After I saved all my Google Notebook information as complete web pages (one webpage per notebook), I ended up with around 70 MB of HTML, CSS and images which were indexed by Copernic Desktop Search but I was still lacking the functionality that Google Notebook provided to me. So I downloaded:

• Autoit (for some small scripting that I needed)
• Tag2find (for all the tagging needs)
• TextMaker Viewer (for a fast open document format viewer)

I created a folder list using this small autoit script:

Dim $year , $month , $foldername
MsgBox(0, "Create Folders", "Script Start")
$year = 2004
While $year <= 2009
    $month = 01
    Do
        If $month < 10 then
            $foldername = "C:\Test\" & $year & "0" & $month
        Else
            $foldername = "C:\Test\" & $year & $month
        EndIf
        DirCreate ($foldername)
        $month = $month + 1
    Until $month = 13
    $year = $year + 1
WEnd
MsgBox(0, "Create Folders", "Script End")

The script is self explanatory. I used it in order to avoid manually create all the folders that I need from the month of 200401 to the month of 200912.

Then I used copy paste extensively between Firefox and OpenOffice and saved all the individual articles from Google Notebook as OpenOffice documents. The documents were saved in the folder corresponding to the month of their creation. Also in each folder is a document called bookmarks that contain all the bookmarked sites from that month. After I finished with Google Notebook I saved all my Scrapbook information in the same format.

Probably using Autoit someone could automate this step also. I preferred to do it manually because I wanted to see what I am going to keep going further. So far I spent close to 100 hours doing this and I ended up with almost 1.5 GB of articles (more than 4000 documents)

Now I am tagging each document with the appropriate tags using tag2find .  Probably at the rate that I am doing it is going to take me probably another month. After that I will have a complete tagged database of information which is portable, offline and backed up. Is good to know that the entire taxonomy from tag2find can be exported as an XML file and the actual files are in ODT format.

Now I am still using Scrapbook for capturing web pages that are of interest to me, but I will spend probably 2-3 hours each month moving information from Scrapbook to the offline repository that I created.

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

• 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.