The use of semantic representations in document-oriented
environments – as formal annotations or embedded instances of a formal
knowledge base – is seen as an …

After some mildly confusing debugging, I finally discovered why my MindMap Viewer was not working with some configurations of Firefox 3, Flash, and Linux or Mac.  I first noticed this myself on Linux a couple …

Ah, I’m sure that catchy title has your attention. The more in depth title is “Gmail is worse than stupidity OR Cloud computing is a trap”. Or, so says GNU founder Richard Stallman.
The …

Learn how to sync your iPhone3g using Ubuntu Linux and VMWare.

One key theme that keeps popping up at me is the critical need to alleviate information overload, and find techniques that let you focus on what matters most.