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Browsing Posts published in October, 2008

Today, Microsoft launched Azure which is the Microsoft OS for the cloud. I am not going to enter into technical details or compare Azure with AppEngine or Amazon Web Services. Something else grabbed my attention. continue reading…

I am using a lot of products from Google lately : Gmail, GCal, Reader, Docs, News, Analytics, Adsense, Picassa. One thing that annoys me a little is that the login page for each of these products is different. I understand the need for the different text in the page, but I would like to get the login box in the same position all the time. And also I would appreciate if the layout of the login page would be identical across the different Google products. It’s a very small touch that can be easy implemented and can make a difference. It’s one thing when your products are geared towards geeks, it’s a different thing when you want that everybody use your products. This lack of attention to detail is annoying when you deal with Google.

After looking at the latest Apple media event and reading most of the comments from different pundits around the web I had a small revelation. Everybody is talking about Steve Jobs leaving Apple due to his health, but I think no one has come up with the real reason.

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Since 2004 I’ve saved a lot of information in different formats and systems:

  • I have 2482 pages saved in Scrapbook ( Firefox extension ), around 320 MB of HTML and photos
  • I have thousands of documents on my hard disk in doc, odt, pdf format
  • I have a monthly notebook on Google Notebook since April 2006. In each notebook I saved anywhere from 10 to 100 pages.
  • I subscribed to around 150 websites using Google Reader and I am labeling for future use around 15 to 20 items each day.
  • I have an Outlook PST of around 6 GB from which maybe 1 GB is very useful information and also I have a Gmail account with more than 2 GB of useful information.

My problem lately is how to create knowledge in an easy way from all this information overload. I’ve tried all sort of web based systems for organizing information, but no luck so far. And I know that search such as Google or Copernic desktop is not enough for creating knowledge.

I am dreaming of an intelligent agent who is capable to create short briefs based on my interests, to answer some basic questions by accessing all the info that I have, to analyze calendar data (ical format), to be location aware.  I know that this is what semantic web is all about it, but this web is still 1-2 years away, and I am sure that as long as I have non structured information is going to be impossible for the semantic web products to generate knowledge out of the information chaos.

It would be great if this kind of agent would run on a smart phone and be with me all the time.

On a side note the more I use Google Reader, Gmail and Google Notebook, the more I feel the need to get all my acquired data from their systems, but I didn’t find yet the right app that could that for me.

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