Information Management

I am trying to write my blog at least several days a week; it will be great if I can write at least every week day. Writing helps me reflect on what I have read from others and helps clarify and solidify my learning. Reading what others have written, however, can be an increasingly time-consuming task. There are hundreds of authors, many of them quite well thought of, writing on a regular basis about the things I am interested in. There are two tools I have found quite useful to help me keep track of all the information. I use Bloglines as a Feedreader. I currently have feeds to 35 blogs which I try to read with some frequency. There are many others which I will look at from time to time. I also like to use Pageflakes. I also use it as a reader but it has some features I like that Bloglines does not have. With Pageflakes, along with being able to customize what feeds I get, I can customize my page to much the way I want it to look.

Another tool I like to use, which I didn’t mention in my top ten, is another one by Google – Google Desktop. I use it to search for information I have saved on my computer. However, it will also search web sites visited. This is a useful way to find information contained inside files even if you can’t remember which file a particular piece of information is in.

There are many other tools out there useful for information management. I am sure I will be writing more about them at a later time.