Personal Knowledge Management and the Mac: New York Times says, "Yes!", IDG's MacWorld says, "No!"

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Personal Knowledge Management and the Mac: New York Times says, "Yes!", IDG's MacWorld says, "No!"

Date Created: 05 Dec, 2005, 12:16 PM

I usually find I'm at the pointy end of new developments and gadgets compared to my friends and contemporaries.

I don't create them in terms of gadgets and software, so I'm not at the bleeding edge of creating things.

But I do adopt early and see trends more quickly than the average Joe.

This last week I've helped several friends buy and accessorize 5G iPods after I showed them one of the first in the country a month ago. Almost three years ago to the day, at a break-up holiday party for the same colleagues, I showed them my 2g 10GB iPod, the first time they had seen any mp3 player, much less an iPod.

Not all "got it", refusing to see the iPod would become the icon I knew it would. Now they clamour to have one, barely acknowledging what I said to them about it just three years ago.

The same December I was in Miami for a folk-dance event, and showed it to many people there, even using it to help DJ the outside pool party through self-powered speakers.

One person heavily involved in music production had been convinced by her sons to get the competing Archos hard drive, a 20GB monster of a thing, because it worked with her Windows box. I could only smile at her knowing that sooner or later she would be getting an iPod and so would her advisors.

In other firsts, I have been desperately telling my peers within my professional society to come to terms with blogs, podcasts and especially RSS. I have been ignored with respect to the latter, with the weak excuse that most of our members are on dial-up and can't afford the bandwidth for RSS. Yet almost in the same breath they can argue about what pictures should be on the homepage.

As most of you will agree I think, if most of your visitors are known to be on dial up, you eschew pictures on homepages and focus on fast-downloading text.

And if bandwidth-limited, RSS is a saviour not a destroyer of your internet experience, bringing the news you want to you, rather than have you wasting time and kb hunting around. The professional society does use RSS but through a third-party who helps advertise employment opportunities, not that my colleagues know of this!

I was also the first and only psychologist to undertake formal studies in Knowledge Management at the University of Melbourne. While it could be argued that this field has met its Use-By date, I think not, and indeed, believe that the need for a more Personal Knowledge Management approach is one whose time has come.

And I believe that Mac users are well-placed to use their Powerbooks and iBooks in a PKM-style I have in mind, which surpasses that available on the Windows platform. We're talking here of collecting data, assembling it into "blocks" or chunks of information then making actionable sense of it all.

If you've switched from Windows to Mac, you will know that the Mac functions two ways superior to Windows:

1. It gets out of your way to help you get things done. Expose (F11) is a metaphor for how the Mac OS opens up, clears the decks and let's you go find what you want on your Mac. Spotlight, even in V.1 format, helps if you don't expect too much of it. In its next iteration, perhaps in Leopard, I am hoping it will offer more transparency, allowing me to peek inside found files so I don't have to open an app. to grab the contents.

2. It elicits creative and innovative uses for apps, as well as apps unique to the Mac because of the way the OS integrates various apps., such as the iLife suite and a host of other apps which model its interactivity. Apps such as Comic Life, Notetaker, and others.

I am not alone in recognising how the Mac brings unique solution-finding apps to market.

Sunday's New York Times (reg required) features an article by James Fallows, entitled "Mac Programs That Come With Thinking Caps On".

It features "quirky" Mac programs which fulfill some of the requirements I would see as important for someone undertaking an exposure to PKM.

These include:

1. Devonthink Professional
2. Tinderbox
3. OmniOutliner Professional
4. NoteTaker and NoteBook
5. Near-Time Current
6. The Advanced Outliner

There are a number of similar programs Fallows doesn't mention, such as the Mac equivalent of the hugely successful Windows MindManager, known as NovaMind, using Tony Buzan's Mind Map theories and processes.

Fallows also offers the atpm.com website as a place to visit for "exhaustive reviews of Mac "thinking tools."

What is pleasing to read is Fallows' concluding paragraph:

"For now the point is to recognize the continuing flow of innovative software, even as the computer industry moves into middle age - and to remind PC users of another reason to keep up on Macintosh software: your workplace might do what mine has just done and switch to Mac operations."

(Fallows is national correspondent for The Atlantic Monthly)

Which makes it all the more disappointing that my attempt to offer a workshop at IDG's MacWorld Convention this January 2006 on "the Mac and Personal Knowledge Management" was rejected.

I thought such a presentation would be a little different from the usual fare, and 1. exploit and elucidate on the way work is changing and 2. extol how the Mac is the best IT tool for most budget-limited self-employed individuals, as well as those who work in self-directed ways in organisations.

Perhaps I didn't explain my workshop proposal clearly enough or "sell" my case adequately. Or perhaps the convention organisers wanted to stay with known quantities, either personnel or content-wise.

Here's the response I received from IDG's Kate Greene:

"Thank you very much for your submission(s) regarding speaking opportunities at Macworld Conference & Expo 2006 in San Francisco.

Unfortunately, we were unable to include your proposed session in this upcoming event. It is a difficult decision to choose from the numerous applications that we receive. Please do not be discouraged from submitting again in the future. Input and ideas from a variety of potential speakers is one of the things that make the Macworld Conference & Expo so interesting and vibrant. In return for your submission, we would like to invite you to come to San Francisco in January to attend Macworld at a substantial discount."

Well, that's a letdown "no thanks"response I suppose I'll live with until 2007. The upside is that by then, I will have given numerous local workshops for professionals so that if accepted it will be a pretty tight and well-planned workshop/presentation with lots of anecdotes to tell, sourced from 2006 attendees who will hopefully write to me during the year of their successes in applying the tools, ideas and methodologies I will have demonstrated.

In my own mind, I am more sure than ever of the need for such a presentation and its likely success when I finally get a chance to offer it. I think it's a concept whose time has come.

Oh, and before you think PKM is only about a better way to individually use technology to deal with cognitive overload or achieve better search results, it's much much more than that.

I'll write a blog entry to illustrate and expand this entry another time. But if you study the apps. Fallows mentions, you'll start to get an idea about how PKM is a way of making connections, and maximising your attention abilities - and no, it's not about time management.