My Contribution

I was just going back through my previous couple of posts.  You guys must think by now that I am one, negative, cynical, glass "half empty" kind of person.

Au contraire kind reader.  I am (in person) one of the most happy, positive people that you will ever meet.  I do have a tendency to make fun of things, especially really obvious things.  I mean I still believe strongly that "news" shows should NOT be able to report on anything that is not "new".  I mean, c'mon the Arabs don't like the Israelis and vice-versa, we get it!  We Americans tend to start wars when we feel our right to fill up our gas guzzlers is threatened, OK that's a given!  Jessie Jackson and Al Sharpton will jump in front of a camera faster than Cynthia McKinney can assault a capitol hill police officer, you bet!

So today I am going to make a lifehacker-like contribution to the readership at large (all two of you).  If you don't know the wonders of lifehacker, please click one of the links above or the link over to the right.  I don't make any money from this referral, I am doing this completely from the goodness of my heart ('tis the season!).

Have you ever wanted a personal knowledgebase?  For those of you who don't know what a knowledge base is, it is basically a personal database that you can search and ask anything.  It's a bit like Dumbledore's pensieve in the Harry Potter books/movies.  Say I was trying to find an online receipt from something I had bought on eBay of last year.  I could search for "eBay receipt 2007" and all of the e-mails or documents, or whatever would appear as a result in my search screen.  Lost an e-mail address for "Joe Smith"?  No problem, just type "Joe Smith" and the last few e-mails from that person pop up.  How about that great article on "How to make money blogging?", just type in a few keywords and search for that also.

Pretty cool, eh?

Well, let me be the first to deliver the great news!  Now you (YES YOU!) can have your own personal knowledgebase for only $19.99!  But wait, there's more!  How about some wind chimes?...

Just kidding, what I'm about to describe is free.  Maybe I am a bit cynical after all.

Several free web-based e-mail services now offer what amounts to unlimited storage.  This is very cool and makes my knowledgebase dream very easy!  I don't know about you, but I've been using free, web-based e-mail offerings for over ten years and they've only gotten better and better in their usability and functionality.  The two services that I use for my knowledge base are Google's Gmail service and Yahoo's Yahoo mail.

Now, in my case I split my knowledge bases into two separate accounts for two different types of data.  The Yahoo account is for my business and I use Gmail for all things personal.  I also have a pop3 account through 1and1.com that I use to "funnel" everything from my desktop (Microsoft Outlook) to these two online e-mail accounts.  (I do pay $2.99/month for this pop3 account, but it is well worth it for the features I get.)

For example, if I get an e-mail that is for business and I want to keep it (forever!) I simply forward it to my yahoo e-mail address and add any keywords that I want ("receipt", "eBay", "2007", "UGA keg tap") to the message body.  Anything "personal" that I get, say a funny joke from one of my friends I forward to my personal account with keywords "funny", "joke", "Ron White drunk in public".  Receipts for paid bills online or items I buy this season for Christmas I forward to my personal account with the keywords "Christmas", "2007" and "receipt".

Now, this isn't just limited to e-mails.  I can forward any e-mail, again with the proper keywords in the message body, containing ANY attachment (pictures, web-links, documents, spreadsheets, etc, etc).

I don't even use folders in these accounts any more - heck, unlimited storage is unlimited storage!

When I go to retrieve something I just log in to my online account and use the "search" feature.

Please enjoy and let me know if you have any questions!