Library clips

I did a post late last year on blogging in a private offline journal to record my daily experience, thanks to everyone for the great suggestions.

I use Outlook 2003, and just noticed it has a Journal feature, in fact you can make as many journal’s as you want, they are just like folders.

Now this feature does much more than I need it to, so I’ll only go over the relevant parts to my needs…someone just told me that it can also track your daily history of your interactions with MSoffice files, they call this “record files”…so bascially it will tell you what files you worked on for the day and what meetings you went to, etc…

For each journal entry:

- subject line
- entry type
- timer
- body of text
- contacts
- category (you can add your own to the list)
- private (as you can share your journals)

All entries view:

- customize and sort the fields (includes advanced filtered searching)
- forward a journal entry as an attachment
- share a journal
(this seems to actually mean share it communally, not just for public viewing)
- view by today, week, month
- view by type

This shows a timeline of a day, week, month…depending on how you have set it…and all the entries for this time period are filed horizontally via an icon (different icon for each entry type).

Each entry type is filed vertically, so you get rows of entry by type.

Also you can click on the arrow icon next to each month and get a calendar view and jump to any date

- view by contact (same but filed by contact)
- view by category (same by filed by category)
- view by entry list (looks just like your email inbox)…filter by phone call or last 7 days

You can also use the right click to arrange this view by category, which makes up for not being able to sort this way.

From my quick 30 minute look it seems that the Journal feature on Outlook can be used by a knowledge worker to record, store and, share tacit knowledge.

So it seems this feature is very much like a blog and can be used this way:

- firstly multiple journals means multiple blogs in the one interface
(maybe each journal could be a project blog, it depends how specific it will be because you can also use the category as a project description)
- since you can right click forward an entry as an attachment, this is kind of like a permalink
- title line
- body of text
- category

- fielded search
- browse by date, type, category

I noticed that Share means to actually communally share a journal, and for each entry you can tick to make it private, so can you choose to make your journal a public viewing section of your email client.

This way a journal could act like a public blog (does it have a URL…what about the entries)

All journals combined from all staff could be browsed by date, category or searched

…also view the lastest entries from all journals (also by category)

…what about email alerts or RSS feeds.

The email client is the most used work application, just see MS Outlook: KM Friend or Foe?, and for this reason RSS aggregators are being integrated rather than people learning a new client…so why not include blogging in MS Outlook (it’s got email, contacts, calendars, notes, journals, tasks, feeds…why not blogging).

Pity RSS2PAGE isn’t web-based and free as it seems to be a good option to present your newsmastering efforts…here is a sample of what you could make.

What is good about it is the look, it databases all your items, and the fact the you can make categories and sub-categories…so you can make a category such as Entertainment and have a number of sub-categories, like Movies, Music, etc…
The limiting thing is the you can’t read the top level category as a river of news (it’s not clickable), and you can’t see the source feeds within a sub-category (ie. you may want to read all items from just one source within the Music sub-category).

In all I like the professional look, you can now make your own news portal and generate some income from the ads…the categories are clean and visibile, and all items are indexed.

Imagine making a news portal out of a Public Bloglines account, this is what it would look like.

You might need Feed Digest or MySyndicaat for full processing features, all on offer here is straight simple merging of feeds (this is what each sub-category is composed of)

Where is the search box?

Where is the tag cloud (ie. if you use blogs or bookmark services as your news sources)?

Where is the feed, and category feeds?

Besides being web-based and free:

SuprGlu has a tagcloud, a monthly archive, and lists the sources (although the limit is you can’t view posts by source)

Blogdigger Groups also archives all posts (but you can’t browse by date), also lacks folders…but it does have search and feeds, but it lacks the professional look of RSS2PAGE.
Blogdigger groups lets you view results from just one source, whereas the most granular RSS2PAGE gets is a sub-category…I wish Blogdigger Groups would let you view contents by a selection of sources, not just one or all.

I guess Blogdigger groups has the advantage of a powerful search feature, but the presentation lets it down, they’ve been talking about revamping this service for a while…hey another cool feature is that it has an OPML file reading list…they were trendy ages ago.

MySyndicaat has the processing power, but the presentation is still in it’s infancy.

kickRSS is not too far off Blogdigger Groups (actually the labels are better, and there is a date archive, but keep in mind it doesn’t store items after 7 days)

Then there is the lightweight RSSMix.

Who know if Feed Digest will get beyond processing feeds and into aggregated portals.

Others:

Peoplefeeds (more about personal aggregation)…but I like tabbed pages, similar to categories in a way…why not have both (also has a tagcloud).

Bozpages is more simple, but it has different views (display boxes or RSS widgets), such as Fyuze, Etamp and others

…more.