XML (eXtensible Markup Language) is a very important and key technology in today’s internet, and other applications involved in the smooth transfer of data between computers.  As a markup language, it bears a family resemblance to other similarly named languages, most notably HTML or HyperText Markup Language.  HTML is the language of the internet which allows web pages to be displayed and formatted in multiple browser configurations with the two-fold objectives of flexible formatting (to allow layouts to be presented adequately across multiple screen sizes), and the enabling of hypertext, or the links which allow the user to ‘jump’ to other related pages with the click of a mouse.

The operative genetic link between these two languages is the ‘Markup Language’ common component of their names.  The markup language means that content of the files using these languages are enclosed in ‘tags’ or labels, which define their context.  But there the similarity ends.  HTML recognizes a list of perhaps 200 words that when properly used as labels and descriptors can allow a web page to be rendered or interpreted into what passes as a well formatted document.

XML, on the other hand doesn’t DO anything.  It provides the mechanism to store reasonable amounts of data in a commonly accepted and defined format for transfer and communication between computers and systems.  Its vocabulary is theoretically unlimited in that tags may be made up and transmitted at will,provided that their punctuation is proper.  The files themselves are made up of elements which are delimited by these tags.  XML tags are case sensitive, whereas HTML tags are not.  The elements, or nodes may be multi-generational with some elements having lesser nodes describing characteristics or individuals of the larger nodes.  Here’s an example of a small XML document which simulates a group of  appointment book entries:

<?xml version=”1.0″ ?>

<appointmentplanner>

XML is truly an abstract language.  There are no specific words required, only that each element, including the root element of the document itself, be enclosed by matching tags, and that its first line declare that it is an XML document.

There’s more.  One can actually create an XML language which will act as a container for a specific application.  This involves an additional referenced file which contains those definitions.  These files are called schemas or DTD documents (Data Type Definition) which can actually define the permitted or required elements in an XML file.  One could invent an XML application language which would be specific to -say– chemistry (requiring definition of atomic numbers, or isotope variants), or medicine (perhaps a separate schema for each specialty, or even for each doctor within a practice)  The schemas or DTDs can define the type of data within an element – text, video, binary, file, or whatever.  This is very powerful technology.

There are several ancillary technologies related to XML which magnify its strengths.  For instance XPATH and XQUERY empower the user to parse an XML document to extract portions or elements of the document related to what he is seeking – much like Regular Expression and database query technologies.  XSLT uses the XPATH functionality to format an XML document.  And there is facility within modern day relational databases to receive data from XML, and deliver data from XML, distributing and gathering it appropriately from relational tables.

The flexibility and abstract nature of XML make the protocol extremely adaptable and useful for exchanging all manner of data between applications.

• Business to Business transactions are now typically (orders, confirmations, quotes) transacted using XML, or one of its variants or extensions.  This allows a buyer company using Windows machines to communicate and accept confirmation of orders to their supplier company who is running a Unix system
• RSS transmissions are standardized using XML, or its close cousin ATOM protocols.  This allows a light weight individually tailored package to be delivered to the user and interpreted successfully, whether the user is a Mac Windows, or Linux machine.
• XML allows websites to provide a web page to be displayed and tailored to each individual.  This is more complex than Amazon’s personal recommendations.  This technique is closer to the iGoogle page which allow you to construct your own home page.  The preferences and URLs you ask for, are formatted to the way you set them, then stored in an XML file.
• XML technology would allow you to construct a feed of your Twitter or Product Specials information to be constantly updated on your blog or website.
• AJAX (asynchronous Javascript and XML) techniques which use XML with javascriptis a technique which allows an interactive and dynamic web experience for the user by empowering the client side web application to update the web page depending on choices made real time by the user.

The best thing about these interactions is that they are done under the radar.  There is no need to take any action either as sender or receiver of this information, since the XML filesare created and interpreted without any human interaction.  This is a very easy to provide updated fresh content for a website or blog without expending additional resources. XML is related to and is basic to similar protocols like SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) and JSON (JavaScript Access Notation).

I read an article about 10 days ago which was critical of Microsoft’s efforts to gain a toehold on the web that got me to thinking.  The premise of the article was that Microsoft has thrown huge sums of money into developing a web presence, but has so far failed.  Kevin Kelleher, the article’s author advances an argument that Microsoft should throw in the towel, and get out of the web business, because Microsoft obviously doesn’t do ‘it’ well.

My own vantage is one of an early and ardent admirer of Microsoft.  My Company, Paladin Consultants, LLC ,was one of the original Solution Providers (later renamed Microsoft Partners Network).  Over the past 20 years, we have  designed hundreds of custom software projects for many big name clients using Microsoft Sql Server database, Visual Basic,  .Net Projects in C#, and extensive application development using the Microsoft Office Products (including programmed routines in Word, Excel, and full blown small database system in Microsoft Access).  A few of the larger projects are detailed on our website.

Gates & Co. has changed the world through their innovations, and they are deserving of every nickle they have made.  Microsoft’s software products set a standard for quality, ease of use, and innovation that the rest of the industry used as a standard.  And for years we have been a strong supporter of Microsoft products.

But something happened in the mid ‘90’s - a number of things, actually, that changed the character of Microsoft, and of the playing field.

First, Microsoft seems to have lost its spirit of innovation.  Their execllent ideas like Windows, Visual Basic, SQL Server, and Office have only been marginally improved since the mid ‘90’s.  Their PR machine would, perhaps vehemently disagree with that assertion, but, aside from the cosmetics, and being easier to connect with those programs, the functionality has been little changed for the good of the user.  Their foray into the browser market is a case in point.  They built Internet Explorer into their Windows software to preclude competition from other browser manufacturers like Netscape.  They were sued by the U.S. Justice department  and by the E.U for anti competitive practices.  The corporate culture for some reason elected to compete in the market with anti-competitive practices, rather than innovation.  The Netscape browser was, unfortunately a casualty.

Second, the terrain of the battle shifted dramatically.  Although Bill Gates paid lip service to the concept that ‘ the future of the information business is the internet’, in practice his actions showed that he didn’t get it.  For instance, take a look at this snippet of text taken from a word document:

In an effort to make IE and Word indispensible, Microsoft allowed Word users to save their documents as HTML files.  The only problem was that in order for those files to render properly, the user was required to use IE.   Here’s a snippet of the HTML generated by Word.  Notice how the tags are largely proprietary, and not able to be interpreted by other browsers:

The larger thought is that the very gestalt of Internet is to have as open a system as possible.  The internet is home to many different operating systems, and APIs.  The nature of the beast is that all participants must be able to share those resources freely.  Microsoft’s view of the world, however, is that they want everybody to use their products, and will do anything they can to ‘tie’ as many people as possible to their paradigm.  In a real sense, thse two competing philosophies and business models are incompatible.  Another example of this is the Microsoft .Net platform.  We develop on .Net for clients, but invariably, there are open products that are available that do just as good a job, if not better, faster, cheaper, and easier to maintain.  The same can be said when comparing Windows Internet servers with Apache Linux servers.

So, when it comes to Internet products developed by Microsoft, by the time the product comes to market, there are already superior products available from their competitors.  VBScript vs Javascript, MSN vs Yahoo, Bing Vs Google, IE vs Firefox, Frontpage vs Dreamweaver and the list goes on.

Third, Microsoft has an extremely poor record of loyalty to its ‘partners’.  They have shown this again and again that when it becomes advantageous for MS to desert their partners, they will do so in a heartbeat.  The loyal army of Solution Providers were presented with a more and more expensive and onerous set of hoops to jump through that it became not a good business proposition for most of them.  In the beginning, Microsoft was a good source of referrals for many of us.  It was advantageous for them to establish themselves as the default platform.  But after a few years, those referrals invariably went to the ‘partners’ who sold the most Microsoft desktop products.  So, like their own internal innovation, relations with their ‘partners’ also fell prey to the drive to stoke consistent quarterly earnings growth.  Their relationship with RealPlayer is another example of this kind of ‘partner’ dissolution.  RealNetworks ended up suing Microsoft and winning $3/4 billion, in addition to the $600 million fine levied against Microsoft by the E.U. related to the RealNetworks suit.

I am concerned that as the desktop market matures along with the growth of Internet and cloud computing that Microsoft will continue to suffer reversals.  Of course, it is possible that the company will experience a resurgence in its innovation, but at this point it is difficult to see the theater that will make this likely.  Contrast this to the buzz that frequently comes from the new product machine at Apple. Growth in Internet based computing shows no signs whatever of slowing down.

In 1949, Charles Goren published his seminal work, ‘Point Count Bidding’, in which he described a method of evaluating Bridge hands for playing and bidding.  Goren’s ‘Point Count Method’ revolutionized Bridge playing for the rest of the century, and was the basis for an entire contextual grammar that the best teams used to describe their hands to each other.  Elegant in its simplicity and powerful in its approach, the method evaluated cards by assigning ‘points’ to the highest cards, and additional points to short suits in a hand.  Players would then translate those point counts into the native language of the game so partners could in a concise and precise manner, describe their hands to each other and arrive at the best fit in the bidding.  The system made Goren the most successful and best known professional Bridge player of all time.

Bill James

Bill James had an early interest in baseball.  After graduating from the University of Kansas in 1973 with degrees in English and Economics, he set about publishing an annual book called The Bill James Baseball Abstract.  The annual was published from 1977 until 1988, when he stopped to write more pointed books and articles on baseball, as well as new annuals about baseball.

Both of these guys are notable for bringing numerical analysis to bear on importantly refining the knowledge of their business.  In Goren’s case, he collaborated with several others – another bridge player, and an actuary –  and built a system based on empirical observation and experience.  James used computers and statistical analysis to accumulate, evaluate and formulate his ideas.  He was not immediately accepted by the baseball cognoscenti.  While he was doing his work, he was working as a security guard at the Stokely Van Camp, and, after all, what could a security guard possibly know about baseball?

But his work gained acceptance because his conclusions were statistically verifiable.  See, Bill had data processing capabilities that allowed him to go back in time, and pose questions, and challenge assumptions that had long been held in the industry.  He was able to quantify, for instance he defined the concept of secondary average:

where

• TB =Total Bases
• H =Hits
• BB =Walks
• SB =Stolen Bases
• CS =Caught Stealing
• AB =At Bats

This measures a hitters total contribution by including his walks and net stolen bases.  Another concept he pioneered was the Runs created measure of performance, which, he suggests, is a better measure than the normally used RBI:

where H is hits, BB is walks, TB is total bases and AB is at-bats.  In both of these indicators, Bill reevaluated the contribution of walks in baseball offense.  This was significant in that a player who got relatively fewer hits, but drew a lot of walks were valued by the baseball market at a lower price than their contribution.  James demonstrated that these hitless wonders who drew walks were almost as valuable as the ones who hit a lot of singles, but could be had for far less salary.

He had a number of such axioms which applied to pitchers, formulae for equating minor league performance to major league expectations, and many others.

He was hired by the Redsox in 2004.  Many think he was a decisive factor in the Redsox winning the World Series in 2004 and 2008.  The previous Redsox victory in the World Series was 85 years earlier.  He advised the management on what mix of pitchers to hire, was a main proponent in hiring David Ortiz.  He’s concerned about such things as where players normally hit balls, who can take advantage of Fenway’s close-but-tall Green Monster Wall in left field, which pitcher/catcher team allows fewest steals.

Now those numbers were available to anyone for the past 100 years.  But until the computer age, they were available in an unusable form.  And it took Bill James to shuffle and deal those numbers and experiment with them to bring about a more meaningful and productive way of using them to benefit the industry, and various teams in it.  He had not an impressive resume, nor exceptional intelligence.  But he was a man with a passion for baseball with the statistical and computer skills he needed to apply to his favorite sport.

Many businesses have analogous situations to baseball before Bill James.  They have the data, but perhaps it is not in usable form.  Raw accounting reports are not very useful because by reporting on P/L and taxes accrued they are like the won/lost major league standings records: they report on what has already happened.

A proper managerial accounting system should allow you to collect data by product.  Which products are you selling and to whom? When to they sell best?  How do they respond to different advertising media and themes? How do sales of each item respond to news items? What industries buy your products?  Does your system allow you to get and process feedback from existing customers?  Can you segment and analyze your different products/markets?  Can you easily share pertinent information among different departments in your company?  Can your prospective customers find you on the internet?

If your business is typical, there are literally hundreds of questions and answers you should be mining from the data and computer records you already likely have!  And if you are not recording this information in a usable form, the gain from making a change will be paid many times over in a smaller or more productive workforce, better information, better sales responsiveness, happier customers, better product feedback, more effective advertising and marketing, and on and on and on.

How about interacting with your customers?  Can they order online?  Can they get return authorizations? Can they make suggestions for improving the product?If you have a large company, can you effectively communicate with your employees?  (Not by sending an email to a few, but broadcast changes in policy?)  Changes in individual retirement, or other benefit plans?

We have a long history of doing similar projects with a wide variety of companies.  Solutions typically involve a capable database management system, user friendly software tailored to the demands of the individual business, and a consultant who can listen and quickly understand the demands of your particular business.  Adoption of techniques such as these in your business plan allow your business to compete more effectively, even though your competitors are larger in size and capitalization.

Shortly after my article was published, I got a tweet, from Eugene Mandel, who invited me to discuss the whole concept of data mining on Twitter.  That tweet led to a very collegial telephone conversation between us, in which we exchanged ideas which will provide the basis for this article.

Eugene is a very engaging young entrepreneur in Silicon Valley, who has been involved with a number of startups.  His current plans integrate very nicely with my concept of Twitter data mining.  My prediction is that his newest venture, mustexist.com, is destined to become an important tool for Twitter users.  He recently started the company with his pal and co-founder, Alex Sherstinsky, a Ph.D. from MIT.  These guys are very serious players.

Mustexist’s current product is called list tags. It allows one to take a twitter name, and creates a ‘cloud’ of lists in which that Twitter name appears, roughly signifying the importance of keywords in that person’s list audience by the size of the type in the cloud.

Here’s a copy of Glenn Beck’s tag cloud.  I shrunk it down to accommodate the page size, and its contextual importance in this article.  Beck is on some 3800 lists.  Politics, News, and political head the parade, but further down the list are lists named things like ‘nutcase’, and other less desirable things to be associated with.  Mandel goes through the Twitter API, and finds all the lists on which Glenn Beck is mentioned.  Then, he queries those lists and finds the most popular keywords in their title.  Then he ranks those keywords by their frequency of appearance in Beck’s universe of lists, and performs a simple statistical conversion to interpolate the list keyword frequency to the type size in the cloud.

Pretty neat trick, eh?

But there’s more: list_tags enumerates some of the lists on which the Twitter member appears.  Here’s a picture of the TopLists for “Politics” in which Glenn Beck appears.  Now think, for a moment how valuable this information can be.  Many of these “top” lists contain 400–500 members.  These are lists for the top topic which have the largest number of members – regardless of whether or not the subject appears on those lists.  That’s valuable information for marketers, or for researchers and even job seekers.  But more than that– everyone who is maintaining such a list is someone who has enough interest in your subject to go to the trouble of maintaining a list of people who he/she considers are the leaders in the field.  And if that’s not enough, the lists editors is another valuable source of fertile relationships to cultivate.

The second. longer list is a list of which Glenn is a member.  So, in the case of a celebrity, it will not be unlikely that the same names will be on both lists.  I’ll not reproduce the Lists for ‘politics’ because it is too long – and because in appearance it strongly resembles in format the ‘Top List’.

So the stage is set now with a resource now to empower Twitter users with access to many lists.  A little resourcefulness will enable you to harvest those lists, and, by extension, to knowledge of all of their membership.  This will give you first hand access to communicating with the most well-regarded people in any given field!  And with the LIstimonkey resource, you can monitor the conversations of those experts for keywords.  With a little software jiggering and less than an hour’s effort, using our Glenn Beck example, we could identify, harvest and communicate with thousands of political junkies.

Mandel, however, is talking about taking Mustexist to a whole other level.  Using the database he has assembled for the list-tag project, he is planning to offer in the near future an interactive, iterative way of ‘surfing’ the tweetstream of these lists, in much the same was that Google lets you surf for articles.  He made the analogy of a newspaper in our conversation.  Each newspaper has several sections: sport, business, local, etc.  If you accept the proposition that a list’s tweetstream is like a newspaper, then it would be very productive to skim through the newspaper, looking only for articles that interested you.  You could skip the car ads, and dating club ads, and focus on baseball, or international news.

Similarly, over a period of time, a list’s tweetstream will have a lot of chaff: someone’s opinion of last night’s American Idol, inclement weather, mother-in-law coming for a visit…  But what if you could adopt a list, or amalgam of similar interest lists?  What if you could in real time and on an ad hoc basis query the stream for stuff like: climategate?  cap and trade?  world health organization?  BTU content of coal?  And how powerful would it be if you could pursue your line of inquiry immediately, based on feedback you got from the previous question?

I think that MustExist is on the verge of somthing quite important that will add a new dimension of empowerment to the serious Twitter user.  There are currently some 23 million Twitter users, 75% of which are either classified as ‘addicts’ or ‘regulars’.  That’s a reliable 18 million pairs of eyeballs scanning and interacting with Twitter several times a week – sometimes several times a day.  Any tool that can reliably and easily segment relevant portions of that population and then address them is bound to be very successful.

Please add your comments.  It is helpful to hear the opinions of our readers!

It is the main job of anyone who is engaged in search engine optimization to make that website friendly and hospitable to search engines.  Help them do their job, and do not adopt the attitude that you can co-opt them.  Ig you push that envelope too far, the engines will penalize you by deducting points from your page, or, in extreme cases, by refusing to index your pages at all.

It’s important to understand that a search engine sees ONLY text.  It can’t understand pictures, or movies, or Flash files or any graphics.  Only words and text are indexed by the search engine.  It can see code, but disregards it.  And the text which it sees, the search engine will try to put that text into some intelligent context to help assign some meaning when it matches the text to a search.  Different search engines accomplish this task in slightly different ways, but the basics are the same.

The better search engines accept site maps.  These are XML files that show all of the indexable pages (or files) on a site, along with information about the files, such as creation date, most recent update date, and its position in the site hierarchy.  These files are very helpful to the search engine in evaluating the site, and, in fact, submission of one will frequently bring about a new reindexing of the site when it is submitted.

Search engines attach more weight to text at the beginning of a page.  Text which matches phrases found in the Title of the page is assigned an especially important ranking, and text which is further down the page is assigned a diminished importance.  Some engines lose patience as they get further and further down a page, and quit indexing after a certain point.  So a page with lots and lots of javascript code near the top of the page may be thumbing its nose at the search engine, and will possibly be rewarded with a low ranking because of that.  If you must use javascript in your pages, annex that code to a separate file, and reference that file in the HTML.

Strictly speaking, not all search sites are search engines.  Yahoo!, for instance, is a directory where sites are indexed by hand by a staff of people who categorize sites.

But in the search engine category, Google is the 800 pound gorilla.  It has nearly an 80% share of the global market today, though this has shrunk nearly 3% in the past year, as Yahoo!’s share has brown from 9% to 12%.  So, obviously, it makes a lot of sense to pay attention to what Google is doing.

Google has two forms of placements in their pages.  One is AdSense, a Pay-per-Click (PPC) program where subscribers pay for each phrase they wish to advertise under.  Those paid ads appear either on the top of the google page, or on the right of the page, depending on your chosen Google page format, when a user searches for a phrase that matches the one paid for.  Each time the advertiser’s ad appears, Google charges his account an amount varying on the placement premium the PPC client has agreed to pay.

The rest of the Google pages are printed the ‘free’ or organic search results.  The objective is to construct your web page such that your page ranks high in the organic search listing.  Now the actual formula Google (and the other search engines) use to determine which sites get a high ranking, and which do not is a highly guarded secret.  And it is ever changing, and varies from search engine to search engine.  If it were publicized, everyone would adjust their web pages to accommodate the formula, thus defeating the purpose of the formula.  Not only does the ranking formulae change constantly, but the demand for those key phrases is ever changing, as is the re-working of sites all jockeying for position in the competition for high visibility.

Most users tend to favor the organic search results.

So the takeaway from this article is that prime placement in the organic rankings is a very valuable asset, but it is fleeting and ever buffeted by changes in competition, formulaic changes in the search engines, and even with rank of other pages in the website.  Second, because of all of the diverse forces at play, the placement of a website in any given search listing will fluctuate according to ALL of those factors.  So it is not possible to control your site’s placement in a search result – you can only hope to influence it.  Having said that, it is clear that search engines bestow honors on sites that produce fresh, new content that is helpful to the consumer, and that is well organized with good links.

This is the second article in a series about the usefulness of Microsoft’s excellent OneNote software. In this article, we discuss using OneNote as a companion tool in our main business of developing custom software and designing websites and web services.

As software developers, we are using a variety of languages(VB.Net, C#, Java, Ruby, SQL, PHP, etc.), as appropriate with any given project. Yes, we have code libraries, but it is not always east to identify and extract the exact code in the language needed at the time. We also develop for clients lots of web services, and web sites that rely heavily on database interfaces. So we have lots of database designs and routines already developed and ready to be applied. We have found that OneNote offers the categorization, segmentation and retrieval capabilities we need to give all of our developers access to a common set of tested, well-developed and bulletproof code. In addition to the code, OneNote permits a ‘mixed’ media of code, comments, notes, and implementation narrative and suggestions and anomalies – all searchable through the various formats and categories of information types.

If you’ve been around as long as we have (20+ years) you find that many of the tasks you do for clients have a common thread. Sometimes, you develop a routine, or process for one client, and then several years later another has a similar need. Sometimes, these procedures are complicated, and you don’t want to have to re-develop a product you’ve already sweated over. And, after the first 20 clients or so, you find that it’s difficult to remember where or for whom you already developed that process. That’s where the OneNote software library comes in.

Using key works, phrases, and language searches, we find that we can easily identify legacy code that’s been debugged and proven successful – and apply it to the current project. Sometimes, we enhance or revise the code slightly to accommodate the new application. This is certainly a very efficient way to leverage our expertise and deliver excellent custom software products to our clients that are guaranteed to last for the life of the project.

To save space, we won’t reproduce pages of code here. But the concept is simple enough to visualize: each code entity is prefixed with tags, and a description of its purpose, use, and interfaces. We discuss revisions, and the application and client for which it was employed. These factors make the code easily findable in the many pages in our code notebook. The code is tagged with its language, and comments for expansion and modification, and a revision history.

Here’s another use for OneNote. We are not fanatics on the subject, but do keep a garden and a lawn. One of the things that made us unsuccessful as we could have been in the past is that we always seemed to miss the window of opportunity to do something in the planting/growing cycle. So I made this BIG Calendar, and slightly modify it each year. On Jan1, I make Outlook tasks for appropriate dates (takes 1/2 hour) for the year. You’ll notice that the list has grown somewhat from its original intent, but the functionality lends itself to be helpful for other seasonal things in addition to planting, weeding, etc.

My gardening center has this quirky gimmick: when you buy something, you get a 10% coupon that can be only used two months in the future. That degree of organization of my personal life made me seethe. The I developed this calendar to exploit those coupons. I figure that this OneNote system saves me about $100 a year, because I am able to use those coupons. When I get the coupons, they go on the fridge with a magnet. The plan for these redemptions is baked into my system.

Oh. One other thing. This entire article was written on the way to a client meeting in NY on the train. I emailed it from my Blackberry, sucked it into OneNote and corrected spelling, etc. Then I pasted it to WordPress, and imported the picture.

Sent via BlackBerry by AT&T

We are Paladin Consultants, LLC, and, for the past 20 years,  have been in the IT consulting business concentrating on developing custom software, and web services for clients in primarily the Ny/NJ metropolitan area.  As our website suggests (Http://www.paladn.com ), we have been involved in as diverse a mix of software and web projects as one might imagine one would find in a company which has been developing mission critical software for that period of time.  As technology has advanced, we have always been enthusiastic to see new applications and techniques developed.  And, when they offered real value. We have been quick to recognize their contribution to the growth of our industry.

One such candidate for recognition is Microsoft’s OneNote.

In the more recent and advanced versions of their Office program, Microsoft has added an additional offering called OneNote, to go with their Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Access programs.  They (Microsoft)  have not done a very good job at marketing it, but it is a very powerful program.  Billed as a portable notebook, it is much more like an idea laboratory and collaborative resource.  I have found it to be extremely valuable in a number of applications, which I will try to explain in the article, and perhaps a few following it.

There are a number of quite good sites devoted to OneNote, such as www.onenotepowertoys.com, and www.iheartonenote.com which flesh out all the nooks and crannies of the product.  But here in a few humble articles, I would like to show how we use the product, and why we find it so powerful.  First of all, it is media agnostic: pictures, text, movies, sound – virtually anything available today will be accommodated in OneNote.  Second, it’s flexible: anything can be positioned anywhere, and moved at will – either in a document, or copies and pasted, or renamed to other notebooks, or pages.  Interoperability with other Office programs is simple and easy.  And you can copy and paste from any URL you can get on your browser (any browser ) either in whole or in part.  It’ll send and receive email, and interface with the tasks in Outlook.

Recipes

I enjoy cooking a wide variety of dishes, in various cuisines.  While recipes are available on line, and in many many cookbooks, I enjoy the creative expression that comes from ‘doing it yourself’.   But who wants to reinvent the wheel.  When I get a dish to where I want it (which may take several iterations), I want to preserve that knowledge.  I have found that OneNote offers an excellent interface to this process.

I start with a basic recipe, either from my own idea, or from another source.  Then, using a two column approach, I record the ingredients, and method in the right hand column.  Opposite the preparation, I record the critique.  Over several iterations of this process, I arrive at a satisfactory result, which I ultimately record in my database, but save the ‘experiment process’ on its own OneNote page.
The process looks like this:

The process looks like this:

The process includes as many steps as necessary to achieve the desired result, and frequently will include pictures. Here’s an accompanying image clipped from a OneNote recipe page on making salsa.

Market Techniques

I have been an active trader in the equity, bond, and futures markets for over 30 years.  OneNote has helped me categorize my knowledge of the behaviors of the markets.  I have written many software routines on the TradeStation platform which measure and predict the behavior of the markets.  As part of the feedback process, a large database of images and actions has grown over the years.  These images and accompanying indicator readings are then identified as categories of patterns, and each category has a OneNote page, which might consist of scores of examples of a pattern exemplified in various markets under various conditions over time.

A OneNote based system for visually categorizing market patterns.

In contrast to the recipe process, which seeks a perfect solution for each category, this process seeks a common denominator for each identified pattern, and seeks to isolate the seminal , or minimum characteristics which will successfully identify opportunities and risk profiles in each category.

The trick is in the software which identifies opportunities and categories of patterns, interaction between the software and the database, and between the database and the OneNote gallery of patterns and narratives.

I