Has anybody been playing with Blinkx? I checked it out after Sam Marshall mentioned it in his blog, Intellectual Capital Punishment.
Blinkx looks to be another example of the quest for “implicit query” along the lines of Autonomy’s extinct toy, Kenjin.
Founded last year by Kathy Rittweger in San Francisco and Suranga Chandratillake, in London, the private company has released the beta version of a toolbar that notices what you are working on at the moment and suggests in real time local documents and Web pages, news, video and blogs.
Whenever you browse a website, read a news story, check your e-mail or write a document, blinkx automatically delivers suggestions from the Web, news or your local files; which you can view by simply clicking the links or rolling over to get a summary of the information found.
As Sam notes, the beta is quirky but shows promise, as does the company’s Visualiser tool, which represents search results in an easily navigable, three-dimensional tree.
“Like Kenjin, Blinkx watches what you're working on and suggests relevant links to e.g. what you're writing in a word processor. I found this rather distracting in Kenjin - possibly because following links is generally far more interesting than finishing a report - but Blinkx seems to do it more discretely.”
As Sam describes it, Blinkx is less intrusive than Kenjin was, but still automates the kind of free association that can make it hard to concentrate on a knowledge task but sometimes stimulates the creative stroke. Playing with Kenjin, years ago while working on a KM article, I once got a hit on Bantu love songs.
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