I have a lot of extraordinary friends. They’re awesome and I learn a lot with them by exciting discussions through email about many assorted and interesting topics. I was wondering what if I could put all these conversations online such way other people could take advantage of that.

While I was thinking about this problem, I found that the knowledge representation is a hard problem and there’s a discipline only to study that, called Knowledge Management.

As time goes by, I am more pragmatic about applying all this science in my daily life. So, after some talk to my friends and loosely define our community, I started to think about the technology to implement this. Some results from my initial research include that blog is inappropriate to store knowledge that can evolve, and the best system for that is Wiki. Twitter s*cks. RSS is very cool and to create a mashup is a great way to spread the word (we don’t need twitter). Forum boards are an appropriate place to discussions, but most of users need to receive alert by emails – they go to their mail box, but don’t go to forum system without a reason.

Even very good willing people don’t have time to spend reading long and boring text, and nobody has time to moderate a community. The solution we found is to create a closed community to post information for a public audience.

We are still settling down our systems and rules. It requires a lot of time, but I hope we can just start something meaningful that we can use later. It’s a sparkle for a better way to spend our time online and share information. I hope that the know-how of this project can be used to help other people to manage their knowledge in a digital way, so they can reuse in other to create more sophisticate systems to help with their daily tasks. More information about it is coming soon.

b-day agent project is not going well. After the good start with the facebook application, I got stuck in the orkut rules. It’s so easy and exciting to create application for facebook, but the google way is so hard and boring. The worst and more frustrating was to find that orkut doesn’t provide you an interface to extract birthday from your contact list. Instead of that, you can create a calendar mark in your Google Calendar and see everything there. It’s so pathetic that Google has to lock up the user data and obligate the users to use its suite. Google can do better than it.
b-day agent need to be smarter know to extract daya from Google Calendar, but I think that it’s too much effort for a toy application. Project is suspended by now. When I have my easy way to create agents, I come back to work on it.

Today I start a class about presentation skills – thanks to YWCA.. Talking about it with a good fella, Joeri Kiekebosch, I took notice about a great site to build presentations http://prezi.com. I also reached a piece of advice in the mastering the art of good presentation, a kind of anti-patterns of PowerPoint. Check this out at http://www.sethgodin.com [Free PDF available].