My Knowledge Network

I have been a collector of information (my "big data") for more than five decades.  The computer has been a great help; in earlier days I had to rely on 3x5 cards and cardboard file folders.  Now, it is easy to store away all kinds of information.  But, how do I find it again, and even more, how do I get a bird's eye, or higher, view of it all?

Years ago, I found the Personal Brain (now simply called TheBrain) software, and I have been steadily littering it with "thoughts" that can be linked to each other, just like in my human brain. But much still resides outside of this personal computer brain, in places like Evernote, OneNote, PaperPort, hard drive files, Outlook, paper files, and so many more.

Others like me have also been "seeking a magic tool for personal productivity" as the New York Times headlined a story about a year ago.  The announcement by David Allen, creator of the phrase, GTD -- "Getting Things Done" -- and a company of innovative people at Intentional Software described their undertaking a project to solve this dilemma. http://www.intentsoft.com/overview/gtd/ . I thought, GREAT!  But today when I was reminded of this project, my searching on the company website, on the CEO's Twitter postings, https://twitter.com/ec_anderson , and on Google, I could find no new news about the project, nor that anything was available to salve my itch.  (GTD® and Getting Things Done® are registered trademarks of the David Allen Company.)

TheBrain has just released a new beta, TheBrain 8, http://www.thebrain.com/products/thebrain/thebrain-8 , which I quickly downloaded to see what new goodies it contained.  There are some, but nothing to improve the integration problem that I and others have grappled with.  So, I posted another appeal on TheBrain forum.  I wanted to share a Skitch diagram of My Information Network that I had made a couple of months ago, and found that I needed to be able to link to an URL to do so.  As a result, I've started this blog; we'll see where it goes.