#TRADE MANIA 2 BLOGSPOT PROFESSIONAL#

I go to my personal cloud-situated knowledge base and type in the term on my content-review interface, along with a contextualizing pair of other terms to narrow down my search (e.g., nuclear weapons, terrorism). Say I need to write something on Iran and I know I’ve mentioned or described that state maybe thousands of times over the decades. It is your database, accessible to only you (or those you might wish to collaborate with) and always there for you to tap. You just always CC’d to it – within the law and your contractual obligations, mind you – a copy of everything you ever penned.

#TRADE MANIA 2 BLOGSPOT PROFESSIONAL#

Imagine a cloud database that you have diligently fed over the course of your professional life: every email, every document, every article, every everything. This is my professional body of knowledge floating out there in the ether and I should be able to mine it – at will! Like a lot of writers, I want what I’m working on right now to be the best thing I’ve ever written, so I’m naturally wary of digging into my past too much – and yet, living and working in a world of Big Data has sensitized me to the notion that all content is pretty much an extension and synthesis of what’s gone before. Toss in the 15,000 blog posts and probably the same number of relevant and useful emails (heck, probably several times more), and you come to realize that, for someone in the writing business, I’ve produced a vast quantity of material – truly a uniquely useful knowledge base, to me at least – that I don’t really have that much access to, much less the ability to leverage and build upon.

I’m talking about thousands of memos and reports and notes – often just to myself. They were filed away in all manner of proprietary systems. Then realize that the vast majority of my writings were never published. Frankly, I am often reduced to Googling myself to find that one passage that I want to review and maybe update/repurpose in something new that I’m working on. But it’s at best a pointer system, as in, look over here for that article you’re trying to remember! I can’t easily compile, for example, the hundreds or even thousands of times I’ve written something about China, the internet, the Defense Department, or really anything. It’s where I’ve recorded just about everything I’ve ever written, and it’s crudely searchable. In many ways, my online blog has served as my primary professional memory. Yes, I’m plenty grateful the cloud came along in my middle years, but even that is frankly nothing more than another file cabinet that’s largely unsearchable – at least in the ways I’d like to be able to manipulate it. I tried my darnedest to keep electronic copies of them all, but just try maintaining that kluged database over a dozen or so computers I’ve had over the years, the conflicting operating systems, the various websites, the hard drives that failed, and the file versions or programs that are no longer supported or even exist. All of them were originally created in digital form, but many found publication solely in print while others now live behind firewalls. I’m a professional writer with over 500 publications spread over four decades, and yet, in this digital age, I can’t get my hands on electronic copies of probably 90 percent of them.

Trade mania 2 blogspot