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.