When content management gets personal

When we think of content management, we mostly think of managing vast repositories of content across large organizations. We might also think about managing complex web properties, but what about our own personal content--the stuff we generate ourselves every day on our own computers? We have music files, pictures, documents, websites we visit, blogs we read and so much more. Every year hard drive space gets cheaper and cheaper and we collect more and more digital bric-a-brac. How are we supposed to keep track of it all?

Those of us who have been around since the beginning of the PC revolution have always organized our content the same way that we did in physical file cabinets. We have virtual folders and sub-folders, and we have tracked our content in this way for almost 30 years, but it's never been terribly efficient at the enterprise level, and it's only marginally better on the personal one. Let's face it, we need a new way. In fact, each one of us could use a mini-CMS.

Files and search can help

Unfortunately, there isn't a Documentum for individuals, but an organized hard drive can help you find the material you want. If you know your stuff, you can find your way through your hard drive quickly and easily, but not everyone is that organized. Some people need help and even a nice graphical view of your drive can't always help you.

Good search tools are certainly a blessing and I've found that Apple's Spotlight is a great way to find my stuff. Just type the first couple of letters and it finds the files, applications or whatever you're looking for in nothing flat. Unfortunately, not everyone is running OSX, so it becomes more difficult. I haven't tried the Google indexing tool in a while, but I remember it sucking resources the last time I tried. Apple has managed to do this without draining the machine in the process.

A little tag will do you

I've been thinking lately about tags as a way to organize your work. I was working on a project that has several different file types. I assigned a tagging system to organize them within the project folder, so that chapters were labeled CH, appendices began with APPX and stand-alone documents were labeled SAD. This made it easy to sort and find the different file types within my project folder.

I was organizing some email in a sub-folder the other day and I was just throwing all the email related to a given project in there, but I started thinking about how great it would be if I could tag the email so I could easily find the most important ones. Unfortunately, there wasn't a way to do that in that particular email client. If I had been using Gmail, I would have been able to create a project tag with an IMP extension (for 'important') to make it easy to find those important ones later.

How about an organizational tool?

Tools like Evernote (which I've written about here before) can help you organize your stuff in notebooks with tags, then access the content from your computer, smart phone or the web. For instance, I have a notebook for this column where I can "jot down" different ideas as they come to me. I can also collect blog posts and articles that might be a jumping-off point for an article idea. Tagging lets me organize those items within the notebook to make it easier to find the different types of content down the road, especially the ones labeled "idea."

As you gather greater amounts of personal content, just as in the enterprise, it gets more difficult to keep track of what you have and where you put it. Tools like Evernote can ease your information burden, but it sure would be nice to have a better way to track all of your content. Chances are hard drive space will continue to get cheaper and as it does, you will need to find more intelligent ways to organize and find your own content. Anyone working on that mini-CMS? - Ron