If it weren't for Google Desktop
I'd be spending an inordinate amount of time looking for stuff I've
written, and then forgotten what I'd named it. But Google Desktop
doesn't do the whole job -- I
often comment on others' blogs, in forums, in wikis and other places
that most tools don't keep track of, and I can never remember where
these important thoughts were placed. And with multimedia and
collaborative sites becoming more affordable and more important, it's
only going to get worse. I know CoComment
is trying to help, but it's just one more piece to add to the memory
storage puzzle, and doesn't even handle all blogs (including mine).
What we need is a web page that works kind of in reverse -- keeping
track of everything we've 'sent out', in any online medium, regardless
of where it ended up.
This was an idea I proposed as CKO a few years ago (it was deemed
technically too difficult). At that point all I wanted was for
employees who had contributed documents (including e-mail messages) to
internal repositories to have a place where all such contributed
knowledge could be found in one place, so at annual performance review
time it would be easy for them to say: "Here, this is what I
contributed to our company's collective knowledge this year."
The closest analogy I can think of is a scrapbook,
a place where we keep all our 'memories'. The online equivalent I'd
like to see would capture all of the following on one 'page':
- Posts to your own and others' blogs, wikis, forums, podcasts and other sites
- Trackbacks to conversations on others' sites that your
writing has instigated or which refers to you or your writing, or which
come from people who have subscribed to your blog or RSS feed,
blogrolled you or listed you in their deli.cio.us lists or flickr lists
or 'friends' or 'neighbours' lists
- Posts on sites you have bookmarked or subscribed to
(favorites folders, RSS feed subscriptions, e-mail subscriptions,
blogroll, your deli.cio.us, your flickr, your 'friends' or 'neighbours'
lists
- E-mails, chats and IMs you have sent or received
- Your Skype, phone, and face-to-face conversations
- Articles, news and conversations related to subjects you
have tagged or set up auto-notifiers for, or searched for and asked to
keep apprised of
This massive aggregation would comprise ATSYCA (All The Stuff You Care
About), a kind of super-memory or 'subset of the Web'. Almost as
important as the content itself is the names and contact information
for all its authors and contributors, ATPYCA (All The People You Care
About).
Our brains seem to have an extraordinary random-access way of storing
and finding all this stuff, but as new media are increasing the volume
of this content by orders of magnitude (and old age is weakening the
effectiveness of its recall), we need to rely more and more on
mechanical aids to supplement our mental capacity and information
processes.
All this information needs to be 'virtually' organized in three different ways:
- By subject (personal information taxonomy) -- So that if
you're browsing for information on a topic you can see a high-level
'map' of ATSYCA/ATPYCA on that subject, and zoom in on facets you want
to explore or rediscover
- By tag (search hook) -- So that if you're searching for
some specific piece of information on a topic you can hone in quickly
on it
- By context and connection -- So that if you're trying to
follow a line of thought and see how various articles, points of view
or people are connected you can do so
Search engines can enable the second type of use effectively (though
with enormous waste, since every single word is indexed). They handle
the first and third types of use badly.
The first type of use, by subject (personal information taxonomy) needs
a graphical layout organized according to the tableau at the top of the
page, described in this earlier post,
a landscape you could navigate from top level and drill down to as much
depth as made sense, to organize all your ATSYCA/ATPYCA. That taxonomy
and its granularity could evolve over time -- you could 'redraw the
landscape' as you learned more about some subjects and integrated
thinking on others.
The third type of use (by context and connection) also needs a
graphical format, but this time 'parsing' and linking all the content
by what (and who) it was connected to, rather than by subject. It would
present a 'route map' rather than a 'logical map' of this content. It
might also allow you to drill down from a 'colloquium' level to a
'conversation' level to a 'thread' level of granularity, and would
provide 'departure points' where you could add and simultaneously share
content (by allowing you to 'publish to' and others to 'subscribe to'
new departures and amplifications from any node on the map.
The result of both the first and third types of navigation could be (or
at least include) what would effectively be 'collective intelligence'
of a group, but the map would allow you to tweak it to your personal
'view', deleting or hiding content you didn't find valuable and adding
personal annotations 'for your eyes only'.
Although these taxonomic maps and routing maps (and perhaps tag clouds -- you know those things that show the prevalence of tags on a particular site by the size of the font of the tag name) might
actually reside on a single web site, or your own hard drive, they
could just as easily reside out in hyperspace, where you and others
could access them anytime from anywhere, and where they'd be easy to
update and maintain.
There are some technical challenges to doing this (notably keeping
'public' web-hosted and 'private' hard drive-located content separate
according to each user's personal permissioning rules), but the biggest
challenges are likely to be imaginative: keeping the navigation 'Google
simple', automating the update of the maps, and enabling interactivity
of shared, published and subscribed content.
But it shouldn't be that hard to create such an application. If we don't get a simple tool that can do this soon, we may literally start losing our minds. |
MADE IN CANADA
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