Most mISV's don't need to worry about these aspects. When you're only one person, a great big file or a whiteboard or any number of other tools can probably fit your needs. But once you add a second person or a second project/product, it gets that much more complicated. Now your mnemonics and half-notes aren't as valuable... in fact, some may be a liability.

Hello, I'm Keith and I'm an information addict. I don't seek to catalog all the world's information. I don't even seek to collect it. My goal is to take what I have and make it useful.

That may sound odd but think about it... most information has a few specific properties:

• The most important/expensive information is usually the most time-sensitive;
• It isn't useful if you don't know how to find it;
• Different people will look for the information in different ways depending on the questions they need answered;

Towards this goal, I've been experimenting with different wiki structures - exclusively on MediaWiki - and how to use them to fulfill those requirements. Here are the results of a year of tweaking and refinement.