1. This weblog.

   This site dates back from before Wilcox Development Solutions, since January 15 2002, as a matter of fact, so a lot of information is here.

2. The Company Blog.

   My professional face to the world, usually longer "story" type topics on a variety of technological topics. While my personal blog tends to be more links, with the occasional personal rant thrown in, my company blog is more technical mini articles.

3. The Company Wiki

   Snippets go here, little nuggets of information. Random, but useful, junk.

4. del.cio.us

   Links. 'nuff said.

5. My Stickybrain

   Snippets mostly go in here ("Hey, that guy said an insightful thing, I want to save that"). It's also a place where I gather information (say I'm researching about alternative fuel cars (bio-desiel, gas+electric hybrids), I'll put all of my research into stickybrain to recall at a later date.

6. IM logs

   As a professional (and someone who wants to be able to exactly recall a conversation), I log my IM chats. This means I can search through chats and find what you said to me last week, or how things happened chronologically, anything. Lots of good information is in these logs, because, for example, "If I need that bit of information again I'll just search my logs for it."

7. Mailsmith

   I love Mailsmith (of course, with no revisions in almost a year (Mailsmith 2.1.5, was released March 3, 2005, while 2.1 was released Jan 6, 2004 - two years ago(!!??!!), I would have to love the product to still be using it.). With no Spotlight integration, it's off in its own little world. I have to use the Mailsmith search interface (every bit as powerful, and maybe a little bit more than Spotlight's search interface). But say I want to find a bit of information and really don't know where it is - maybe email, maybe in my file system. I have to search two places.

   I would love to be able to do a Spotlight search for things I need to do today, which would be composed of files and email messages - something I could do if I used Mail.app (but, bleh). Think GTD-like @today.

   I also have a Gmail account. This is mostly more personal email, or email that doesn't matter (I use it for some mailing lists, mostly). Maybe the information is in there (but I can't see that with a Spotlight query either.

8. Other files in my file system

   Duh. "Where is that routine?", "Where in that article did I write about?", "What was that email conversation?". Stuff in random files. Now I rarely loose files, everything is pretty well organized on my machine. There are some exceptions (like my applications, which could be in ~/Applications or in /Applications), but I Spotlight/Saved Search those exceptions away.

There are several problems with this. First of all, sometimes I don't know where to store things, and often I'll categorize something and never look at it again.

Another problem is that there's no "one-stop shop" for my information. Spotlight can really only handle items 1 (because Radio exports all my blog entries into XML and saves them on my computer), 4 (with delimport), 5, 6 and 8. My other ("on the web") information stores require a Google search. Normally this isn't an issue ("I'm looking for an email, let's switch over to Mailsmith and do a query"). Sometimes, well...

Sometimes what category a bit of information falls under is a bit fuzzier. "Did I put this on my local machine, or somewhere on the internet?" I might have put this info on the wiki, to share with others. I might have used it in a file somewhere, or an article. Maybe I just flagged it in NetNewsWire. Did I... . No one query can pull together all of my information stores!!!

Maybe VoodooPad, with its HTML export capabilities would allow me to publish my wiki style notes to the web, while also having them Spotable (Spotlight + able. New Word.) Yet the idea of a wiki is that anybody can edit the content - not so if I'm just exporting static HTML from VoodooPad.

So what I need is some sort of "one-stop search shop". Like Spotlight, but with the ability to do google searches on specific domains, and return a unified result list. (In a better search results window than what Spotlight gives us, that's a must)

Now, this, of course, is for random bits of information I already know, or have seen somewhere. I really don't want my "one-stop shop" to include, say, search results from the entire Internet. That's information I haven't seen yet, and usually I know when I've seen a bit of information and when I haven't. Although there might be some merit to allowing this, so that I always go to this one-stop application, no matter what I'm looking up: information I've seen, or information I don't know yet.

Someone needs to write an app. That someone probably won't be me.