Rememberance Agent
Doug Miller publishes a fascinating discussion of his Commonplace Book, a Tinderbox tool for "keeping track of books, articles, people, Web sites, email messages, and pictures."
I let Tinderbox do the classification for me. The document also contains a number of Tinderbox agents, continually scanning my notes for patterns of interest to me. Most of these agents are topical in nature, focusing on things like People, Artificial Intelligence, or weblogging. Others are task oriented, like the agents that create a list of what books I want to buy or check out from the library. A final group is time oriented: I can tell at a glance what notes I modified last week three months ago, or a year ago. These agents provide me with a temporal context for my shifting interests and attention.