What my blogs are for: memory management and the Google-Gordon geek-mind fusion

[Firefox 3 and Blogger are wreaking havoc on my posts, so I'm now using Safari 3 and Blogger-In-Draft. The original version of this post was messed up.]

I used to think I wrote my blogs as a way to exercise my mind, get my feedback fix, and plant covert memes in the emergent Googlian metamind. Last year I wrote:

...my ... blogs are written for these audiences in this order:

1. Myself. It’s how I learn and think.
2. The GoogleMind: building inferential links for search and reflection.
3. Tech blog: Future readers who find my posts useful to solve a problem they have that I've solved for myself. [I try reasonably hard not to contaminate this blog with too much of my personal speculation or political opinions.]
4. Gordon's Notes: My grandchildren, so I can say I didn't remain silent -- and my tiny audience of regular readers, not least my wife... [Full of opinion, and this is about meme injection]

I still think that's true, but I realize that the #1 item on the list is evolving, and merging with #2.

This is a theme I want to explore more, but it's bigger than one post.

It's an extension of my ancient interests in Personal Information Management (ahh, fond memories of the "PIM-L" email list I ran), my 1997 "Snippets" project, and Xanadu stuff, now built on my increasing experience with full text search of personal corporate multi-gigabyte text archives.

I'm calling this "memory management" for now, and I've added a new tag to my Blogger "label" collection to track this. Memory management includes:

• My private personal (John ****) memory management: tagging, hierarchical organization, cyclic graph links and full text search of my personal and family datasests.
• My public personal (John Gordon) memory management: full-text indexed, tagged, and linked posts (more on the missing backlinks below)
• My private corporate memory management: memory of mine that's legally owned by my employer, and by law stays with them.
• My semi-public corporate memory management: limited to my writing and posting that's visible only within the corporation.

The technology of memory management becomes increasingly important because of two currently irrestible trends:

1. My experience grows far beyond the ability of my aging brain to contain it all
2. My declining cognitive faculties make my productivity more dependent on past knowledge and experience. (I'm older than 25. If you're older than 25 your primary processing faculties are also declinining.)

There's more to come here and in my tech blog about the technical progress on this agend and how this relates to the blogs, but I'll end here with excerpts from a recent Gordon's Tech post. I really want Blogger to resuscitate there moribund "backlinks" feature by making backlinks robust for whitelisted URLs:

Gordon's Tech: My new number one Blogger request: fix backlinks with whitelisted URLs

I've created a new category called "memory management" that will expand this idea, both here and in Gordon's Notes....

... "Memory management" involves personal memory management and corporate memory management, private memory management and public memory management, and an early ... version of gordon-google mind-fusion (one decaying, one growing)....

....Which brings me to my new #1 Blogger request. Fix the backlinks...

... the original purpose of backlinks collapsed due to fraud, webspam attacks, and search engine optimization.

Google has given up on them for all but very high end blogs, and one of their defenses has been to block backlinks within blog domains (to reduce search engine optimization and link farm fraud)....

... but backlinks are an aspect of what we used to call "backward chaining" in inferencing systems. In people-speak they allow one to explore semantic connections (insert obligatory semantic network, xanadu, memex, etc reference) to antecedent or precedent posts.

This capability is a strategic component of my personal memory management obsession.

So I want Blogger to create a new sort of backlink -- to posts that are within domains that I specify. I would create a set of whitelisted urls for my blogger account, and links from those urls to a specific posts would always become backlinks. I could remove them if I wished of course.

To avoid linkfarm abuse Google would exclude this type of backlink from their value estimation algorithms...

... As of first posting a search on "URL backlink whitelist" returns no meaningful hits. I wonder when that will change...