Hello WebMynders, full text search is now working with out slowing down your WebMynd playback. There is a lag of about 5 minutes between when you look at a page and when it gets indexed for full text search, so if you are not seeing recent pages appear when you run a text search that is the reason.

We want to thank the people who took the time to fill out our survey, your feedback and suggestions are extraordinarily valuable in helping us figure out what features to build next. The majority of people requested a tagging system and a way to extract contact information from pages that they see. We are hard at work implementing these features now.

On a separate but related topic I came across an interesting book today that my friend Justin recommended entitled “Keeping Found Things Found: The Study and Practice of Personal Information Management” by William Jones. Dr Jones is a Professor at the Information School, University of Washington. Seeing how relevant this topic is to WebMynd I quickly ordered the book from amazon.com and am awaiting its arrival.

Doing a little more online research about the book I came across some interesting studies that Dr. Jones’s research group had conducted on how people keep track of the websites they visit. I was interested to find out that they identified 13 different methods that people commonly use to keep track of websites, they are (in no particular order)…

Send email to self
Send email to others
Print out the web page
Save the web page as a file
Paste the web address (URL) into a document.
Add a hyperlink to a personal web page
Do nothing to save but search again to re-access
Do nothing to save but enter the URL directly
Make a Bookmark or Favorite
Do nothing to save but access via another web site
Use Personal Information Management Software
Personal Toolbar or Links
Write down the web address (URL) on paper

The study also found that generally people have a repertoire of between five and seven keeping methods from the list above that they use weekly. That is quite a lot of ways to try and keep track of information that comes from a single source, the web. It seems like having website information spread across email accounts, note pads, bookmark folders, etc. is more confusing then helpful. These folks need to give WebMynd a try! Keep all those website in one spot and do a WebMynd search when you need to find it again. Anyway I look forward to reading the book and learning more about keeping found things found, that is certainly something we want WebMynd to help people with.