Offering some thoughts arising after a Twitter thread with @gregbd. There's a public page on Notion with background info at https://bit.ly/notionpkm

I'm scraping through COVID. And I have some PKM ideas I'd like to share.

The motivation comes from Greg Dixon in Alberta, Canada. As you can tell, Greg, if you're listening, my voice is not back to normal. As I recover, I am prodded to think about how artificial intelligence and machine learning and maybe neuro linguistic programming can help evolve the workplace, or help improve my workflow.

And I'm thinking about this stuff, because I believe it's a long line of thought that you were asking about Greg, about, like, what's the big leap forward that, that me that Bernie Goldbach might see, in this space where artificial intelligence, machine learning, and the workplace coexist.

I'm a big fan of trying to keep the stuff that I discover, especially eureka moments, in places where I can find them. And what I know it's sometimes difficult to annotate them, or to categorize them. But they're valuable throwaway moments.

They would be thrown away if they couldn't be discovered or resurface later. So about a year and a half ago, I started using Roam Research, because you can just throw stuff into its system. And it has a flat text searching capability that finds everything. If you add hierarchial commands to the information--headings or hypertext links or hashtags--it's easier to surface the material and give some structure to it. But it's an unstructured database of thoughts. And over about the 18-20 month period, I've been using it.

I've been able to rediscover stuff that I didn't know I thought about and didn't know I wrote about and didn't know I talked about, but there there there, there it is, the stuff is there. Now, this is all relevant, because in the workplace, you'd like to come to the table, or be in a meeting and present thoughts that are relevant, timely, and maybe earth shaking, you know, very important, would provide a leap of capability to your team. And if the preliminary research you've done, in our case, it'd be like desktop research on a company or deep research on student trends or evolutions of different textbooks. At meetings that we have at the university level, it's good to know we can bring this information to the table. And maybe you could get the information you need to hand within just a few minutes of a meeting happening because of the way your personal knowledge management system is set up.
My Roam Research does that. And in fact, in the description of this audio clip, I'll leave a link to another more visually appealing database. It's run by Notion. And it surfaced a blog post I wrote a while back about this whole idea that I'm talking about right now. And because I wrote it in such a way that it showed up in an RSS feed, the RSS feed inside of a service called Feedly had an AI that was looking at the word PKM letters PKM, or the words personal knowledge management. It flagged that and then it pushed it into both Roam and into notion all by itself.

Since I have subscriptions--paying for Roam and paying for Notion and paying for Feedly-- I have those things running in the background. It helps surface things I need in the foreground. It be in the APIs of those systems. It be in the web hooks of the services. And then what I want to do is make all those things part of a daily process where I can leverage them. And that's what I see the big leaps between now and 2025 being where companies are going to figure this out.

I'm enslaved by Microsoft Teams. So I'm watching Azure services, the cognitive sciences part of Microsoft's Office 365, do a lot of this stuff in the background for me. I like to have it do more. So when I get a calendar alert for a meeting, I would like to know that maybe dynamically based on the words in the agenda attached to the calendar meeting, that there'll be these block links, links to blocks of text, or database links, that when the notification came to my desktop, to my Outlook, or to my Microsoft Surface Book, that Roam or Notion would pick up key terms, and all of a sudden suggest 1,2,3,4 or 5 relevant things are to look at, before the meeting starts. That behind the scenes, the AI would do this for me. I wish that the the AI could do a sentiment analysis of the people who are listed to be part of the meeting. So maybe harvesting something from their social feed or from news items that they shared or from strings of email text. I know that the thing I'm doing right now, which is I'm making a podcast that's going to go to Spreaker, that if I was making this podcast, inside my desktop, I could turn on otter.ai at the same time, and I'd have a transcript dynamically in front of me, before I even posted the audio clip.

This podcast will generate an audio clip based on how I have a surface set up behind Spreaker. And maybe there'll be a small headline right on that it'll pop out through an app that's running on the back of Spreaker as well. Something about the AI will determine what's the most relevant part of the thing I'm talking about, and then pop it that I could share on social. I've written everything I've written the main points of what I'm talking about today, already. And they've been harvested already by PKM systems of Roam and Notion.

I'm planning to put a link to this audio clip inside my Notion and Roam databases. And I've already put a link to the Notion database up on a Twitter thread, where Greg Dixon and I are talking.

If you're listening to this in a podcatcher, and things are working the way I think they do, you should be able to scroll down and see a link going into the notion database. I asked for it to be public, so click it. And you'd see the Notion database with some people at the top of it, which would include Patrick and John Collison. Patrick's major investor doing a $10 million investment in Roam Research so he sees the value of this.

Okay, I'm explaining what we're doing with what I'm talking about here to a group of postgraduate students starting in October 2022. They're interested in digital transformation. Personal knowledge management is part of that. I am surfacing a little teaser about this to a bunch of teachers on the 14th of May at the ICT and Education Conference in Thurles, County Tipperary Ireland.

If you want to catch up with me, you might know where to find me. I'm topical Bernie, on all good social networks. Thanks for listening. Bye for now.

Connect with Bernie https://twitter.com/topgold