Category: Knowledge Management

20 Years of Blogging and Coding: Reflections on an Unexpected Journey

Reading Time: 2 minutes This week marks the 20th anniversary of when I first started writing online and published my first blog post. In 2010, I released my first open-source project: an unofficial Fitbit API written in Perl. At the time, I had no grand vision—just curiosity and a desire to document my thoughts and pursue my passion across…
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Firefox Scrapbook Hacks – Viewing and Saving Webpages from Anywhere!

Reading Time: 4 minutes This weekend I decided to wrap up a couple cool knowledge management “hacks” and share some code on GitHub.  I primarily use the Firefox Scrapbook plugin to save all web pages of interest and use it as a general “digital snippet” repository. Since I started using Scrapbook in 2006 there have been a number of…
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Learning Faster – Automatically Extract Highlighted Text from PDF Documents

Reading Time: 8 minutes Overview I never really considered myself a “highlighter” until a couple years ago.  Back in school I would, on occasion, highlight some interesting passages while doing homework or reading books and jot them down later.  More often then not though many of those highlights would go to waste.  After all, what good are highlighting interesting…
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Example Document Browser Code

Reading Time: < 1 minute 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…
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How To Create Your Own Personal Document Viewer (Like Scribd or Google Books)

Reading Time: 3 minutes 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 without needing any special software.

Knowledge To Go: Put Your Wiki On Your IPhone

Reading Time: 6 minutes 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.

How to Synchronize Your Digital Scrapbook

Reading Time: 4 minutes 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’

Total Recall, Personal Informatics and Life Logging

Reading Time: 3 minutes “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).

Information Visualization Toolkits for Mind Mapping

Reading Time: 2 minutes The other week, I wrote a blog post The Visual Wiki: A New Metaphor For Knowledge Access and Management. At the time, until I read the paper in depth, I hadn’t realized that this was about a project that I had blogged about last year: Thinkbase – A Visual Semantic Wiki. In a nutshell: “Thinkbase…
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Freebase Parallax: Set-based Browsing Interface

Reading Time: < 1 minute I found a very interesting project from David François Huynh, developer of some impressive projects over at Simile. Parallax offers a new way to browse and explore data on Freebase, one of the largest open and shared (structured) databases of knowledge on the web. Freebase Parallax: A new way to browse and explore data from…
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