How do you go on your daily quest for clues?
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Recently, i showed my frustration to a wiki vendor for making the wiki adoption process more confusing than it is. They responded, to which I had some followup comments.
Now wikis aside, I had another valid reason for the frustration, something far broader and more important. Something that requires all of your input.
A lot of us are beginning to live more than half of our life on the internet, and as many have described, I believe this act is a constant search for meaning — whether it is social acceptance we search for, or a channel for easing stress, or an actual search of information or data the web was designed to host.
However, despite amazing advanced in search technology that was the collective output of hundreds of employees, the quest for meaning is still a search.
Seth Godin puts it beautifully in this Ebook “Everyone is an Expert” — he argues that every day we go on a quest to find relevance or answers that will enhance our life. We do this by first collecting clues, and then linking up these clues in our heads until the answer hits you! We thus do a google search, but actually go to 10 or so different websites before we have enough to make sound judgement on.
I completely agree with Seth on that (but not entirely on Squidoo).
This is one of the reasons I spoke again Wikipatterns. I would go to Wikipatterns to take the clues I have and try to link them up. In the specific case of wikis, the clues are the observed adoption issues I am trying to solve that I have already found / defined for myself using my own vocabulary.
The problem is, rather than giving me a way to link up my clues, wikipattern is (currently) giving me even more clues, and this is the reason I (personally) have felt lost in trying to make that resource work for me.
That’s not what this post is about however. I’m interested in finding out (from YOU) this question: How do you keep track of all of the clues we find every day?
Do we really trust our brains as the place to store all the clues and link them, or do we write them down somewhere in notebooks?
Do we add interesting websites as bookmarks, or use something like Google Notebook to store web clippings?
In our offices, do we hold everything on knowledge management repositories like Sharepoint portal?
The common issue with all of these, as aptly pointed out in Scrybe videos, is that as more and more clues are added into some software, it becomes increasingly difficult to link up only the relevant portions
No matter how well I categorize things in Google Notebook, I still find myself look at them one by one or running multiple searches until I find the right thing?
This is particularly important for online journalists or bloggers too — what software do you use that lets you instantly (i.e. within three clicks or less) get to the clue you’re looking for?
I asked one of Web Worker Daily’s contributing writers about this as well — how do online journalists today keep track of the avalanche of opinions and ideas anyway?
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