Monday, June 16, 2008

Success Tools: Your Own Personal Wiki

Imagine a Wikipedia of your own life. Everything you’re interested in: subjects, people, projects, links, products, methods…all taggable, searchable, and available from anywhere. Well, it’s here, and it’s free. It’s called Tiddlywiki, a personal wiki program, and its online “cousin”, Tiddlyspot,where you can store your wiki for retrieval from any web connection.

As with many of my recent “discoveries”, I was prompted to search for wiki software from a hint dropped by productivity guru Matthew Cornell who mentioned to me that he was using a wiki program. As far as I am concerned, this is an amazing Personal Information Manager or PIM. You can link to your own local files, to the web, and within your own wiki. You can create your own unlimited collection of “tiddlers” (equivalent to Wikipedia entries) and tag them, link them, put them in menus…and I’ve only been at this a few days. Also, you can save your wiki offline and also upload it to the web.

The implications of this are huge.

I went over to my local Apple Store yesterday, borrowed an iPhone, and…in seconds, there was my wiki, with all the data I had entered, available to me on a hand-held device. As the Apple salesman looked on, I entered everything he told me about the iPhone onto my wiki, and, later, when I got home, there it all was.

There is a tremendous amount of support for this product at Tiddlywiki.org as well as on Google Groups. I am only beginning to discover the uses of this flexible, ubiquitous, easy-to-use information tool. But my intuition is: it is nothing less than life-changing.


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