Jack Vinson and I have been having a conversation about the use of NewsGator and PersonalBrain. Jack wrote,
“Interesting… I tend to think of these blog links as being somewhat ephemeral, and I don’t like to put ephemeral stuff into my PersonalBrain. I’ve never really thought of dumping my aggregated news into PersonalBrain. Can you tell me a little more about how you go about this — what is your use of the saved thoughts?”
For the benefit of those unfamiliar with the tools, NewsGator brings (or aggregates) newsfeeds from various websites into Microsoft Outlook so that you can read them in a single location. So if you subscribe to this site’s feed this entry will appear in Outlook without you needing to visit directly. PersonalBrain on the other hand is a visual knowledge mapping tool. It’s best to visit Brainwaves for some ideas of its use and examples. PersonalBrain links ideas.
As Jack says, much of what is written on blogs is ephemeral yet there are some real gems worth hanging on to and it’s these that I store in PersonalBrain. This allows me to see posts in a broader context than they originally appear.
When I see something I want to keep I drag the message from Outlook’s NewsGator Folder into PersonalBrain. The following screenshot1 shows what I end up with.
Highlighed in red is the current focus Thought. It is titled “Example Stories” and is part of a parent group called “StoryTelling”. To the right of StoryTelling you can see other child thoughts; the siblings of Example Stories. Now you know where you are. What can you see?
Any thought with a small Internet Explorer logo is a website link. For example “Five storytelling tips”. Those with a pinned piece of paper come from Outlook. Each is a copy of the message so the original can be deleted from my InBox. I create these in PersonalBrain simply by dragging the message from NewsGator into PersonalBrain. The great news is that you can do this with any email or note from Outlook. You are not restricted to those in your NewsGator folders.
You may have noticed that some of the thoughts are in purple e.g., “The Power of Story”. These are copies of thoughts posted to this site. PersonalBrain lets me “type” thoughts and I’ve created a type called “thought?horizon post”. I can now distinguish what I have written from that of others. If you want to do something similar I suggest you create a special RSS history feed which is large enough to hold all your topics. Point NewsGator to the history feed and it will then load them all. Normally RSS feeds provide only the last 10-15 posts so you have to create a history feed to get them all. This need only be done once.
There you have it. Some ideas on how and why to store blog entries in PersonalBrain.
Footnotes
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Screenshot Lost in the mists of time. ↩