It took me a while, but now I have a very good and I hope future proof solution for keeping all my information that I gathered in the last few years. Below you’ll get a succinct account of what I had to do.
Mar 112009
Jan 152009
This morning I got the news that Google will close many services. The one that affected me was Google Notebook. I had a lot of information in it and even if Google says that I can still use it and add information to the notebooks, I do not feel at ease with that. So, I decided to export all the information out of Google Notebook and import it in Scrapbook . I don’t think is the best option, but I know the information is on my hard drive. The export was relatively easy to do, and once the export was finished I realized that the amount of information that I have on Google servers was minuscule (less than 70 MB archived).
For the moment this service closing is just a minor annoyance, but should be an alarm signal. Trust is something that is very difficult to build and very easy to loose. Probably in the higher levels of Google hierarchy they decided that the amount of information that the users are storing in the notebooks does not improve the relevance of the adverts served to those users in Gmail or in the Google search pages. So they decided that Notebook is not needed for their plans. Once Google chooses to close some services, it’s obvious that if the situation is going to be even worst they could choose to close other services. I know the service was free, but I would have like to have a better export option at least.
On the other hand something else to take in the account. Because Microsoft is making a lot of money with their offline software (Server, Windows, Office and so on) they can afford to loose some money with the online division, so they are able to still offer a lot of things for free. The most interesting to me is the 25GB Skydrive storage space. I start uploading some non vital files for testing purposes and it seems to work pretty well. Once Microsoft announced this some months ago, I expected that Google will match this, but nothing happened. This was my first alarm signal that maybe not everything is nice and dandy in the Googleplex.
Now I am looking for an offline RSS reader that would match Google Reader capabilities and if I will find one, then Gmail is the last thing that still has me linked to Google Services.
I know I can replace Analytics and Feedburner anytime with other options for skunkworks.ro
It appears that all good things are coming to an end. And I am sure now that in the next months a lot of free services from other Web 2.0 companies will dissapear. Probably is best to start thinking offline software again and somehow find the means to maintain the collaboration level and community feeling that the Web 2.0 services are offering
Oct 102008
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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