Thursday, October 10, 2002

Integration or obfuscation? While learning about blogs, I keep drifting into thoughts about merging all the information I have into one easily managed interface.  I have played with ZOOT!, Outlook, and other information managers attempting to find that one magical way to access, manipulate and basically remember information that I come across.  Merging the utilities of these packages would seem to be the way to go. Ozzie's notes on Groove and the experiements being conducted to use blogs and Groove to manage communication of ideas is interesting.  Looking at my blog calendar, I wonder how useful it would be to merge my Outlook calendar into my blog calendar creating a true "daily diary" that would document my meetings and create a record of what I did every day, whether or not I had time to annotate those meetings in my blog.  Hypertext linking to individuals involved in the meeting and listed in my contact file could be useful.  Having links between meetings, people and tasks could help me sort my thoughts by working topic, as well as by date. I must admit, my trials with ZOOT! are far from conclusive, but I am interested in ZOOT!'s ability to "clip" web pages and sort into appropriate files for later use.  The search function is pretty decent as well.  Friends are using AskSam and I see Jerry Pournelle is investigating ZOOT!, AskSam and Info Select as well.  The ability to sort and search email seems to be a factor here. But, I am also concerned with loading any one package with so many features that the package collapses under its own weight.  The promise of XML to link disparate packages would seem to be the answer, but who has time to do the coding necessary to make such connections seamless? I must remind myself that according to The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, the answer  is 43.  But, who remembers the question?  comment [] 8:03:07 AM

A list of ideas from Dan Bricklin ... in his essay he lists several ways blogs can be useful to small businesses.  Need to read more on how to use these types of blogs to build community, thus increasing the usefulness of these applications   comment [] 7:49:00 AM