Another personal KM tool

I just tried out the Blinkx software for Learning Circuits's Try It section (look for the review to go up in about two weeks). It's a pretty neat idea, although the beta version definitely needs perfecting.

After you install Blinkx and allow it some time to index your system, it searches for other emails, documents, and Webpages on your computer that relate to an email or document you're writing or a Website you're surfing. You can also initiate searches yourself and it can look on the Web, but currently only 20 percent of Webpages are indexed.

The tool often returns some strange results but it's a good start at another personal KM tool (see this and this previous entry on personal KM), which help a person organize and share the information that they find most relevant to them.

The twist with this tool is that it can be automatic, so it's not the information that the person finds most relevant but that the software does--based on other information that the person is working with. That takes a lot of the burden off of the person--this push versus pull model has been a holy grail with many knowledge management initiatives.

Often, KM software just collects information and then the user has to sort through to find what's relevant. A tool such as Blinkx makes that unnecessary. Now we just have to wait for the technology to develop to a point where it's all exactly relevant.