Late last year I enthusiastically blogged about a new service I created to let you share and embed your mind maps directly into your website. Now that I've wrapped up my personal travel journal, I figured it would be a good time to move onto the next phase of my Personal Knowledge Manager and start actually putting my viewer application to use for myself! After all, this was my original motivation for creating a universal mind map viewer. I needed the ability to embed my mind maps directly into my personal wiki (memex).

With a little bit of tweaking, I managed to take my existing public mindmap viewer service and copy it to my internal wiki. I needed to do this since my personal wiki is on a private/internal network and you can't access it over the public Internet. Since the current mind map viewer service needs to be able to directly download the URL you provide, this wouldn't work for internal URLs (think Intranet).

I've created another MediaWiki plugin that let's you specify a mind map URL (still currently supports Mind Manager), and height & width of the embedded frame. For many of my personal research endeavors, I'll typically create an initial outline using Mind Manager the lets me create a skeleton for consolidating my information. Once I've fleshed out the mind map, I usually write up a summary or paper that helps me crystalize what I've learned. See below:

Regular Wiki Article

Embedded Mind Map using Flash

After getting some feedback over the past few months, and now trying this for myself, I've realized there is probably a need for people to utilize this service who have maps solely on an internal network (Intranet) or local hard drive. Many people simply don't want to share their maps online. Yes, I know. This is completely opposite logic to what's driving the latest "Web 2.0" Mind Mapping application phenomenon.

Over the next few months, I'm planning on porting the existing mind map viewer service to Java and would like to add quite a bit of features. I'm also considering releasing this as open source, so other individuals or companies can embed and share mind maps directly into their existing content management infrastructure. This embedded viewer should be entirely platform agnostic. There should be no reason why this couldn't work in MediaWiki, Confluence, Sharepoint, Alfresco and other content or knowledge management systems.

Posted by EricB at 10:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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Many of my posts the last few months have been geared towards Personal Knowledge Management (PKM) and Semantic Wikis. Since I last posted about Vannevar Bush's vision for a Personal Memex, I decided to focus my efforts on building an impressive personal travel journal, and share the results to illustrate the capabilities of a Memex.

What's this Memex thing all about?

While the process for setting up a Personal Memex can be quite involved, the idea is fairly simple. My memex is a personal semantic wiki that exists for the sole purpose of centralizing my research notes, learning activities, personal journals, and allows me to easily retrieve important data and memories that I enter into the system. My memex is built entirely from existing open source projects, and essentially runs MediaWiki (the wiki software used for Wikipedia) with a number of Semantic extensions, and a few extensions I have written for myself. The Personal Travel Journal is a single integrated feature and section of my Personal Memex.

Motivation

Although you can't exactly call me a world traveler, I've gone on my fair share of trips in the last decade, and have spent a lot of time visiting my friends and family on the east coast. Since I purchased my first digital camera in 2000, I've literally taken thousands of photos and videos. And, back in 2005 I started keeping a written journal of the places I visited (family visits, weddings, vacations, weekend getaways, cruises, business trips, etc.) So far I can account for at least 60 major trips.

Ultimately, I wanted to have a central place to store all the details of the my travels (dates, places, people), And, have a nice personal (private) website where I can view photos, videos, maps, and comment on each trip. Sadly, for many people, as time passes memories of trips and events can often fade. With the help of the Memex, forgotten memories will be a thing of the past.

What can the personal travel journal do?

At first glance, the travel journal may look like a plain old webpage with some embedded photos. But, it's much more powerful than you might expect. Here's what you can do in a nutshell:

• Semantic markup and searching
• Visual timeline browsing
• Easy embedding of photo and video slideshows

Semantic Markup and Searching

This is arguably the most interesting and powerful feature of my travel journal. With the help of the Semantic MediaWiki extension, adding Semantic capabilities to a wiki makes browsing and searching a breeze. What does semantic mean in this case? Many wikis such as Wikipedia have tremendous amounts of text for each article, and in many cases you can find what you're looking for doing basic searches (via Wikipedia or Google). However, it becomes *much* more difficult to easily issue a single query/search that asks:

"Show me all philosophers living between 1800-1850 who were born within 50 miles from Weimar, Germany and who published more than 6 books"

Unless you have a Ph.D in philosophy AND are a wizkid with Google searches, chances are you'll spend a better part of a day doing research to find this answer. Thankfully the type of searching and browsing I'll need to do for my travel journal is much more simplistic. Nevertheless, adding semantic details for each trip greatly helps with indexing and organizing. I've added the following semantic information:

• Trip start date
• Trip end date
• Trip location - Major city
• Travel destination - Important place, landmark, or area within the trip location
• Person - who was there

How does this work exactly? Like most wikis, each travel journal entry contains simple text with some basic wiki markup. In order to indicate that a particular piece of text is Semantic, you simply add some markup around it. For example, once added to a travel journal entry, the article will semantically come to life:

[[Location::Key West, FL]]
[[Person::Eric]]
[[TravelDestination::Duval Street]]
[[TripStartDate::2008/04/12]]

Now I can do searches that let me easily show all trips within a certain date range. Or, I can query for trips based on location or people who were there (Ex: Show me all trips between 2002-2004 where I was in Florida and my wife and I visited a beach, or for that matter Show me all trips where I was on a beach).

Although adding the semantic markup is fairly straight forward, it can become very tedious to remember the exact fields names and required fields for each travel journal entry. Thankfully a MediaWiki extension called Semantic Forms drastically simplifies this process. All I needed to do was create a template with the required fields and markup, and then let Semantic Forms create a new form for me. Now, whenever I want to add or edit a travel journal entry, I simply click a link and fill out a regular web form.

Since the journal entry is now created with the special markup, each article will show the semantic details:

And, I can easily search and create index pages that will show all relevant trips:

Visual Timeline Browsing

With the placement of my semantic trip details and SIMILE Timeline, I can easily browse and locate any trip.

I can drag or click anywhere on the timeline and instantly view my travel journal entry. Seeing all the trips on a single timeline also greatly helps with discovering where entries are with relation to each other.

Easy Embedding of Photo and Video Slideshows

This was actually a *huge* undertaking. It took me a little over a month to consolidate all of my photos and videos, and find a web-based solution for easily embedding multimedia slideshows into my wiki. I originally blogged about my search for flash-based slideshow software back in June, and have since picked SlideShowPro as my solution. I created a simple PHP Mediawiki extension and Perl webservice to dynamically locate my photo and video albums on disk, and generate the appropriate gallery and slideshow. I've organized all of my media into folders based on the date/time. So, all I need to do is edit my travel journal entry and add the following markup:

=== Photos ===

<embed_slideshow>
id=1
album_name=Dixie and Chan,Key West Day 1,Key West Day 2,Naples
album_path=2008/04-13-2008,2008/04-14-2008,2008/04-15-2008,2008/04-16-2008
</embed_slideshow>

Once added and loaded, the slideshow extension will process each album name and dynamically generate thumbnails and download links complete with media info.

What's Next?

I'm really happy with the results so far! Not only do I have all of my photos and videos organized for the last 10 years, I've managed to fill out almost all of my travel details for close to 60 trips. I can safely say that the semantic browsing and searching capabilities helped my ability to recall, re-enforce, and write down many of my memories. The power of association is really amazing!

At this point, my Personal Travel Journal portion of my Memex is nearly feature complete. What are some other features and possible uses? I've already started experimenting with Google map integration for some trips.

Right now this is a manual process of adding latitude and longitude details. However, I can envision the ability to enhance this with geocoding/geotagging information of location details inside JPG using EXIF. Using my GPS and geotagging software, I've been able to automatically encode lat/long info inside each picture (Using RoboGeo for example). It would be great if I could dynamically pull the lat/long info outside of each picture and plot on a map for each journal entry.

This is only the beginning, so stay tuned in the future for new developments!

Posted by EricB at 03:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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Chuck Frey, author and blogger of the Mind Mapping Software Blog, has recently consolidated all of his research and reports on mind mapping into a central location.

From Chuck's newsletter:

During the past few years, I have published a variety of surveys, reports and resources that have helped to expand the global body of knowledge about visual mapping technology. As I released these reports, I blogged about them, and they quickly disappeared from view, replaced by newer blog posts. There wasn't one convenient place where you could access them - until now.

I have just launched a new Reports & Research page on my blog, which gathers all of these valuable resources into one place. In particular, the results of the 3 surveys I've conducted contain a wealth of insights into the ways in which people utilize and benefit from mind mapping software.

I hope you find it useful!

Chuck Frey

You can checkout the research and reports here:

http://mindmappingsoftwareblog.com/research-reports/

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OK, I'm going to take a short break from my posts on productivity, creativity, mind mapping, and using technology to enhance learning. You can call this an uninformed rant if you like, but I seriously can't comprehend all the buzz that is surrounding the "MicroBlogging phenomenon". No doubt, many of you are aware of Twitter. For those of you that have been hiding under a rock, or are not plugged into the blogosphere as of late, Twitter essentially takes blogging to another extreme and lets users broadcast at any given moment exactly what they're doing. Here's a concise description from Twitter's website:

"Twitter is a service for friends, family, and co–workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing?"

I've always been a little bit hesitant to adopt the latest technology craze du jour, but I've been circulating these thoughts internally for some time. And, it wasn't until this week that I read a few posts that had me really question whether this is uber-hype or a case of me just refusing to get with the times. Case in point.... 2 recent articles illustrate the microblogging buzz:

1. How Twitter Could Be Worth A Billion in a Year
2. Indent.ca - Another microblogging service that just recently hit the del.icio.us popular list

My premise for my argument/rant is this: Aren't we already to the point where we've reached information overload and communication saturation? Of all people, I'm probably one of the biggest technology evangelists, technophiles, and all around geeks out there. However, in the last year I finally reached a point of realization that there is just too much noise in the wild, wonderful, world wide web.

I'm what you would call a "connected person". I love the fact that you can use technology to enable communication, find people with common interests, and make long-lasting connections. I've met some of my greatest friends and acquaintances through the PC. My passion for using technology to enable communication drove me to develop one of the first web-based chat applications on the web (Lucid Chat).

I've been connected to the net since '94. In fact, I've been involved since the BBS days back in '88. Yes, I'm a member of most of the major social networking sites out there, love using Linked.in, use del.icio.us at least a dozen times a day, and am constantly hunting for the latest and greatest blog posts. I also have accumulated at least 250+ RSS subscriptions to some pretty cool blogs. At this point... the information overload bubble sort of reached critical mass.

I finally realized that I just can't *possibly* keep up with the amount of information out there. I've started to take a more pragmatic and realistic approach to simplifying my focus and attention on my most critical sources of information. Do I still subscribe to most of my RSS feeds? Yes, however I've significantly decreased how frequently I read the feeds, and only tackle at least a half dozen of my favorite feeds at a time.

I have email. I have social bookmarks. I have a multitude of social network sites that keep me connected with others. I have instant messaging. I have RSS feeds. Do I really need a microblogging service that keeps me up to date on what friends (and strangers) are doing at any given second? I'm not sure on this one.

I actually really want to like Twitter. I want to embrace it and jump on the latest technology bandwagon. However, I just can't get away from the feeling that we've reached the apex of the golden age of communication, and are now on the downward trend of turning valuable information into useless "datababble" (yes, I just made that term up). Enter the age of Information Entropy.

Please help me understand what I'm missing here.

Posted by EricB at 09:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (8) | TrackBacks (0)

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Leo at Zen Habits has posted another great article on productivity. The following is an excerpt from the article on Emerson's thoughts on creativity and productivity.

Write Everything Down

"Men are born to write… Whatever he beholds or experiences, comes to him as a model and sits for its picture. He counts it all nonsense that they say, that some things are undescribable. He believes that all that can be thought can be written, first or last; and he would report the Holy Ghost, or attempt it. Nothing so broad, so subtle, or so dear, but comes therefore commended to his pen, and he will write. In his eyes, a man is the faculty of reporting, and the universe is the possibility of being reported."

-- Ralph Waldo Emerson

A problem that Emerson faced his entire life was the possession of an unmanageable mind. His thoughts leaped quickly from one idea to another. He had moments in life where insights sprang from his mind like water from a broken dam. During these times, Emerson had trouble organizing his thoughts effectively. Yet these deluges were gone in a flash and he was then beset with an intellectual dry spell. He compared the challenge of managing his mind to that of harnessing thunderbolts.

In order to manage these fluctuations, Emerson kept a journal. Every day he collected even the smallest thought, idea, or dream that crossed his mind. This enabled Emerson to better organize his thoughts when they flowed freely and to spur new ideas when he hit a dry spell. Writing helped Emerson make sense of the world. He would revisit the ideas he had recorded and add to them as he gained new insights. Thanks to Emerson’s journaling habit, we are blessed today with his great essays on simplicity and self-reliance.

I can relate to this post on a few different levels, and can certainly relate to the feeling of the ebb and flow of creative maelstroms. The value of journaling is clear, and the ability to collect and organize your thoughts and ideas in a single place is a fantastic way to channel your creative output (think Memex).

Source: http://zenhabits.net/2008/06/lessons-in-productivity-from-ralph-waldo-emerson/

Posted by EricB at 09:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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Psychology Today recently posted the last known interview with George Carlin (interviewed on 6/13/2008). Whether or not your a fan of George's comedy is beside the point. This interview is hands down one of the best I've read in a while, and gives some great insights into Carlin's history, personality, and creative process.

From the article:

"Ten days ago, on Friday, June 13th, 2008, I had the extraordinary privilege of talking to George Carlin. As far as I know it was the last in-depth interview he gave before he passed away yesterday at age 71. Originally it was slated to run as a 350-word Q&A on the back page of Psychology Today. But I was so excited to talk to him—and he was so generous with his time—that I just kept on going. By the end I had over 14,000 words.

On stage, George Carlin came across as a grouch, often vulgar and sometimes misanthropic. But with me he was patient and warm, happy to talk through the minutiae of his creative process and eager to share stories about his childhood, his evolution as a comic, and his influence. What struck me most was the joy in his voice as he talked about the wonderful feeling he got in his gut while writing. I was also moved by the gratitude he expressed for his mother, who he said “saved” him and his brother—leaving her bullying, alcoholic husband when George was just two months old, getting a job during the worst years of the Depression, and raising two boys on her own."

One particular Q&A that stuck out to me was Arthur Koestler's influence on Carlin's work. I'm only partially familiar with Koestler's works, but I'm assuming the book he's referring to is The Act of Creation (now officially on my reading list).

"You asked me to remind you to tell me about Arthur Koestler.

That was another impact. I was doing nightclub comedy down in the Village. I was down there in ’63, ’64, and my friend told me about Arthur Koestler’s book about the act of creation and it had a section on humor.

He was talking about the creative process. There was an illustration on the panel that showed a triptych. On the left panel, there were these names of artistic pursuits. There were poets, painter, composer. And one of them was jester. I was only interested in the jester. What he said about each of these, he said these individuals on the left hand side can transcend the panels of the triptych by creative growth.

The jester makes jokes, he’s funny, he makes fun, he ridicules. But if his ridicules are based on sound ideas and thinking, then he can proceed to the second panel, which is the thinker—he called it the philosopher. The jester becomes the philosopher, and if he does these things with dazzling language that we marvel at, then he becomes a poet too. Then the jester can be a thinking jester who thinks poetically.

I didn’t see that and say, “That’s what I am going to do,” but I guess it made an impression on me. I was never afraid to grow and change. I never was afraid of reversing my field on people, and I just think I’ve become a touch of each of those second and third descriptions and I definitely have a gift for language that is rhythmic and attractive to the ear, and I have interesting imagery which I guess is a poetic touch. And I like the fact that most of my things are based on solid ideas, things I’ve thought about in a new way for me, things for which I have said “Well, what about this? Suppose you look at it this way? How about that?” And then you heighten and exaggerate that, because comedy’s all about heightening and exaggerating. And anyways I guess I was impressed that there was another thing from my early life that probably at least influenced me to some level."

On a parting note, I think George's thoughts on death are appropriate:

"The most unfair thing about life is the way it ends. I mean, life is tough. It takes up a lot of your time. What do you get at the end of it? A Death! What’s that, a bonus? I think the life cycle is all backwards. You should die first, get it out of the way. Then you live in an old age home. You get kicked out when you’re too young, you get a gold watch, you go to work. You work forty years until you’re young enough to enjoy your retirement. You do drugs, alcohol, you party, you get ready for high school. You go to grade school, you become a kid, you play, you have no responsibilities, you become a little baby, you go back into the womb, you spend your last nine months floating …and you finish off as an orgasm."

—

George Carlin

R.I.P.

Posted by EricB at 10:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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The Visual Understanding Environment (VUE) project at Tufts is focused on creating flexible tools for managing and integrating digital resources in support of teaching, learning and research. VUE provides a flexible visual environment for structuring, presenting, and sharing digital information.

At its core, the Visual Understanding Environment (VUE) is a concept and content mapping application, developed to support teaching, learning and research and for anyone who needs to organize, contextualize, and access digital information. Using a simple set of tools and a basic visual grammar consisting of nodes and links, faculty and students can map relationships between concepts, ideas and digital content.

Concept mapping is not new to the educational field. In fact, the benefits of concept mapping as a learning tool have been documented by over 40 years of cognitive science research. VUE provides a concept mapping interface, which can be used as such, or as an interface to organize digital content in non-linear ways.

Check out the VUE screencast here. According to an email I just received this afternoon, VUE 2 was just released with the following features:

• Tools for dynamic presentation of maps
• Map merge and analysis tools
• Enhanced keyword tagging and search capabilities
• Support for semantic mapping using ontologies
• Expanded search of online resources (Flickr, Yahoo, Wikipedia, Twitter, PubMed, etc.)
• Ability to publish your VUE maps directly to Fedora digital repositories and Sakai

Posted by EricB at 05:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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By shear serendipity (ala Google), I stumbled across a truly great paper on Personal Knowledge Management. The paper, titled Building the Memex Sixty Years Later:
Trends and Directions in Personal Knowledge Bases, is undoubtedly one of the most comprehensive pieces of literature that I've read on PKM (Personal Knowledge Management). This paper was written by 3 students at the University of Colorado (Stephen Davies, Javier Velez-Morales, and Roger King) in Aug 2005.

Two key things from this paper really stood out to me:

1. The distinction between the role of objective and subjective realms when it comes to PKM. For example:

   "... the objective realm – the set of electronic documents and other information that are available to a group at large. This is often the entire public domain, as with the World Wide Web, but sometimes it may be communicated only internally with an organization. The key factor is that it consists of materials everyone within a large group has access to, and views identically (ie., a given text appears the same to everyone.)
   a subjective realm – the viewpoints, interpretations, classifications, and relationships that an individual perceives when examining the objective realm. This set of elements is unique to each observer. It represents the ongoing accumulation of knowledge each person builds as they browse and learn from objective sources. It need not consist solely of elements from the objective realm, as the observer will also bring in their own background knowledge and biases, but it is most often primarily comprised of such objective elements."

2. The depth and range of coverage of the existing PKM solutions (mindmaps, outliners, wikis, semantic web technologies, and numerous references to historical PKM products)

If you're interested in Personal Knowledge Management, I would *highly* recommend checking out this paper. My curiosity about the Memex has been peeked recently, and this paper definitely re-enforces the notion that others are interested in also achieving this vision.

I was able to find this pretty easily (by luck) via Google, however there is a limited distribution notice in the paper itself. So, i'm not certain if I can or should provide a direct link. However, you can check out the link to the ACM Portal (ACM subscription required). It seems the link on ACM is referencing a new paper published in 2006, which I have not yet reviewed:

http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1142431

And, of course, you can simply Google the paper title in quotes and you should be able to find the .pdf pretty easily:

Google "Building the Memex Sixty Years Later: Trends and Directions in Personal Knowledge Bases"

Posted by EricB at 08:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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Thanks again to del.icio.us, I discovered an amazing site today called Thinkbase.

"Thinkbase is a new way to navigate and explore information on the web. It is what we call a 'Visual Wiki'. It is based on Freebase, an open, shared database of the world's knowledge - in other words a Semantic Wiki. Thinkbase uses a visualization tool (Thinkmap) to create an interactive visual representation of the semantic relationships in Freebase."

This is actually something I've been wanting to do with my own Personal Knowledge Manager(a.k.a. Semantic Wiki or Memex). I'm a huge fan of visualization, and ThinkMap (The software used to power ThinkBase) is a pretty comprehensive toolkit. I've looked at quite a few different visualization solutions over the last few years, and ThinkBase is one of the most impressive ones. Recently I came across a stunning Flash-based project by Ruben Swieringa
called the interactive mindmap (http://www.rubenswieringa.com/blog/interactive-mindmap). It would be interesting to leverage some sort of open source solution like this to accomplish what the guys at ThinkBase have done. Overall, ThinkBase is a step in the right direction and I'm hoping it gets some well-deserved attention.

Posted by EricB at 11:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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Most of my weekend was spent laboriously locating and consolidating my digital photo collection over the last 8 years. You would think that my nack for organization would have payed off in this area, but you'd be wrong. ;) It took combing through 4 old hard drives, multiple Ghost images, an Iomega Peerless Drive, and a Terapin Mine to consolidate my photos since 2000. I now have close to all of my 3,000 photos and videos accounted for.

My main motivation for *finally* consolidating my photo collection is for my wiki-based travel log. Fueled by my recent post on the Personal Memex, I decided to finish cataloging and detailing all of my trips and travels since the turn of the century. This was by no means a simple feat. I'm actually only partially done at this point, but have enough semantic detail and information to make finding out details of each trip a breeze. My next major step is to integrate my photo repository with my wiki.

I love software like Picasa for managing my photo collections and albums. However, I'm looking for something that can be easily viewed over the web. My thought was to use some simple flash-based photo/slideshow viewer to embed directly into the wiki. I've been collecting links for some flash-based slideshow applications and figured I'd give them a whirl. Here are the major ones that I'm aware of:

• MonoSlideShow ($19.95) - I've used this application in the past, and have embedded slideshows directly into my blog posts. It's fairly comprehensive and gets the job done
• SimpleViewer (Free) - Similar to MonoSlideShow, but with some additional options. I like the ability to right-click and open the image into a new window
• WorldMap/TripperMap ($9.74 / year) - This blew me away when I first saw it. Slideshows with Map integration. TripperMap supports FlickR right now, but support for other images sources is being developed.
• SlideShowPro ($29.00) - As with TripperMap, this application stuck me as quite impressive. The interface is visually appealing, and it also supports video playback. Very nice! I decided to experiment with this one and see if it suits my needs.

This is by no means a comprehensive list, but I think it does illustrate some pretty compelling flash-based slideshow applications. I'm curious what other software is out there. In the meantime I plan on experimenting with SlideShowPro, and will share my feedback on a subsequent post of creating an impressive wiki-based photo and travel journal.

Posted by EricB at 09:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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