Summary
The explosion in the popularity of blogging - and all the people that have cool things to say but previously had no outlet - has made my old knowledge management techniques untenable.
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My previous technique of printing/photocopying and then highlighting the interesting passages has started to take so much time and space that I don't have time to work on my other projects (Installer DeLuxe, Judy, JEOPS, Luxor XUL, AspectJ, Gizmowerkz.com, ChattyLips.com, Indeterminate Heuristics, oh, and my children ;-).
My solution: I bought a Sandisk Cruzer USB memory drive, installed the Java 1.4.2 JRE, Apache Ant, Apache Tomcat 5.0.19, Snip-Snap Wiki-blog, Apache James, and Zoë email "googler". I've written an Ant script to start all of the services. Tomcat is used to host Snip-Snap and James is used as the base mail service. I email interesting links with a quick blurb to an email account managed by James. I use Zoë to browse and index those emails. As I consider ideas surrounding any particular topic, I then update/add/rearrange topics in the Snip-Snap wiki so that I can capture those ideas.
The whole point is to try to make idea capturing as easy as possible, otherwise I'm disinclined to write anything.
The software that currently puts food on my table, Onfolio (http://www.onfolio.com), is designed specifically for this purpose... you can drag information into it from any webpage, or from the filesystem, or right from your e-mail client (depending on your e-mail client). Once you've captured some data, you can organize it, search, and share it with others.
Hmmm, that sounded even more hand-wavy than usual... just go to our site and check out the Flash tour if you want to get a better idea.
It's Windows only though, and works best with IE (just press a hotkey or right-click to capture), and costs $30 (or $80 if you want the Pro version, which includes a WYSIWYG report editor/publisher).
Very cool. I do something completely similar. I have a blog setup hosted by Blogger. Blogger accepts blog entries via. email and so I just send emails to my special mail-to-blog email address and blogger automatically publishes it to my server. Take a look at the url below:
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