The email sent will contain a link to this article, the article title, and an article excerpt (if available). For security reasons, your IP address will also be included in the sent email.
As I continue working with
Mac OS X I'm continually impressed by
Spotlight, Apple's included text indexing feature. It is seamless, fast, effective, and has significantly changed and improved how I find information, as compared to my
Windows XP days.
Having a solid idea file
[1] is crucial to Knowledge Work
[2], an on-going interest of mine (see
Where's The IDE (Integrated Development Environment) For Personal Information?)
Given that, I was struck by an idea to integrate Spotlight with all apps to support an
80-20-level information support system. I suppose this is essentially a work-around to connect all data in the OS, i.e., to remove data islands
[3]. Lest you think I know what I'm talking about, see my disclaimer below
[4].
Tell me what you think!
Elements
As I see it the elements are:
In other words, Spotlight on steroids.
I envision these interconnecting thus
[6]: Pull the text from the front most app (option: just selected text), look up all the phrases in Spotlight's database, pull out most relevant ones, order by learned patterns, then display summaries and links to the side. Suuuure.
Applications
How would this work in practice? In a word, PKM (Personal knowledge management)
[7]. Suppose you're reading an email from a prospective client (or anyone of interest, really) and you want to remind yourself of who she is and your history of interactions with/notes about her. Boom! As if by magic (and I may not be exaggerating :-) a selection of relevant hits show to the right, perhaps categorized ala Spotlight's results bar.
What would show up?
- Contact information
- Times, Dates, Names, Addresses/Places
- Calendar evens
- Email messages
- Projects
- Tasks
- Files
Another application: A visual indicator of which information sources are most valuable (see
Information Provenance - The Missing Link Between Attention, RSS Feeds, And Value-based Filtering). As you're browsing your news feeds, an icon (?) shows on the right how many idea file entries the current feed has. Use this when it's time for your regular purge to make an informed decision.
I'm really curious...
- Whaddya' think?
- Reality check: What's are the major arguments against this? They center, no doubt, around reasonable retrieval given all text in an app, and possible hits.
- How would you use such a beast?
- What tools do you use to accomplish PKM?
References
Return to Article