On Tuesday I attended the Occidental Business Associates Award Dinner. Patricia Sueltz, the executive VP of professional services at Sun Microsystems accepted her award as business person of the year and spoke about the network is the computer- Sun's mantra for 22 years now. It got me thinking about the nature of knowledge management right now. Right now knowledge management is in an incredibly poor state, with islands of human knowledge scattered in an unconnected archipeligo. The problem I face and I am sure everyone else faces is that too much information resides on client side. I store my documents locally. I do my spreadsheets locally. Yet my machine is an island even from my other machines like my laptop and my three home machines. I carry much of my information in a USB hard drive. Yet this seems a wholely inadequate solution. Knowledge and information gains value when is is shared, compared and inferences drawn from it. Services like Blogger partially address this problem through RSS feeds, yet even this information remains relatively isolated.

Too much of the computing experience is machine specific when it should user specific. Information that should reside on the network instead, resides locked away on a specific machine somewhere. Yahoo's desktop is the beginning of a networked desktop - a least it is accessible from multiple machines and multiple browser types. Yet to commit to using it is to commit too enclosing your knowledge and information in that island. This is generally true of systems like Sourceforge or any online project management software. You must commit your knowledge to a system. Of course with a standards compliant system, you can with some work get that infromation out in a way that you can use in other systems and with some work you can even do some of the valuable data mining that bring even more value to data. It wasn't that long ago that knowledge was even more compartmentalized and seperated in physical journals, books and micro fiched readers. I just guess I am anxious to get the next generation systems. Systems that have knowldge of my habits, interests, like and dislikes, what i read and what i don't. That's certainly the next few steps with Xao.

I was thinking about Google the other day and it struck me that we very much live in the Google universe. Google for me is the end all of search engines due to it's incredibly broad coverage of the internet and in general human knowledge. Simply put Google is the resource for searching for pretty much anything. Well that got us thinking @ Xao. How to improve upon that search? What features would we want that we currently don't have in Google? One of our solutions is a more extensive and permanent history of the user's search history. How many times have you been searching for something at Google, find what you are looking for after a couple of tries and then a few weeks later try to remember the exact same search? I do it all the time and usually it takes the same couple of tries (or a different set since you no longer remember the exact search query). So to address this we have created an application which remembers your search and visit history. That way you can quickly look up what you were looking for on a particular day, see the sites you visited and the terms you searched on.

You might say,"Well the browser history and bookmarks of IE all provide these features." While that is certainly true, those are seriously flawed ways of using the network. Firstly they are annoyingly machine specific. My search history is only on the current machine that I am using. Depending on the settings of IE, this history is set expire (usually within 30 days or so). Additionally the history function of IE is very difficult to use, clearly not much user testing has gone into the feature. So our first attempt as a complete search history is here at Xao. For the full set of features you will need to register, however, none of that information is stored in a form that we can read (we encrypt it all). Right now we are pretty quickly hitting our query limit with Google, so you don't get the full effect. We are going to Gigablast But try it and let me and let me know what you think.

I am sitting at my computer on Saturday morning playing Warcraft online. I am heavily involved in a multi-player game when Bodhi sticks his head into my study looking inquisitively at me. I know immediately what is on his mind - A WALK!. He walks over to me, pokes me with nose and then looks at me,"Come on, give me a walk." He then turns and walk out again. About two minutes later this happens again. It then happens a third time but this time Bodhi makes a sound much like human speech ran through a dog filter. He then shakes his massive head. Clearly he's thinking, the human isn't that stupid. Then his head and tail pop up. He has got an idea. He trots from the den to the living room and I hear a scratching @ the door. Now Bodhi is about 125 lbs @ this point. He can quickly do a lot of damage to wood pretty quickly. I take the obvious hint, drop Warcraft and Bodhi stands patiently by the door watching me gather leash, pooper scooper and dog collars. I gather all three dogs - Devo the ferocious looking but lovable Char Pei/Chocolate Lab mix, Sasha - Chow Chow/Australian Shepherd mix and of course Bodhi, the fierce Tibetan Mastiff off we go. A brisk walk 45 minutes later we find ourselves back home worn out. Bodhi circles his favorite spot by the fireplace and gives me one last look. "Good Job," resting his head on his paws.