Personal information architecture

One meme that's gathering a little steam is Personal Information Architecture. Peter has mentioned it, and I've thrown it around in some comments on other blogs. It comes up most often in discussions about Flickr and del.icio.us, and how they let us extend our own way of classifying things into the social sphere.

It seems the KM folks have a similar idea called personal knowledge management (or PKM). And, of course, we have PIM--personal information management--tools all around us, though they don't extend much beyond calendars and contacts (bringing us back to Flickr, Furl and del.icio.us, which are like PIM tools for people with interesting lives).

While doing some digging on PKM I came across Denham Grey's blog, Knowledge-at-work and found this quote on PKM:

"Organization of personal information is not knowledge work in my opinion and a focus on the individual does not leverage the basic strength of KM which is networking, collaborative spaces and group innovation / knowledge creation."

I was struck by the implicit gap between the individual and the group in this comment. If there's one thing we're seeing in the social/ethno/folk classification space it's the blurring of individual and group construction of knowledge. Social classification leverages our personal information architectures, the systems we use to keep track of the bits we like, for our communities. (For another perspective on PKM, look at Steve Barth's site.)

From Denham's blog I stumbled onto this interesting diagram on PKM ( Source):

Funny how it mirrors that all-too-familiar IA diagram:

(All Venn diagrams are basically the same, aren't they?)

Anyway, personal information architecture isn't a new thing--the reason we're talking about them now is because we have tools to expose and use them. But I can see it growing as we're able to take better advantage of people's own classification systems (and let's admit that tools for personal IA are actually pretty dismal).