The Dawn of the PKB (Personal Knowledge Base)

This is a fascinating topic on a few levels.  Primarily, recognizing the need to manage personal data is on the cutting edge, something I don't think many people see now.  The value becomes evident when moving from one type of p.c. to another, when central storage for an individual or family becomes more and more "common sense."

I think there are some business opportunities here (beyond the storage).  Maybe a Franklin Covey for the 2000s--just like Covey provided tools for persons to manage their schedule, leading to Palms, Treos, smartphones, etc., there's probably an opening for a company to come up with the Personal Knowledge Base turn-key solution.  I know there are a lot of programs people could use, but something customized and branded for this purpose, easy to use, could go mainstream.

I forgot to mention in my other comment this wiki, with a whole slew of tools for personal knowledge management. And I have to give a shout out to the open-source Firefox plugin. It has a bit of narrower focus, being designed for academics who want to organize large collections of article. If you do any research reading, though, I think it's invaluable. I review it in greater detail on my blog.

oh, and also, the del.icio.us feed for PKM is a pretty good resource for keeping up with the area.

This is actually a topic of growning interest for a lot of people, including myself. The field of personal information management has been around for a while; more recently, personal knowledge management has come up (the difference between the two terms seems to vary some according to who you ask).

Lilia Efimova has been writing about PKM for while now. Harold Jarche has some posts, as does Jack Vinson. This post by Dave Pollard, while a little on the aged side, raises interesting points about managing not the knowledge itself but the formal and informal social networks we use to access it. Finally, and more recently, Eric Blue has been writing about using a souped-up MediaWiki to realize Vannever Bush's vision of the Memex PKM.

These are just a few I have readily at hand in my rather rudimentary PKM; if you're interested in this idea, though, I'm sure you could find more. It's a fascinating topic, and I reckon that we'll be hearing a lot more in the future.

Hello Marc!I think that's a great idea.But, wouldn't PKB make us to store the information we don't really need to.Now, when we don't have such a tool, we evaluate every email, every file-thinking: do I really need it-and having such a great program, we will keep everything and might be snowed under with information.It's like things- we have so many things we don't need to, could it happen with our files?

Marc, I really appreciate your article. If my PKB was in shape at all, I would be able to give you more specifics about the idea I wanted to post. A few years back, I read of a software that sat in the background and created a sort of lifestream by indexing files opened on the computer, with a thumbnail of documents, and emails and everything (good and bad) of all the activity on the computer. It was a local resource on the harddrive of the users computer, but had some of those ideas you mentioned. Now with cloud computing and resources of that nature, I am certain this idea would be even more of value. By the way, the name escapes me of the designer and the software itself (which is legacy software by now and as recently as 2 years ago was not in supported status any more.) As I said, if my own PKB was in order, I'd be able to find it back and report the name to this post.

Any chance you have any memory of this software from years gone by? Have you any tools you can recommend for aggregating all these ideas into a pkb?

Like viboons, my closest thing to a PKB is also gmail where I can tag, sort, search, filter.  

Regards,

cmj 

The idea as seen from the previous posts is a great one. The amount of information that we can create and use these days id mind boggling. Furthermore information is a mine of wealth if we can find ways to integrate them and add more value to our information store.

Also, the platform that will be able to retrieve and store disparate types of information will be quite a challenge, but there exist technologies out there that can definitely help. I have heard of Adobes AIR, could this be a good candidate to be used for developing the required platform?

We look forward to the day of PKBs

Good point you raised. I think knowledge/info management is more than just a matter of collecting and storing your data, but it's rather about being able to retrieve and use your data effectively when and where you need them. And it's not simple to manage a large amount of personal data collected over years in such a way that they are accessible and useful. This is more or less similar to what Google wants to achieve, and that is to organize the world's information, not just the Internet web pages but also books, literatures, images, videos and so on, a vast amount of knowledge in the world. And I think the key here for any knowledge management system is the "search" tool. Tagging and indexing are important, but if the search doesn't work to retrieve the relavent data you try to find then it's pretty much pointless.

Right now, the closest thing to PKB to me is my Gmail where I can effectively tag/label, store and retrieve my data (not the Twitter stuff but most of the useful knowledge) and which has a very good search engine and is pretty much integrated with other useful Google tools, like Google Calendar, Alerts, Docs, and Reader, etc. And most importantly, it's "personal" in the sense that the data I've collected is for me and only me can access it. 

Yeah, I also think that point #7 about connecting PKBs would somehow run into privacy issues even when sharing among friends and folks. Technically speaking, once your PKB is shared, it's no longer "Personal". But of course, certain part of your PKB data can be linked while keeping things that are really personal to you, like private correspondence or confidential docs, hidden from the "Shared Knowledge Base (SKB perhaps)".

Marc,

Interesting idea!  It would definitely be great to get better control of all the info, and it would be very valuable to have it all in one place.  Unfortunately, there's the issue of 'work' stuff vs. 'personal' stuff.  Because of the rules in place for work-related info, there is only so much data that I can co-mingle with personal data. 

I'd also think that it might get a bit ticklish to share ALL this data with others.  Perhaps my parents are anti-rodent, and I don't want them to know about my Guinea Pig Club, etc?  Some finer-grained control over what I share with whom would be nice.  What do you envision for addressing this issue?

-Geekess 

I think we all have a storage problem because we don't know what we are going to use eventually. We've gone through so many interations of "how to store and retrieve your data", but still haven't arrived at one that works other than just keeping stuff.

Maybe we just need  "clean up your online stuff" day the way we have a "clean out your house" day in my community. We have one weekend set aside to bring "junk" to the recyclers (who temporarily set up collection centers in each community). It seems to help.