First Post!

Hmm, I imagine that joke is a little tired, though I'm not exactly one who spends enough time trolling the blogosphere to be on the front lines of that particular issue. More to the point, this is the first post of the MyHippocampus blog. To be honest the only user of this site is currently moi, but I had a realization this morning that it's not too early to start the blog if I'm already getting value out of the site and since that's the case, well, here we are.

The developments of the past two weeks have included full-text search, a nailed down version of the firefox plugin and a good way to import my del.icio.us links. Now that that's complete I'm cutting the del.icio.us umbilical cord and going full hippo. And it feels nice.

My realization of the morning came after looking at my newly discarded copy of "Fooled By Randomness." About a week and a half ago I started using these little red sticky 'flags' in everything I read. You know the type of thing I'm talking about, little colored post-it style markers? They're something I've never really used before because I haven't seen the point. Ok, maybe they help you look up a quote for a paper you're about to write, but when you've let the book lie for a couple months what do your little markers really gain you? You still have no constructive overview of what was in the book. You can't search it. And your memory is just whatever vague, blended, half-fogged, reminiscence your addled mind can come up with.

So how am I going to use the little red flags + MyHippo to change all this? How are they going to help me bridge one of the most serious gaps in the MyHippocampus plan? That gap is of course the fact that I don't like reading a book with a laptop on my knee, ready to index and categorize new information. Clearly I'm not alone, but I've struggled with how to make MyHippocampus, a service that promises to help your retain and reuse this contextual information, but that is bound to the world of laptops, blackberries etc, bridge this gap. Well, it's not all that amazing, but my new plan is to flag things I like, then to go in and enter them into MyHippocampus at my leisure. Not exactly Web 5.0, but here's where it gets unexpectedly good.

The effect on my reading has been fantastic! Now when I chuckle at a little tidbit, discover a new connection etc, I flag it and know that I won't be forced to forget it over the course of time. How many amazing and fantastic little tidbits of information have you read and then immediately relegated to the dustbin of your mind? For me it's essentially everything. Everything that wasn't rigorously tied down by continued exposure, exposition, or use in regular life and I'm not joking when I say that that's really almost everything. What a waste! And the great thing experiencing now that I've got a system to remember all this, is that it's amazing how much more involved I can be in the book. I didn't even know I had it, but I now see that there was a latent sense of futility that has markedly colored my intellectual activities up until this point. Is that too bold? All I mean is that I think a lot of the reason I couldn't concentrate in History 24 "The Irish Diaspora" was that I knew none of it was going to stick. I'm an efficient guy and the knowledge that the work I'm doing is futile is a pretty powerful disincentive.

So yes, taking over the world proceeds. Or at least my world. Can't wait until everybody else gets their own MyHippocampus.
-j