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If you can read this (and you should be able to) we’ve upgraded the software running this blog from Wordpress 1.2 to Wordpress 1.5.

Thanks to an excellent guide, the process was pretty much flawless – and if you’re currently using Wordpress 1.2, then upgrading to 1.5 comes highly recommended.

A recent post about How To Use Wikis For Project Management has been getting a bit of interest of late. The focus of that post was about how wikis can be used collaboratively in a group situation, but wikis are just as useful as a personal tool.

Paper fear

One of the side-effects of an increasingly digital lifestyle is a lingering fear of paper. In my case, this was caused by the loss of a Filofax at an early stage in my career – the trauma and disruption it caused are still with me, so as a consequence I’m never really comfortable unless I’ve got three backup copies of my calendar, address book and so on.

The obvious way to do this is to keep that kind of information digitally – and it’s easy to do with the tools at our disposal, whether they’re PDAs, PIMs or online services. But while that’s fine for inherently structured information like calendars or contacts, the ad-hoc information that tends to be captured into notebooks and onto legal pads is much more difficult to deal with.

Digital tools tend to be poor at capturing and managing unstructured note taking – and if you think about it, most notes that you take are an odd mix of structure and freeform. Structure comes from the topic or context – ‘notes about project X’ or ‘minutes from meeting Y’. The ad-hoc nature comes from the content – most notes are incomprehensible scribbles out of context.

And there’s further real value from linkage – over the life of a notebook, I may make numerous entries relating to a specific topic. If I’m particularly organised and anally-retentive about my notes (which I’m not) I could create some form of an index to cross-relate these, but that’s not something that’s either easy in principle or practice. Wouldn’t it be good if my notebook could cross-reference itself?

Enter the wiki

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