Looking for the information "librarian"

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Note: This message is from the outliners.com archive kindly provided by Dave Winer.

Outliners.com Message ID: 2125

Posted by john.killeen
2004-08-22 16:23:05

My first post here. I discovered outliners.com recently and have been devouring the archives. A great resource.

Like many here, I’m sure, I came upon outliners.com because I needed help in managing information. Not outlining as such. For my needs, Treepad does that job quite well.

But the archives here show that many, like me, are still searching for the other kind of information manager. The information “dump”, if you will, or perhaps you might call it the data “librarian” - somewhere where you can throw all kinds of data in a haphazard fashion, and feel sure you can find it again very quickly, regardless of the quantity of data.

I’m also sure that I’m not the only one who is astonished that, in an age where information overload is commonplace, that this category of software is so poorly developed. A great prize awaits the person/company who cracks it.

It seems at the moment we are all making do with second best. My own solution, at the moment, is my email client - Bloomba (http://www.statalabs.com), which has the sole benefit of indexing everything (including text-based attachments) that arrives in the inbox. I can search five years’ worth of emails in seconds. Since, these days, the majority of information seems to arrive by email, Bloomba is a partial solution. Unfortunately, in all other respects, my previous email client (Becky) blows Bloomba out of the water. Bloomba lacks many features, and has many frustrations. But retrieving information is what it’s about, in the end, so Bloomba it is.

But if the information I need is not in my email, I’m in trouble. So thanks to what I have read in this forum, I’m going to trial Zoot, which appears to be the only program focussed on entering and retrieving data as quickly as possible. Hopefully it will answer my needs.

This long-winded note leads to a simple question. Why is there not an abundance of programs geared towards this need? Surely every second business executive, bombarded with data on a daily basis, would give anything to have a reliable program to act as data librarian?

JohnK

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