Soob

In this past couple of weeks I have read two articles on dealing with loads of data. This post is an attempt to synthesize the two.

I recently read this article on using Google Reader as an Archive and a personal knowledge management tool. I took two things away from it:

1. The ability to use Google Reader as a personal archive of my own interests. On a lot of the blogs or news feeds I subscribe to there will be no need for me to go and spend a lot of time reading the posts manually. I can just archive them all automatically, Google stores them, and later I can use the search ability to find keywords and data from enthusiasts and subject experts.

2. I separated my feeds into Primary, secondary, and tertiary. By pair bonding RSS feeds and ranking them I created a priority list and split them up into the three folders. Feeds that didn't make it still stayed in the folders that were labelled by topics and are subsequentely archived.

From there I was still flooded with data each day in my primary, secondary and tertiary folders. That's when I read this great article on creating quality feeds for a specific subject. Using the article as a general guideline I wanted to test it out, so I created an Intelligence RSS feed.

I sourced feeds from Delicious, using keywords like popular/sigint or popular/humint etc. I also sourced feeds from Intelligence related blogs like Kent's Imperative, or Sources and Methods. I gained more blogs from their blogrolls. Then I also took feeds from major news sites relating to Intelligence.

I then took all the feeds and ran them through AideRSS, which will create RSS feeds of the initial RSS feed based on their popularity (which is measured on things like number of links, or discussions etc.). You can then subscribe to the top 10% of each feeds output.

I then placed these top percenter feeds into Yahoo Pipes making sure to manipulate the pipes in such a way to provide the content by date and not doubling up on posts.

I then added the pipe output to one of my higher priority Google Reader folders. So far it seems to be working ok. There have been a number of posts that aren't related to Intelligence, but most of them seem to be somewhat interesting. This afternoon I also created a Psychology related pipe so I can now archive all my intelligence and psychology related blogs and just use the Yahoo Pipe feed.

I'll have to give it a week or two to see how it all works out and whether or not it saves me some time from the torrent of information.

Does anyone else have any personal knowledge management systems? Or tips and tricks?