Re: Absent Hoisting or a Deeper Problem; A Question about Id

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

Outliners.com Message ID: 4693

Posted by pma
2005-12-11 05:51:02

But Alex,

Isn’t this a matter of where you are in the writing process? I mean, for managing all your bits and snippets, your “information store” might not need to be having a structure, and often won’t have. Or - it’s another kind of structure than the structure that partly emerges and partly is imposed on a piece of writing, you’re going to do. Isn’t it? When you are going to write something, you want to pick out the information that fits into your argument / covers the topic you want to write about. You pick out that information from your information store. So while writing is a goal-directed process, gathering information is much less so. Even though your writing is data-based, emerging from the data and thoughts you have, you eventually want to end up in some kind of linear structure with a limited number of items. On the other hand, the information store wouldn’t need the same kind of goal-directed structure, but on the other hand, it would be nice if it somehow reflects your way of thinking, clusters of related items etc., and effective search tools.

But then again, maybe the idea of such an information store, an extended memory, is not viable at all. Maybe it’s just an unreachable dream, that you have some kind of repository where you can go and dig after stuff, when you’re going to write. Maybe it just gives you a false sense of security, that things don’t get lost, e.g. an interesting webpage that you see, but that when eventually you might have used it, you’ve forgotten that you put it in your information store anyway. Then, what you need, is something that reminds you of this item, when you’re going to write something where it might proof useful.

There is an add-on to Reference Manager (RefViz) which according to some semantic-web-like algorithm can show you a graphical map of the references, and how they cluster together, based on keywords, title and abstract. If you go to Google’s playground, you’ll also see some interesting emerging technologies, which will help people find information which is relevant in a certain context. I think that we’re going to see a lot happen in this area within the next 3-5 years. Technology that helps to bridge the gap between the information store and the outline. Also consider the datamining-facilities on amazon.com and social bookmarking like del.icio.us, blogging and OPML, taken a step further, which will be able to “learn” connections between information based on people’s behavior. These developments might infer that the personal information stores becomes obsolete, because we can always find the information again out there somehow, including our and other people’s thoughts (in blogs).

Peter.

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