Re: But, what is a PIM

< Next Message | Back to archived message list | Previous Message >

Note: This message is from the outliners.com archive kindly provided by Dave Winer.

Outliners.com Message ID: 3783

Posted by daly_de_gagne
2005-08-16 17:02:02

Graham, you raise a valid concern about the devaluing of words. Of course, that happens all the time in advertising, but it is too easy to blame simply the ad industry. Whole Language reading instruction in grade school has helped to devalue language, although it is arguable that Whole Language, badly taught is the culprit there because, as a concept, it requires a master teacher IMO.

To the question at hand, Steve is right; most of the programs I mentioned are not PIMs in the sense of contacts/calendar/tasks. Yet, even that definition truncated somewhat what might, in more objective terms, be consider “personal information,” as well as management thereof. To make the point, what is the authority, other than usage as defined by the one who created the first software PIMs, that we would define the term as we do.

That that definition is insufficient is seen in usage today as people like myself broaden the meaning to include that set of information which is of personal importance and value to me, and the software applications that I choose to manage it. Is this kind of a usage definition any more, or any less, authoritative than the one it’s replacing, which I presume resulted from marketing and branding exercises?

There is an effort now to differentiate between PIMs and knowledge managers; somehow this feels arbitrary to me, but I realize it is an effort to be perhaps more precise than I was with my more inclusive use of PIM.

To get closer to what you are meaning (or what I think you are meaning) is that young people today know fewer words, and have less awareness of how to use them to express the subtlties of meaning than you or I probably did when we were boys. What will the impact of this be in years to come?

Daly

Back to archived message list