As a Writer, What Would It Be Worth to You to Be Able to Instantly Mine Everything You’ve Ever Written?

I’m a professional writer with over 500 publications spread over four decades, and yet, in this digital age, I can’t get my hands on electronic copies of probably 90 percent of them.  All of them were originally created in digital form, but many found publication solely in print while others now live behind firewalls. I tried my darnedest to keep electronic copies of them all, but just try maintaining that kluged database over a dozen or so computers I’ve had over the years, the conflicting operating systems, the various websites, the hard drives that failed, and the file versions or programs that are no longer supported or even exist. Yes, I’m plenty grateful the cloud came along in my middle years, but even that is frankly nothing more than another file cabinet that’s largely unsearchable – at least in the ways I’d like to be able to manipulate it.

In many ways, my online blog has served as my primary professional memory. It’s where I’ve recorded just about everything I’ve ever written, and it’s crudely searchable.  But it’s at best a pointer system, as in, look over here for that article you’re trying to remember! I can’t easily compile, for example, the hundreds or even thousands of times I’ve written something about China, the internet, the Defense Department, or really anything. Frankly, I am often reduced to Googling myself to find that one passage that I want to review and maybe update/repurpose in something new that I’m working on.

Frustrating, right?

Then realize that the vast majority of my writings were never published.  They were filed away in all manner of proprietary systems. I’m talking about thousands of memos and reports and notes – often just to myself. Toss in the 15,000 blog posts and probably the same number of relevant and useful emails (heck, probably several times more), and you come to realize that, for someone in the writing business, I’ve produced a vast quantity of material – truly a uniquely useful knowledge base, to me at least – that I don’t really have that much access to, much less the ability to leverage and build upon.

Like a lot of writers, I want what I’m working on right now to be the best thing I’ve ever written, so I’m naturally wary of digging into my past too much – and yet, living and working in a world of Big Data has sensitized me to the notion that all content is pretty much an extension and synthesis of what’s gone before. This is my professional body of knowledge floating out there in the ether and I should be able to mine it – at will!

So, imagine that capability.

Imagine a cloud database that you have diligently fed over the course of your professional life: every email, every document, every article, every everything. You just always CC’d to it – within the law and your contractual obligations, mind you – a copy of everything you ever penned. It is your database, accessible to only you (or those you might wish to collaborate with) and always there for you to tap.

Say I need to write something on Iran and I know I’ve mentioned or described that state maybe thousands of times over the decades. I go to my personal cloud-situated knowledge base and type in the term on my content-review interface, along with a contextualizing pair of other terms to narrow down my search (e.g., nuclear weapons, terrorism). Seconds later I’m looking at scores of hits spread out over the past X years – stuff I forgot long ago, or no longer adhere to, or still adhere to but need to update.

So now I’m cherry picking the best bits by simply clicking and dragging pieces of text – the vast majority of which has already been edited to a hard polish – and within minutes I’ve compiled a career’s worth of professional knowledge (along with the citations) that jump-starts my current writing project on Iran.

What would I give for that convenience, speed, reach, and recollection? Like most professional writers, I’m pretty good at synthesizing, repurposing, updating, and extending existing content – except now I’m doing it at ludicrous speed, mining material that I inherently know and trust. So yeah, that would be worth something to me.

• It would be worth something simply as a cloud-based professional content repository that I could add to and curate throughout my professional career.
• It would be worth something simply as my personal knowledge base that I could search at will.
• It would be worth something as a tool to explore the evolution of my thinking on a subject.
• It would be worth something as a mechanism to compare and contrast various versions of the same material so I could rapidly select the best/most appropriate one for repurposing in whatever I’m working on right now.
• Finally, it would be worth something as a document generator, no matter how much of what I’m writing right now is new or some partial synthesis of what I’ve done or been exposed to before. Say it’s 80% new material but I need to contextualize it to the tune of that other 20 percent. By generating this doc online, through this Software-as-a-Solution (SaaS) venue, I’m able to leverage my cumulative knowledge base – as needed – in a matter of clicks.

Well, that’s what my new company, Riverscape Software, is building and testing right now: a cloud-based document generator with dedicated document repository. Those are two of several modules in a SaaS designed to super-empower small businesses operating in the increasingly sped-up world of Federal contracting, where government-wide Indefinite Duration, Indefinite Quantity (IDIQ) contract vehicles have transformed the public tendering landscape into a never-ending torrent of Task Order Requests (TORs) to which all firms – big and small – must reply at high speed with highly complex proposal volumes.

Riverscape Software will launch our SaaS, dubbed InfoSquirrel^TM, in early 2022. It’s currently being field tested by a top-20 research university and one of its extension services as they collectively look to upgrade their capacity to respond to government solicitations – particularly grant proposals.

Meanwhile, we wanted to start an informal dialogue with what we believe to be a rather large market for this SaaS and/or its individual modules – like the document generator described in this post. As Riverscape Software’s Director of Strategic Communications, I just wanted to start this conversation with a writer’s viewpoint on what is – to me at least – the most exciting part of InfoSquirrel^TM – namely, its ability to super-empower authors who, like me, typically operate under tight deadlines to produce large amounts of professionally complex content.

This is admittedly a bit of a product tease, but I wanted to start small. Other posts will follow in the weeks ahead. Please reach out to me (thomas.barnett@riverscapesoftware.com) with any reactions, thoughts, or interest. We know we’re onto something here, because we’ve spent the last year using InfoSquirrel^TM to increase our proposal submissions 8-fold(!) over the past two years. But to be honest, we are just scratching the surface of what the entire InfoSquirrel^TM module suite will ultimately be used for, so we’re looking for fellow-travelers on this fascinating journey of discovery.