Alright all of you information management professionals, I’m in need of some searching aid. My data is scattered, and I need to find a way to get it under control. I need to be able to search across several sites/places at once (some of them are password protected, some physical, others in the cloud). The databases: my gmail account (I archive everything), my delicious account (harder than you believe because I don’t share all of my posts), my google reader archive, and my very own little mac hard drive. If I want to know what I’ve read about fixing css with IE6, I need to know what came across on various listservs, what I bookmarked on the topic, the ebook on css that I downloaded, and that thing that they posted on the w3 blog that I read in my reader, and don’t tell me I should have to search all of them. That’s right, just like the patrons, I’ve been Google-spoiled. So does anyone know of any solutions? I decided to crowd-source here first. Aren’t you all honored?
Posted by: Andrea | May 15, 2008
Federated Search for me
Posted in crowd-sourcing | Tags: data management, federated search, google, information management, searching
My first thought is to set up a gmail account that will act as an infodump. You forward your mail to it, and use GTDGmail to add personal notes of every URL or pdf you want to save. You can also add the Gspace firefox extension to add apps that you’ve downloaded, and the associated googledocs account for text files and clips. When RSS reading you would have to either share a lot of things, then RSSmail subscribe to that feed, or you can email useful articles to yourself. The sharing option would be a lot easier, I think.
Others may have more sophisticated suggestions, but this one makes use of tools that you already use, and also the search power that you’ve come to enjoy.
Hope this helps get some ideas going.
By: jtfburgess on May 15, 2008
at 9:59 am
Also, check out SecondBrain.com. It’s not exactly what you’re looking for, but it has a lot of potential. Especially now that you can incorporate a box.net account for files. Worth checking out.
By: jtfburgess on May 15, 2008
at 5:00 pm