Since I posted my article last month on How To Create Your Own Personal Document Viewer, I’ve had a few inquiries on how people could have a similar setup themselves.  I thought it might be helpful to .zip up the docbrowser project and show some of the code that does the conversions using the utilities I illustrated in the article.  Disclaimer: This code is by no means my finest work (it was hacked together on a Sat. afternoon), but it gets the job done.  At a high-level the code is …

Overview
Like most people, I have a large number of personal documents in a variety of formats (PDF, Excel, Word, RTF, PowerPoint, etc.). For the typical user, organizing these documents in a ‘My Documents’ folder and having MS Office/Open Office/Adobe Acrobat installed simply gets the job done. However, I’ve been looking for some sort of “Web 2.0″ solution to view my documents while I’m on the go. And, since my knowledge manager is web-based, I’d like a way to browse and embed personal documents directly in my wiki …

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.

Begin able to access your personal information/knowledge from multiple places is the ultimate realization of total information ubiquity. Being able to access all of your personal bookmarks, notes, contact information, journal entries, and research data from any computer is obviously useful. Being able to access all of your personal knowledge from a handheld device like an iPhone is absolutely exciting! Without sounding totally nostalgic, this type of portability is in a large part a modern-day realization of what Vannevar Bush had envisioned in his article on the Memex (”As We May Think”).

I had originally planned on calling this article ‘How to Use Cloud Computing to Synchronize Your Digital Scrapbook For Research and Integrate Into Your Personal Knowledge Management Wiki for Extra Credit’

Truly fascinating work! This is next on my list for my Personal Memex.

And, the original paper on Scribd:

The Visual Wiki: A New Metaphor for Knowledge Access and Management
Publish at Scribd or explore others: School Work Essays & Theses Non-fiction …

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 enabling technology for intelligent services
which may help knowledge workers in tasks like finding, structuring, or
assessing information. A very high level of formalization may even more
directly support problem solving, e.g., by the application of inferencing
services. A coupling of textual and formal representations in document-
centered knowledge work raises, amongst others, two questions: i) How
can the acquisition of …

I’ve had some down time the last couple days, and figure it was time to cleanup my public project list.  Most of my work this last year has been solely focusing on building my own Personal Knowledge Management system - my Personal Memex.  I’ve written a number of articles in recent months focusing on open source knowledge management, and personal learning environments.  Much of this project has been spent researching tools, integrating them into 1 cohesive system, performing trial and error, and incrementally making progress.  I still have a ton …

Just discovered some exciting news from Semantic Media Wiki:
SMW now supports Ploticus and Exhibit for powerful data visualizations.
From http://semantic-mediawiki.org/wiki/New_data_visualization_for_SMW:_Exhibit_and_Ploticus
22 Jan 2009. Semantic Result Formats (SRF), the add-on package for query formats in SMW, has just been extended with two great additions for powerful data visualisation: Ploticus and Exhibit. Both are available to first testers from SVN.

Ploticus (by Joel Natividad) is a format for creating diagrams based on the free Ploticus software package. It will provide a powerful alternative to the existing GooglePie and GoogleBar formats (which can only be …

Late last year I enthusiastically blogged about a new service I created to let you share and embed your mind maps directly into your website.