Steve's Seaside Life

Tagged: PKM

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HotRecorder, Skype and My Life Bits

HotrecorderInspired by listening to talks about the Microsoft Research project, My Life Bits, I decided it would be a good idea to record my telephone conversations when I can. Fortunately it turns out to be really easy if you use Skype and the free program HotRecorder.  The product is not the prettiest I have ever used, and the UI is a bit quirky but it gets the job done.  Recording quality is good, and you can add key words and the name of the person you called to each recording making retrieval easy.  The ad-supported version is free and the premium version is only $14.95.  Well worth trying out, if only to listen to the different responses you get when you tell people you are recording the call, from the slightly guarded/worried to the “where can I get a copy”, so far!

If you want to get up-to speed on My Life Bits I recommend the recording on IT conversations, which I listened to on my Treo while walking along the beach last week.

My Life Bits progress so far:

  • Photo’s
  • Emails
  • Web pages
  • Documents read
  • Documents reviewed
  • Audio listened to
  • Contacts talked to, or want to talk …

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Personal Information Lifecycle Managemenet

Information LifecycleMy company is currently re-launching its knowledge management environment, so I thought it would be useful to re-think my requirements from a personal and then (in another blog post) from a team/project perspective. The diagram on the left represents a simplified view of the personal information management lifecycle and I will step through each phase looking at the commodity tools that I think all knowledge workers should have, by right, in todays world.  Then I will discuss some of the more advanced tools that may only be applicable to certain high value processes or industry segments.  First off I make no apologies for the simple model I have chosen to use.  More complete lifecycles have been modelled, for example this one by David Pollard which is a more comprehensive view of the creative process, and if you want to dig deeper go read his work as it’s better than mine!  However I wanted something that was visually simple and easy for people to relate to.

I will be testing my companies project against the content of this document,  it should be interesting!

First off lets deal with the coloured groups,  the green hexagons (subscribe, search and discuss) are ongoing activities …

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InfoView

A week ago I blogged a little about InfoPath and the fact that Bill Gates had said that InfoPath will probably be the closest thing today to the dominant Microsoft forms technology moving forward,  so Bill why not just buy InfoView and leave InfoPath for forms design and offline usage scenarios.  What’s InfoView:

With InfoView your organisation can:

  • Publish InfoPath forms to the web – providing external users who do not have InfoPath on their desktops the same rich and dynamic user experience of InfoPath forms with web forms
  • Leverage XML standards to capture data via web forms and route data into back-end systems with no manual operation

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Report writing – second edition

Imagine my surprise when the day after writing this post on my frustrations with the existing medium for writing and delivering reports, I see a very similar post on the subject of writing books and insightful comment.  Although in this case the frustration is not so much with the paper medium (which has worked and continues to work pretty well) but with the fact that we have not exploited the electronic medium.  The following extract talks to the lost opportunity, without which Joe does not believe eBooks will really take off:

The biggest barrier I see is this recognition that an e-book needs to be developed with the delivery platform in mind. Wouldn’t it be great if you could introduce the concept of a hyperlink to a printed book so that someone could just touch a phrase they don’t understand and they’re magically taken to a definition of that phrase or the first place it appears in the book? Instead, you have to flip back to the index, look it up, and then jump to that page. Oh, and while you’re doing that, you need to keep a thumb on your original page so that you don’t lose your …

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Maxthon gets RSS

MaxthonrssI am just blown away by Maxthon, far and away my favorite browser.  Even more impressive is the fact that its primarily developed by one person with a community of plug-in developers.  of course its developed upon the foundation of IE, which provides its core functions but the level of innovation is staggering.  It reinforces my belief that a few good programmers who understand their market are better than a team ten times the size.  If you want to read about productivity in programmers, read peopleware, but if you want the best browser get Maxthon and donate.  What promoted me to write today, RSS reader integration.  But there are loads of other great features I have written about in the past.

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Beagle – innovation in action

Its great tgo see that even in a application space dominated by the big boys MS, Google, yahoo etc there is room for innovation, check out Beagle on Linux http://nat.org/demos/, great UI, Command Line, API etc.  Of course being a die hard X1 user it won’t tempt me, especially now...

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RSS and the benefits of a standard format

I have evalgalised for a while the innovation that is unleashed in clients and servers when a standard format exists for passing information beteen them.  RSS is a great example of this, and Dare makes the point strongly in this article, a snipit from which reads:

RSS is a wonderful example of the higher level of interoperability that can be built upon XML formats. Instead of information sources using various incompatible mechanisms for providing information to end users such as NOAA’s SOAP web service and the Microsoft.com web services which each require a separate custom application to consume them, sites can all standardize on RSS. This standardization creates an ecosystem of applications that produce and consume RSS feeds which is a lot larger than what would exist for each site specific web services or market specific XML syndication formats.  Specifically, it allows for the evolution of the digital information hub where users can view data from the various information sources they care about (blogs, news, weather reports, etc) in their choice of applications

He goes on to point out that RSS goes one better by allowing domain specific extensibility whilist still allowing standards based readers to consume feeds:

Additionally, RSS is extensible. This means …

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Maxthon/MyEI2 Groups

I have mentioned the topic of groups a few times,  let me elaborate.  Maxthon (used to be called MyIE2) is a shell around IE.  You can open a whole load of web pages as tabs (no suprises there).  As I go through my RSS feeds I click away on links of interest and probably end up with 20-30 articles I want to read, I then Click GROUPS – SAVE AS GROUP, and it generates a file of links. 

I then either wait for a robocopy autosync to my tablet or click a shortcut and the group file gets copied to my Tablet within seconds.  I Open the group on the tablet (two clicks) and all the files are downloaded and ready to browse offline (one tab each). 

…

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Home office ideas

If you read my blog then you know I am pretty passionate about office design in general and have a category devoted to related issues.  So I was interested to see dave’s ideas for creating an office for writing, where in particular he describes the benefits of consolidating all of his computing needs onto a single device.  Bryan responds that he is struggling to cope with 3 computers. 

I found both interesting perspectives, especially since I have quite a number of computers, and largely find the experience quite rewarding.  Here is a snapshot of how I work.

I have a main machine, its powerful, and drives three 19″ monitors, and a great wireless keyboard and mouse.  When I sit at this workstation its optimised for writing, analysing and information gathering.  I have everything to hand and hopefully will soon be getting a optimised chair so I can work for more than half an hour without too much pain.  My main PC is a Windows 2003 Server which allows me to work without admin priv, and always have an admin RDP session open for when I need it.

I have a lab server because my main machine needs …