My comments the other day are starting to feel very Lazy Web, because I’ve been doing a lot of talking and thinking about information management, but not actually doing much to solve the problem.

Blogtalk Downunder was a good opportunity to mention this issue, especially since one of the strongest themes at the conference was the challenge of organising and preserving the blogosphere (which I as a librarian was glad to hear from a room full of non-librarians). I had a brief talk to Jesse James Garrett about it, and mostly I’m just glad that no-one else has come up with a perfect solution that I don’t know about. And it was great to get to meet Jesse in itself since he’s written a lot of things about Information Architecture that I’ve found incredibly useful in the past.

I’m planning on working this some more by determining what it is I would actually want from this potentially Vapour-Ware-like application.

Firstly, why do I even want such a thing? Organisation concerns me, professionally and personally. I don’t like the feeling of losing things, and I often feel that this is happening when I bookmark sites and never return to them even though I mean to, my list of books that I want to read grows stale and I have blog post drafts saved that take me weeks to finish. I often feel that I rely on my memory too much. I have a great memory, for all sorts of strange things, but some information is better kept in a database than a brain, to be forgotten about and then called on when needed.

Why do I want to replace some of the things I’m happy with? I am very happy with del.icio.us and Flickr, but with the caveats that I mentioned earlier. I’d like to be able to supplement these services with my own backups so I can keep a local copy.

I’m coming across more and more information that is told to me, that I then write down on a note and then stick on my desk. Where else can little notes and reminders go? I’d like to be able to organise these things better, perhaps into a personal mini-KnowledgeBase of sorts.

And I have concerns about proprietary software and formats, like many people. I want to be able to store information in open formats that I can keep on using forever without too much migration.

I was also struck by a comment that Mark Bernstein made at Blogtalk, which we all know already but seem to forget now and then – prettier notes are not better notes. By this, I take Mark to mean that you need to use tools that work, not tools that will distract you from your work. This reminds me of Moleskines, because I like many others get into the mindset of thinking, “wow these notebooks are nice, how could I possibly ever write in them!”

Ultimately, I think I’m looking more for some kind of harvester (maybe something like Fedora or dSpace, but I have a feeling they are too big for my purposes) to pull everything together rather than a ‘killer-app’ as such.