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How do you save your old clips (or passages from e-books)?
August 14, 2006 | 10:17 am
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By David Rothman
Eons ago I promised Carly I’d buy a scanner and file away my old newspaper clippings.
Reality beat good intentions. Luckily we aren’t neatniks, and just as importantly, the Web blossomed with all goods of digital goodies that I could stash away. Mind you, I could have been more orderly about it. Information organizers such as IZE had already appeared—heck, I perped a p-book about it—but they were too much of a hassle for me to use over the long term.
Idea: An auto-IZE for Gmail
And these days? When I see an interesting clip, I just file it away in my e-mail collection, which exists in the Bloomba program and Gmail, both searchable. No, that isn’t the most sophisticated approach, but low-maintenance and far better than nothing at all. I’m just hoping that Google can provide the automatic equivalent of IZE someday to help me—without any effort on my part—go beyond the searchword phase. Hello Sergey and Larry? No consulting fee for this smart new Gmail idea.
So what are you doing to organize your information? And what technology and features would you like to see make the task easier for various varieties of text, whether they be e-books or magazine articles. I certainly do appreciate the ability of programs such as eReader to export notes. Got any brainstorms in that area?
The serendipity angle
No matter what the source, some of the most valuable information may reach us when we’re not even looking for it. Read a somewhat related post and dialogue between Bill Janssen and me. Feel free to join in. Before doing so, however, see Cathy Marshall’s paper (PDF alert).
The scanning angle: If you could scan your library… and Digitize your personal library revisited, both by Branko.
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Comments:
I think I have a similar request.
I use Powermarks which keeps getting better as time goes on. The buttons on the Firefox tool bar are useful and the synchronisation to a central file on the Internet is really good when using multiple computers. You can also add notes and comments to your bookmark.
The problem I have is that it relies on keywords to find what I am looking for and due to some quirk of my brain I often don’t search for the same keywords that I filed it under.
What I would like is for Google to do a search on all the pages and files I have listed in Powermarks.
Hi, Nick. Just back from the Kaylon/Powermarks. Looks intriguing. As for the Google search, I assume you’d want the capabiity of designating some stuff as private. Thanks. David
UpLib, of course.
I think one thing which could have a major impact would be a shared metadata repository for e-docs, similar to the CDDB/GraceNote metadata repository for music CDs. We’ve implemented a version of this locally for UpLib, but it should really be done on a world-wide scale. It could also serve as a storage point for annotations and shared tags.
Yes, good point. I guess I want my own private search utility where I can say, “search and rank all files and web pages, including the keywords, that I have listed in my Powermarks file.”
Have you used Google Notebook ? This appears to me to be a promising utility although I just can’t get into using it regularly. Maybe it would be better if I had broadband access with more responsive access.
Best wishes, Nick
I always thought that having eidetic memory would be amusing. But my brain would not cooperate so I decided to implement a partial solution. I have been reading news items and discussions online for many years. In the 1980s I had access to the New York Times electronic newswire, Arpanet digests, and Usenet newsgroups. Later, I read the AP newswire via Clarinet. Sometimes I would rack my brains trying to recall details of something that I had read.
Finally, in 1998 I began to store most of the web pages that I read online by making a local copy on my hard disk. When I save a page I attempt to give it a descriptive title and organize it chronologically. There is a folder for each day and hierarchical folders for months and years. When I read an ebook I also add it to the chronological sequence of documents. After I started to do this I heard about the “lifestreams” a concept that was already defined by the computer scientists Eric Freeman and David Gelernter as follows:
A lifestream is a time-ordered stream of documents that functions as a diary of your electronic life; every document you create and every document other people send you is stored in your lifestream.
To access my data I perform keyword and date searches; however, they are sometimes cumbersome. I am assuming that search technology will improve over time and become a built-in feature of operating systems; hence, I am concentrating on gathering data. There are automated ways to save the entire cache of your browser incrementally but I do not do that currently.
So now I have an extended artificial memory that is indexed by word tokens and it is useful. Yet, many of the topics that interest me are fast changing. So I cannot rely on articles I have read in the past. Instead, I have to perform fresh web searches and maintain an Argus-like watch.
Garson, thanks for sharing your methods. That’s exactly what I wanted to come out when I broached the topic. Meanwhile I need to find out more about Google Notebook, etc., and see if this stuff would fit my needs (thanks, Nick). – David
Bill Janssen said:
Bill, UuLib sounds interesting is there a public version available so that we can try it out?
Regards, Nick
Alas, not yet. If that should change, I’ll no doubt post something about it to the ebook-community mailing list, which Jon Noring runs. (I tend to prefer mailing lists to blogs, for reasons illustrated by Branko’s recent retreat to his own personal blog-space.) And if I post it there, David will certainly pick it up and post it here.
Thanks Bill, I will keep a lookout.
I just remembered another utility I use – Stickies from Zhorn Software:-
Yellow notes posted on the computer screen that cover the ‘Reminder for action’ case reviewed by Catherine Marshall. They act just like notes ‘clipped to the refrigerator door’ with the advantage that you can send them to other computers and users. In addition, when you have actioned them and cleared them from the screen, it stores them in a history file.