The more data you have, the more you know. The more you know, the more you forget. The more you forget, the less you know. So why have data?

Microsoft Researchers have an answer for this old, slightly twisted riddle. They’ve put together a nifty interface that will find all the data on your PC that you need, be it email, documents, tablet notes or spreadsheets. You can find all the data that people have sent to you, all the Web pages you’ve ever seen, and all the attachments you’ve ever forgotten to save. Its called Stuff I’ve seen and you can read about it here.

It’s an important concept in Personal Knowledge Management.  I personally have been using X1 for about 6 months and also use Lookout to search my RSS feeds.  I find the two incredibly useful and routinely find things now that I would never have tried to even find before.  The level of re-use I am now achieving is significantly greater. 

I figure these tools probably save me an hour a week, that’s a very impressive ROI, and X1/Lookout don’t do everything that Microsoft are promising.

There is a downside though, I suspect that these capabilities will only work best when the products your use to create, manipulate, views and store the data all come from Microsoft. 

Not suprisingly the Open Source community are not ignoring this requirement with products like Chandler and Haystack offering a simillar long term vision.

One of the interesting twists to this debate is whether its possible to seperate Work and Home when it comes to data, when you think it through, people you know, places you go, your calendar what you read all have personal and business aspects.  This is a topic that I have started to discuss under the heading of Consumerization, where work and home mix.