One of the largest parts of talking about productivity and work practices is gathering material and keeping up-to-date on new ideas, reports, and trends.Finding and looking at the the information is pretty easy to do - Google search and reader help me with the vast majority of the heavy lifting here. The real difficult part is in storing, sorting, and organizing both these finds and my thoughts on them.
For me, an ideal storage method would be easily accessible, searchable, tagable, and cross-referenced. Like a blog. In fact, like this blog.
The blog you're reading is my research file. In case you haven't noticed, this blog has comparatively few articles that contain original content. This is by design.
I'm gathering what I feel is the best content that fits my work philosophy (simplified GTD), and indexing it for my use as research fodder. Likewise, when I have some ideas that I want to capture, I'll add them to the blog. Everything is tagged and searchable through the search box in the upper left corner of this page, and I can access all my research from nearly anywhere on the planet. For me, this is the ideal data repository.
If you have a large, ongoing research project, I recommend a personal blog (you don't have to make it public like this one) or if you don't need universal accessibility, a personal wiki like tiddlywiki is an excellent choice.
blogger.com - free blogging service and hosting
wordpress.com - free blogging service and hosting
tiddlywiki - free personal wiki (wikipedia article)
tiddlyspot - free online personal wiki hosting
image: wikimedia commons