What are a person's assets? What are your assets?

Money, possessions, and wealth, of course. Ability, connections, health, attractiveness, and social standing too.

And knowledge.

Information you can keep and retrieve is knowledge. Your knowledge is as much an asset as your other possessions. And because we live in a world where people will pay you for what you know, that knowledge can become income too.

What you remember is what you know. Although an asset, your knowledge is much more. You literally are what you remember. That is your identity. That is what makes you unique -- because you remember what no one else does; because your memories combine in patterns that no one else's ever can. Never in the past. Never in the future.

However much you own, whatever high opinion others have of you, if a bump on the head erased all your memories, you would be tragically diminished.

Technology has given us the Web so each of us now has instant access to more information than the great minds of history ever dreamed of. It is way too much to keep in our head so we have computers and hard drives for an augmented memory for our information.

And what do we do with those vast amounts of information, those assets, that future income?

We throw them away, that's what; just like an old shoe.

Why? Because after a time there is just too much of it to search through. The important stuff you are working on now soon becomes old and is shoved to the side to be replaced by new, temporarily important stuff. Eventually it all becomes clutter; too massive to search through for the important nuggets you know it contains. We know we will never find what we need, so finally we toss out the old stuff. Only fools burn money, but everyone throws away information.

You do not have to do that any more.

Hard drives are now so large and so cheap that storing a lifetime's worth of information costs no more than a fancy restaurant meal; pretty soon it will cost no more than a burger. They are making hard drives bigger at a faster pace than an individual can create or acquire information. Unlike desks buried under piles of papers, you are never going to run out of space for your information again. There is no longer any reason to limit yourself to recent work; no longer any reason to delete ancient files. Last year's information will be just as accessible as yesterday's.

So, yes, you can save all that stuff, but so what? You do not have the time to organize it all and there is no really useful way to search it.

That is the problem, managing all this information. Boswell is the solution.

Before Boswell you had to depend on others for your organized information. Where do you find that interesting article again? What was that phone number? What was it X said about Y?

You had to trek to the library. It had to be open. The phone book had to still be on the booth. You had to have the correct change for the vending machine. You had to have the money and space for the book. You had to have a corner to stack your old magazines in and the time to keep them in order after you searched through them the last time.

The Web changed the access methods and the details, but you are still dependent on others.You have to be on-line. The site has to still be there. Your browser has to match their way of doing things. You have to remember which site had the information. You have to have remembered to bookmark the site. You have to find the bookmark.

Now there is Boswell. Just take whatever text you want and Boswellize it. You will always be able to find it again.