Segmentation Fault: Core dumped..;-)

GMail is great, but what I am really looking for is myKM service!

Posted : July 13, 2004 at 3:44 pm [America/Los_Angeles]

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you probably already know about Google’s GMail service. To brand GMail as yet another free email service, albeit with a bigger (actually, much bigger) storage capacity, is tantamount to saying Elvis was just another singer. There’s a lot more to GMail than it’s big storage capacity just as there is a lot more to Elvis

With that said, what is the one thing that absolutely nails the deal for GMail. If you ask me, it’s the ability to search. To access your tons and tons of email content quickly. In other words, it’s kinda like having your very own personal Google service, where the indexed content is nothing but your emails. Unfortunately, it’s only emails

As a knowledge worker living in an Information Age, email is but one of the many formats in which I get binary nuggets (a more jazzy way of saying, knowledge) that I would like to stash for future consumption. In fact, here’s a quick list of formats that these binary nuggets seem to show up, at least for me:

• emails
• mailing list entries
• newsgroup entries
• urls (basically, stuff found during casual surfing or consuming RSS feeds)
• ebooks (in PDF, Word or some other rich format)
• blog entries
• multimedia clips (of course, the legal ones )
• just plain ol’ files

After spending the last 8 years trying out bookmarks, folders, plain text files and numerous other ways of stashing my binary nuggets, I think this one might just be what the doctor ordered.

So, what is this one? Well, what I am really envisioning is a paid (or not) service which would:

• Allocate a 100 GB (or whatever I paid for) space for me in the form of an appliance
• Host it securely behind a firewall and hook it up to a fat enough pipe on the internet
• Provide a HTTP, SMTP (or any other transfer protocol that I am currently forgetting) interface to upload my binary nuggets into it. Even allow me to tag some of them with my own metadata.
• Cache (in case where the uploaded content is a URL) and index the uploaded information
• Provide a HTML/XHTML or WAP (and any other interface that I am currently forgetting) search interface to my binary nuggets
• Since the repository will store files (word, pdf, mp3, etc.) as well, it will also act as a file/backup (albeit, without versioning) service

This is what I am calling myKM - my Knowledge Management - service! For me, this would be nothing short of nirvana as it would give me an avenue to capture and index every cool thing (read, binary nuggets) that I am come across. It will also ensure that my little brain dump will not be polluted by content from anyone else and will always be accessible via a simple (with an option of using an ‘Advanced’) search interface.

What do you think?

- Anand

Category: IT and Business Trends