As a follow-up to my Reliance post yesterday, which was on the subject of my dependence on web servers, I read something by Mitch Kapor this morning that resonates (even though his post was from a different context):
"I think I've unfairly maligned servers in the past. It's not the server I dislike, it's the idea that as an end user I am disempowered if the work I want to do depends on the administration of a piece of software I don't control, can't get access to, and plays by a different set of rules. The PC-era pioneer in me says, "get rid of it". Another approach might be, "tame it and make it serve me".
Electricity comes out of the plug in the wall reliably (in the developed nations). Landline telephones have reliable dial tone. Why can't we have utility-level connectivity for user data? And why can't it be open source? This is a big, ambitious vision, and it's not just about servers per se, but operational reliability as an overall system function (think Google with its hundred thousand servers) but maybe there's something here. More on this later too."
There are a number of themes here that interest me. It's early in the day where I am and I haven't got my head around it all yet, but it's to do with: operational reliability, user empowerment on the Web, integration of the web system with one's person, control, "taming" computers, commoditization, and of course the old chestnut of browser-based apps vs desktop apps. This is a placeholder post, while I mull over it. If anybody has any relevant pointers or links, feel free to make a comment. p.s. isn't it interesting that when people discuss heavy themes like this, Google always comes up...
In my travels today I came across some articles about how Generation Y (people born in 1980's or 1990's) use Information Technology. I'm a Generation X'er myself, so Generation Y has always been something of a curiosity to me - as other generations always are, no matter which part of the timeline you come from. The first article that caught my eye was from an Australian IT magazine and it was about how Generation Y are much more prone to forming communities than previous generations. Here's an excerpt:
"Social researcher Hugh Mackay said yesterday that younger generations were herding together like never before, using new technologies such as SMS and email chatrooms to foster tight social bonds.
Having grown up knowing only "instability, uncertainty and unpredictability", Generation Y had instinctively drawn together to cope, Mr Mackay said. [...] "They are the most intensely tribal, herd-based generation of young Australians I've ever known."
The words "tribal" and "herd-based" are words you wouldn't normally use to describe a Generation X'er. We're mostly characterized as individualistic or selfish, lazy, and cynical towards society. In some respects those attitudes were a backlash against the flower-power idealism of the baby boomers, although I'm one of those who thinks environment - or context - has a lot to do with the values and attitudes that a person or group of people has. So Generation Y are both a product of the computerized environment of the 1990's onward and are also rebelling against the "bite me" attitude of Gen X by adopting a, well, a "hug me" attitude I suppose.
The aussie social researcher quoted above goes on to say:
"I'm not predicting a revolution but I think it's the early sign of a genuine culture shift away from individualism to a more communitarian kind of culture."
I'm not so sure that individualism is on the way out, because two-way web culture promotes freedom of choice and individual creativity. But we definitely are seeing mass market culture slowly but surely being replaced by niche markets - that is, small communities of people based on shared topics of interest. Nowadays we increasingly have a large collection of small communities (niches), rather than a small collection of large communities (mass market).
btw doesn't "communitarian" sound eerily close to "communism"? or is that me being cynical? ;-)
After reading the above article, I went searching for more and came across this article from Chief Learning Officer magazine on how Knowledge Management should cater to Generation Y. They concluded that Generation Y will expect the following 3 things from a KM system: real-time access, personalization, and community. They state:
"By the end of this decade we will have moved from a workforce that often has to be sold on e-learning to one that demands e-learning, knowledge management and communities of practice."
Then I came across Dina Mehta's latest post, about youth in Urban India. I found this very interesting, particularly regarding youth's preference for IM (Instant Messaging for you oldies) over email. Dina talks about:
"...an "always on" world which is facilitated by technology like IM, VOIP, forums, blogs and online journals (have you ever left a comment at a youth journal or blog - either at a specific post or on their guestboards, and noticed how very promptly you will get a response to your comment - not just from the author but from a whole host of readers ?), simple SMS to enhanced functions offered by new generation mobile phones. How this is impacting and changing the way youth thinks, communicates, and takes decisions. And the implications this might have for the future as they enter the workplace, bringing in their new "culture-of-use", and for marketers seeking to address this segment."
As I read this it occured to me how the field of Knowledge Management is undergoing a seachange right now. Knowledge Management has been a failure for Generation X from the 90's up till now and frankly most KM consultants haven't got a clue about the changes coming in Generation Y. The very changes that Dina summarises so well.
People in the blog world such as Dina know what's up, but if you look at professional KM articles elsewhere on the Web it's the same old same old. They continue to witter on about "leveraging" or "capturing" knowledge, how to uncover "tacit knowledge", and "optimizing operational efficiency". Frankly that sort of mumbo-jumbo annoys the heck out of me, but unless you talk that language you don't make any headway in the business world. If I look at this in a positive way, maybe that's my "niche" to explore. Knowledge Management for the 21st century, two-way web style.
In other news, Mark Bernstein wrote a good post today about the recent "bad behavior" of the blogosphere (the MT pricing scandal and the weblogs.com kerfuffle). The best piece of advice in his post was this:
"Slow down. Take the time to write well. Think things through. Relax."
This was a follow-up to Mark's previous post, where he said it would be preferable for people to respond to other bloggers in their own space (weblog), rather than leave comments in another person's weblog:
"Weblog comments incite duels. Duels are bad for society. We should all forego comments and return to carefully blogging responses -- including responses we disagree with, but excluding responses we cannot tolerate."
It's interesting to note that Mark's advice seems to go against the grain of what Generation Y does - frequent comments on other blogs, using IM to converse instantly and in real time. So on the one hand Mark's advice is old-fashioned and out of touch with what 'the kids' do these days. But on the other hand I agree that we should learn to take deep breaths and compose thoughtful responses on our personal weblogs - instead of engaging in knife-fights on someone else's territory.
Related to this topic, I've just finished an experiment where I tried to publish a short and pithy post every day. Off-the-kuff things. It didn't work for me though, as I'm more comfortable writing long-form articles and pondering things before I post. But then I'm also more of an 'email' person than an 'IM' one. Perhaps there is a generation gap (I nearly said a 'disconnect', but that's a loaded term in the Web world). Whereas Gen Y like to send messages to their tribes in real-time, previous generations prefer to 'compose' their messages and 'publish' them when they're good and ready. If that's the case, is RSS Time fast enough for Gen Y's?
Knowledge Management is a term that many people dislike, myself included. Firstly it's a misnomer - you can't "manage", at an organization or corporate level, something as subjective and contextual as knowledge. It's even debatable whether you can manage knowledge at a personal level - because we don't always know what we know.
Secondly, the term 'knowledge management' has become one of those awful IT cliche buzz words - like (my personal favourite) "leverage" and "portal". People who want to sound important in IT business meetings, but actually know little about IT, use buzz words frequently. e.g. "Yes we are addressing that with our new Knowledge Management initiatives, which will leverage off our Web Portal."
But despite these faults, the term 'knowledge management' is widely accepted as the name of a business discipline (alongside 'accounting' and 'marketing' and so forth). So it makes sense to go with the flow and continue to use the term. Indeed I've done so in my own weblog categorisation, which mostly matches the community topic mapping applications I use. It isn't my purpose here to try and change the term 'knowledge management'. I do however want to try and grasp what exactly is knowledge management and how is it done in the real world?
I came across an interesting paper that debunks some myths about KM. Written by Professor T.D. Wilson of the University of Sheffield, the paper is provocatively entitled The nonsense of 'knowledge management'. The professor researched journal papers that had the term 'knowledge management' in their titles and he found that the occurance of such papers grew exponentially from 1997 onward. His data takes us to 2002, which was the peak but also showed signs of a slow-down. Professor Wilson discovered the following tendencies among the journals he researched (nb: I've separated the points into a numbered list):
1. A concern with information technology.
2. A tendency to elide the distinction between 'knowledge' (what I know) and 'information' (what I am able to convey about what I know).
3. Confusion of the management of work practices in the organization with the management of knowledge.
The 3 things above aren't the Professor's conclusions, just an excerpt I've selected that covers what I consider to be 3 key points. His actual conclusion later in that paper is that KM is a "management fad, promulgated mainly by certain consultancy companies". That may be so, but I'm more interested in what KM is in practice in the business world.
I want to pick up on the third point from above, "management of work practices in the organization". This is dismissed by Professor Wilson in his conclusion as a "Utopian idea", but I believe it is a practical way forward for KM. The current crop of personal content management and 'social software' tools (weblogs, wikis, etc) go some way to giving individual workers control over their information gathering and sharing. It's by no means a perfect solution - I've written before that I'm skeptical about how many 'normal' people (i.e. non-geeks) will use these technologies. But even so, technologies such as weblogs do emphasize subjectivity and context - which as I mentioned at the beginning of this post are two main tenets of 'knowledge'.
One of the best articles I've seen on KM was written a week or so ago by Dave Pollard. He entitled it Confessions of a CKO: What I should have done. As the title indicates, Dave used to be a "Chief Knowledge Officer" (at Ernst & Young I think? if so, then it's one of the consultancy firms that Professor Wilson picked on in his paper!). In a previous article, Dave had outlined his principles of KM and in this latest article he tackles the processes. They are grounded in the following observation:
"...I realized that we have been looking at it all wrong, from above, from a systems perspective, instead of from ground level, from an activity level."
Which is another of saying that KM should be bottom-up, rather than top-down - a theme that I've written on before (as have many others in the blogging world).
What really grabbed me about Dave's article was his ideal "job description" for KM - or "Work Effectiveness Improvement" as he re-named it. He outlined 6 bullet points and I've decided to crudely cut out the action points from those, which ironically loses the context somewhat. But generally speaking there are far too few KM action points in the world (as opposed to reams and reams of KM theory). So here goes:
1. Introduce personal content management and social networking tools.
2. Provide personalized training, tools, suggested processes and 'cheat sheets' to workers; plus provide recommendations for more systematic changes.
3. Establish standards, procedures, filters and measurements to reduce unnecessary e-mails, information flows, paperwork, meetings and interruptions.
4. Develop voluntary training programs.
5. Assess the aggregate cost to the organization of information; and objectively evaluate information adequacy, quality, and overload, and recommend changes to tools, repositories, and processes.
6. Develop a set of Work Effectiveness Principles.
The key point I take away from Dave Pollard's article and Professor Wilson's paper is that Knowledge Management isn't just a term to be used and abused in management meetings and journal papers. Knowledge Management - despite being mis-named - is a personal, collaborative, active 'doing word'. It is founded on subjectivity and context.
Let me put it this way: Knowledge Management should be a verb, not (as the word 'management' implies) a noun.
Our jobs as KM researchers or practitioners is to enable that in organizational settings. Now... if only I could get such a job! I'm currently a Web Producer, but I much prefer working at the Analysis and Strategy level. So I'd be interested to know how Dave Pollard worked his way to be a CKO, as that's something I'd like to aim towards.
I'd be interested in feedback from readers as to how one gets a job in the KM area. Do you work as a KM [something]? What do you do in your job to enable 'knowledge management'?
I've begun the push to introduce wiki and weblog technologies into the company I work for. As I wrote in my last post, I'm aiming to enhance Information Flow within my company. There is some initial skepticism from my colleagues about wikis and weblogs, but mainly due to unfamiliarity with these tools. For example, one concern is of the unstructured nature of Wikis when compared to the highly-structured nature of Content Management Systems. Wikis and Weblogs are often seen by people as being replacements for Content Management and Document Management Systems. And in a sense it is a choice between two types of Knowledge Management: Bottom-Up (wikis/weblogs) vs Top-Down (CMS's, Doc Mgmt). But right now I see wikis/weblogs as being complimentary to CMS's and Doc Mgmt systems - not replacements. There is still a need for structured information in a corporate setting and probably there always will be, but what wikis and weblogs potentially bring to the table is collaboration and a publish-subscribe culture.
Having said that, there's no doubt that wikis/weblogs would be much stronger technologies if we could discover how to add layers of structure to the information that we produce using these tools. But that's when the Semantic Web looms into view like a giant blimp and techies start throwing 3-letter acronyms at each other like paper airplanes. Long story short: when the day arrives that we able to structure Web information from the bottom-up in a practical and user-friendly manner, that's when wikis and weblogs may begin to replace CMS's and Doc Mgmt systems.
All this doesn't stop us from implementing wikis and weblogs now as tools to foster collaboration and easy information publishing. That's basically what I'm aiming to achieve at my company. Today I had a look at Twiki and I came across this excellent presentation by Twiki creator Peter Thoeny, which he made to LinuxWorld on 21 Jan 2004. There's a lot of great advice in this presentation, but the things I want to highlight are his views on Knowledge Management. He makes the point that Knowledge Management is typically viewed as "control over content" and this is what conventional CMS's aim to achieve. He argues that knowledge cannot be managed, it can only be enabled. This is a point that resonates with me, because I think that "knowledge" is subjective and therefore cannot be 'captured' as an objective entity. Information can be captured though - and that's where wikis and weblogs come in. They enable anyone and everyone to capture (write down) information. Knowledge needs context - the reader's.
This is all fine and dandy in theory, but the practical reality is I have to convince my company that wikis and/or weblogs are a viable KM solution. A lot of people still subscribe to the "top-down" approach of KM. With regard to Intranets, the top-down approach says that Intranet content needs to be controlled. That there needs to be a gatekeeper or webmaster who decides what is appropriate for publishing and what is not. Of course, I don't agree with this approach - this weblog isn't called Read/Write Web for nothing! To my way of thinking everyone has the right and ability to not just consume information, but produce it too. And this is the fundamental benefit that wikis and weblogs provide. The question is: are corporates ready for the read/write culture, or is the need to control information going to remain for a while yet? I'm asking this question in the context of a corporate Intranet, but it's the exact same question being asked of journalism, politics, marketing weblogs, book publishing, music, etc etc.
All in all, my colleagues were open to using wikis and weblogs - as long as they're targeted at the right problem and to the right audience. That is, ordinary people must be motivated to use the tools ("passionate" is a word that was used) and it must be a suitable context. For example, a Wiki could be used to enable communication between teams, as an alternative to team members using email to send and store work-related information. My colleagues are enthusiastic (albeit slightly skeptical) about me testing out these technologies and seeing what evolves. I'll let you know how it goes!
Dina Mehta wrote today about implementing Weblog, Wiki, IM, and other collaboration technologies into an Intranet environment, to replace an "archaic" Knowledge Management system and improve inter-office communication. I'm embarking on similar activities with the company I work for, so I'm eagar to read about others experiences. In my work, I've made a couple of proposals to IT mgmt about using weblog and wiki technologies. They seem interested, so I'm now going to set up some test runs using open source technology. I've got my eye on Twiki as an Intranet-focused wiki and Movable Type as an extensible weblog system. I'll be writing about my experiments with these two products in the future, because I'm as curious as everybody else how "normal people" will react to this technology in a corporate setting. Especially as I not only have to convince business people, but IT people too.
Dina also adds, about KM in general:
I'm not sure this fits into traditional definitions of Knowledge Management (i really dislike the term) - i wish someone would coin a really neat term for it.
I feel the same about the phrase "Knowledge Management". To me, KM is full of fluffy words and phrases that have little practical value in the real world. It's too easy for so-called "Knowledge Management Consultants" to swan into organisations and pontificate about leveraging 'this' and setting up processes for 'that'. It's all so top-down, all talk and no action. The thing I like about wikis and weblogs is that it's bottom-up, there are no rules or processes or KM systems trying to pen workers in like sheep. KM is like a sheepdog and KM Consultants are the Shepherds. Except the 'sheep' are actually people, not sheep, so they resist herding.
With wikis and weblogs, people can just click a button and type (notice I said 'can' - it remains to be seen whether they actually do). People can produce information, subscribe to information they value, edit each others information. It's like a flow of information and Knowledge gets created in the mix and mingle of it all.
Information Flow is the term I suggested to Dina to replace Knowledge Management. It's not an original term, I've heard people like Dave Winer use it. Information Flow is what wikis and weblogs enable. To "manage" knowledge suggests a top-down approach where we get to tell Knowledge what to do. Well guess what, knowledge can't be ordered around. Information routes itself around of its own free will. What's more, Knowledge is in the eye of the beholder - i.e. it's a Subjective thing, not Objective. Am I mixing my metaphors? Sorry, it is late on a Friday...
Hey, maybe I can style myself as an "Information Flow Consultant" :-) I'll get the business card made up on Monday morning!
Thought a) Some people post too much. Recently I subscribed to 7 Journalist Bloggers - 6 of them post too many items, so I've fallen behind already. One of them has 81 unread items sitting in my RSS Aggregator and it's only 3 or so days worth. It's too much! I don't have the motivation to catch up, so I will probably unsubscribe from most of those Journo bloggers. The 1 Journo blogger whose quantity I can keep up with is Jay Rosen, who posts 1 or 2 long essays per week. That's more my style.
Thought b) Robert Scoble has admitted he's a "Blog Addict". He's taking a 1-week holiday from blogging to clear his mind. While I'm not on the same scale as Robert, I have to admit also that my blogging is beginning to become all-consuming for me. The positives: I'm actively writing and generating ideas because of blogging, I'm watching less tv and reading newspapers less, I'm interacting on an intellectual level with people from all over the world. The negatives: family time does suffer, I'm reading less 'real' books, there are too many interesting things to keep up with and so one tends to lose focus.
Thought c) Will blogging ever be anything but an "online diary" to Normal People? I'd like to think it will hit it big sometime soon, but let's face it - we're a minority (or is it a cult?).
Thought d) Does Location matter more than than The Blogosphere would like to think it does? Is blogging too American-centric? I live in New Zealand, so I don't get to attend any of the blog conventions, blogger lunches, etc. And I do feel like I'm missing out on something. e.g. nobody sent me an invitation to Orkut (it's invitation only). I'm probably not interested in Orkut anyway, but it did make me wonder if living in New Zealand is affecting my ability to actively participate in the blogosphere.
Thought e) Somehow related to Thoughts c & d, but was Howard Dean's polling failure related to the fact that blogging isn't REAL enough? Location (of votes in this case) matters.
Thought f) I keep thinking about my Microcontent Wiki idea, which really revolves around trying to keep up with conversations and aiming for a sense of permanance to them which is missing. e.g. when is the tipping point for when blog conversations (via the comments sections on peoples blogs) peter out? Sometimes I want to go back to a conversation two months later and re-start it, but I know that no one apart from the original author will be notified and so the momentum of the original conversation is never regained. We need places where ideas can reside and continue being debated for all time. Wikis are the right tools for this, mostly. Except they aren't good at the Subscribe part of the PubSub equation. And Wikis to me don't have the same personal touch of weblogs - Wikis ain't Avatars.
(this thought is inspired by Erik's interesting post about effectiveness, which has got my brain spinning - but I don't know that I'll have anything further to contribute until a few days, when the conversation will probably be finished).
Thought g) Attention. Where do I start with this one... Pick me, pick me. It may be a democracy of ideas, but sometimes it feels like a Horserace (in the American politics sense of the word).
These are just Saturday Morning thoughts, before the real day starts. Ah, my daughter's just woken up and needs my attention :-)
One of my 12 main categories for this weblog is Corporate Weblogging. I recently wrote my category headings in the form of a manifesto, so here is how I actually phrased it: "Weblog technology can be used to enhance Corporate/Business communications and KM."
Thus far I haven't written much on this theme, but it's something that's been percolating and bubbling away in my brain over the past year or so. It's a very important subject to me, because I'm keen to marry my interest in weblogging technologies to my day job. If my life was an XML file, then my goal with blogging would be to do an XSLT transfer from Amateur to Professional. It's that old maxim about getting paid for what you love doing. I'd dearly love to get paid to develop weblogs, but realistically the only way for me to do that is to introduce weblogging and similar technologies (such as Wikis) to my company.
My day job is Web Producer in a medium-sized New Zealand company. I've come to the conclusion that there is potential for weblogging technology to be used at my workplace, on our Intranet in particular. The company I work for is very project-oriented, as opposed to being run by a bunch of middle managers. This type of culture, I believe, could take advantage of weblog technologies internally to disseminate project and other business information. There are many advantages to a project-oriented culture - e.g. it's a flat hierarchy and so it's more dynamic and responsive to change, kind of like the Web in fact. However one of the disadvantages of a project-oriented workplace is that information stays within silos. One project team often won't know what another project team is doing, even though there may be a lot of knowledge they could share that would be mutually beneficial and therefore benefit the company as a whole.
So I've taken it upon myself to try and kick-start some weblogging and wiki initiatives in my company, to get information flowing like it should. I'm an established personal blogger now, and one of only two people in my company who even knows what weblogging is, so I'm in a unique position to begin implementing weblog technologies in 'the real world'. Of course there's still the issue that 'normal people' have no interest in writing. As Nova Spivack memorably put it recently: "I like blogging. Everyone I know likes blogging. But let's face it, we are all a bunch of geeks."
Nevertheless, corporate blogging has potential. I forsee weblogging and wiki technologies will be most useful in enabling bottom-up Knowledge Management in my company - via our Intranet.
Looking around the Web, it's quite hard to find practical information on using weblog technology in a corporate setting. What I have found so far seems to be mostly related to using weblogs as an external marketing tool. For example, Dina Mehta pointed to a Microsoft Marketing manager who uses blogging to converse with his customers. That's great, but external blogging isn't suitable for the place I work for. You really need to have a significant proportion of customers/clients who are both tech-savvy and motivated to use the Web regularly, in order to achieve anything with external blogging. So the internal Intranet is where I must focus my attention.
Keith Robinson regularly writes about using weblogging technology on his company's intranet. He uses Movable Type for parts of his employer's Intranet. I've found Keith's articles to be very useful and relevant to me - check out a recent article from him that describes how he implemented MT for a Policies & Procedures website. Using weblog tools as an easy-to-use and adaptable Content Management System is one way to introduce blogging into corporations. DL Byron notes:
"I'm consulting for a large corporation and it's fascinating to watch my peers embrace blogs and blogging. They're still working out how to use them internally, but have had success externally and I expect the same. Besides the communication within teams, I'm trying to help them understand the simple content management aspect of blogging."
I agree that success in corporate blogging has been mainly with external customer-facing blogs, and mostly sales and technology-oriented ones at that. Also don't forget about people like Robert Scoble, who is pushing the boundaries between personal/corporate blogging. His opinions are his own and he doesn't speak for Microsoft, yet he is quite obviously hyping his employer for all it's worth on his blog. His readers push back too, which is a sign of Robert's success and perhaps points the way forward for Political Candidates - involve your audience, engage them in conversations.
Today Digital Web asked "Is it year of the blog for corps?" I think it may be the year that internal company blogging begins to gain traction. My own corporate blogging efforts will probably be in the Knowledge Management arena - my users will be employees rather than customers. Plus my company already has an easy-to-use Content Management system for the Intranet, so I don't need to use weblog tools as a CMS.
I see that the upcoming SXSW (South by Southwest Interactive Festival) will have a panel called "Blogging for Business", featuring Keith Robinson and DL Byron. I'd love to go along to that, however I'll be stuck on the other side of the world. Hopefully someone does a write-up of it.
Summary: I analyse a 1994 Personal Information Management program and compare its goals to what we want in in a similar tool in 2004. I discover the requirements are basically the same.
The blogosphere is mostly a synchronous give-and-take of content. People largely comment on and link to things that other people are commenting on and linking to. It's a circular flow of information, with a particular point in time always at the epicentre. It's why 99% of weblogs are primarily ordered chronologically - with the most recent post at the top of the page.
When I'm looking for information to quench my insatiable thirst for knowledge, I often use the Web in an asynchronous manner. That is, I like to read historical web documents and compare them to current blogosphere memes. The Wayback Machine is my friend in this regard. Why, just last week I discovered a gem of historical Web documentation: the Electronic Proceedings of the Second World Wide Web Conference '94: Mosaic and the Web. This is a record of all the presentations made to the 2nd annual WWW conference back in 1994. I intend to browse through most of the presentations in due course, but for now I want to tell you about the first one that tickled my Interest gland.
It's funny how a tool developed 10 years ago can still accurately describe the requirements of the 2004-era Web. That's exactly the case with PAINT, a "tool for individualizing the Web". Here's the executive summary:
The increasing complexity of navigating the Internet is becoming one of the fundamental obstacles to its effective use. This is due to the nature of the Internet, principally, a disorganized collection of both sites and site documents whose exponential growth rate rapidly is outstripping any user's ability to master it. There are two ways to deal with this complexity: reorganize the structure of the Internet or give each user the ability to organize an individual perspective of the Internet. Although the former would produce more global benefit, the latter is both easier to accomplish and potentially more beneficial to any individual or group of users.
Our approach, therefore, is to create a navigation tool which copes with Internet complexity at the individual, rather than the organizational, level. This tool, PAINT (Personalized, Adaptive Internet Navigation Tool), allows the user to impose a hierarchical organization on Internet sites and documents of interest by creating categories under which to group sites. Such categorization can be used not only by an individual user, but also can be shared among groups of users with similar interests. PAINT will also provide local automatic classification based on user parameters and user behavior. That is, PAINT will record visited locations and categorize them according to past use. The user is then free to examine the automated organization, modify it, and make it a personalized view of the Internet. In our report, we will describe the PAINT tool, its use, and some preliminary investigations of local, automatic categorization.
This webpage, even though nearly 10 years old, still in a nutshell describes what we're looking for in a PIM (Personal Information Management) appliance circa 2004. You can get all fancy and talk about wanting agents to gather data automatically, or using Bayesian filters, or latent semantic indexing. But really it still boils down to this: we want a tool that (in the words of Paint) individualizes the Web.
Take the following sentence from the first paragraph in that 1994 webpage. It outlines the central problem - complexity - and the two general solutions. In red type, I've added how these two solutions are (generally speaking) being approached now:
There are two ways to deal with this complexity: reorganize the structure of the Internet (2004 = the Semantic Web) or give each user the ability to organize an individual perspective of the Internet (2004 = bootstrapping; eg what tech bloggers are now trying to do with their weblog taxonomies).
The program PAINT was designed to take the second approach. Paint wanted to put the user at the centre of their own personal Web:
This tool, PAINT (Personalized, Adaptive Internet Navigation Tool), allows the user to impose a hierarchical organization on Internet sites and documents of interest by creating categories under which to group sites.
The key things to note: PAINT enables people to create a hierarchical organization for their information, by grouping items into categories. Hmm, sound familiar?
PAINT circa 1994 was first of all an extension of the Mosaic web browser's hotlist facility. Hotlists were the equivalent of Favourites in the modern IE browser, or Bookmarks in Netscape. But at the time, hotlists could not be organized into folders. You just had the one list of documents and websites. So it could be argued that PAINT was simply a description of what IE Favorites or Netscape Bookmarks became a couple of years later - a hierarchical set of folders with which to store website URLs.
But I think PAINT's goals were deeper than that. Look at your usage of Favorites or Bookmarks today - do you use them as a way to categorize information you find on the Web? Do you organize your information into a hierarchy using the folders available to you? If you're like me, once upon a time you made an effort to do all this, but it long ago fell by the wayside. With the advent of RSS and Google I hardly ever use my IE Favorites anymore! And yet we still have this over-riding need to organize our information on the Web...
But obviously I can only take a comparison of PIM requirements then (1994) and now (2004) so far. What's different now? For a start we've had an exponential increase in the amount of data and information on the Web, thanks in part to having weblog tools that allow anyone (technical or no) to publish on the Web. But perhaps more fundamentally, information on the Web is now published as "microcontent". Information exists in "chunks", and each chunk of information is defined with a permalink. True, we haven't yet reached the stage where individual paragraphs or even sentences are given permalinks - but maybe that world of data isn't too far off.
So, could PAINT - or more likely a PAINT boosted with 2004-era technologies - be used to help us build weblog taxonomies based on categorizing our content hierachically? Well yes, but we're already building such tools. Dave Winer has developed a product called Channel Z which categorizes weblog posts into categories created by the author. k-collector allows bloggers to create and post to categories in a shared directory. And some clever bloggers (eg Paul Ford, Erik Benson, Bill Seitz) have created their own automated back-linking categorizing extravaganzas. So we're moving towards the goals that PAINT (and others I'm sure) defined back in 1994, and that visionaries such as Ted Nelson and Vannevar Bush defined decades before that. We haven't got there yet though. Most of us still muddle our way manually organizing our Web content. PIM Nirvana hasn't yet been developed. But with initiatives such as Chandler taking over the mantle from PAINT as the next big thing of PIMs, the circle of Web innovation continues and the dream lives on. Everybody wants to control and be at the centre of their information environment - will we ever succeed?
I've just returned from 4 days holiday. I was disconnected from the Web for the entire time. This was a good thing, as I spent lots of quality time with my family. Now I'm back sitting in front of my PC at home. I've spent the last hour reviewing stuff in my RSS Aggregator. But with 4 days worth of updates to dig through, I've barely made a dent in clearing out my RSS Aggregator! So rather than totally swamp my mind with new data, I decided to take the plunge and click the Mark All Read button. It's a drastic move I know, but it's the only way to keep my holiday clearheadedness intact. Plus, do I really want to engage myself in the RSS-Data debate? That's a rhetorical question ;-)
I did however bookmark Jon Udell's latest articles, on browsers and interactive microcontent - yum! I'll devour those later. Plus I've bookmarked a Mezzoblue essay entitled "markup: Bulletproof XHTML". That's of interest, because I have my own XHTML essay brewing inside me...
Too. Much. Information. Data floods my mind and my actions become water-logged. What to do? There's too much to do. Information washes over me, my head is submerged. Metadata fills my nostrils. I'm drowning, help!
I'm being melodramatic :-) But actually I do feel this way sometimes. Right now I am struggling to manage my information flow. Let me list my current methods of information management:
- Email for communication
- RSS Aggregator for reading weblog feeds
- Weblog for writing
- Linkblog for aggregating Web links (I haven't started this yet)
- Personal journal (currently inactive, superceded by my public weblog)
- Paper notebooks, lots of 'em
- Various bits of paper with scribbled notes (a sea of them)
- Emails to myself with ideas
- Ideas Database - my dream app, not yet off the ground...it's possibly my own personal Tim Berners Lee Semantic Web-like folly.
- SMS (I don't use mobile phones much though)
- Tasks in Outlook (separate ones at work and home)
- To Do lists written in my diary or on pieces of paper
- Outlook calendar (work only)
- Diary: where I note down tasks, appointments, do my finances.
- Jottings in books
- Photocopies and printouts - screeds of 'em
And that's probably just the tip of the iceberg. I haven't even mentioned other popular forms of information management like Instant Messaging or Skype, neither of which I use. The point of all this is that I have too many data platforms. What I'd like to do is reduce it down to 4-5 key platforms. Solutions?
Erik Benson posits a "universal text box", which would be a one-size-fits-all writing tool. Whether you're entering a weblog entry, an email, a search query, a photo, a comment on someone else's blog post, a ping to a server - it all gets put in the "universal text box". This is a variation on one of my favourite themes: the Universal Canvas. To me it would be a dream web application. The nightmare scenario, however, is that Microsoft are already building it and it's called Longhorn :-0
Erik concludes that to make a universal text box, we'll need to reduce and consolidate in terms of functionality and features:
"I'd like to create a catalog of different ways that people can currently write to the web (web forms on a zillion different sites, all ignorant of one another, various desktop applications, all saying the same thing in a slightly different way) and find the lowest common denominator. It's good that so much exploration has happened (that's the benefit of allowing innovation to occur in a distributed fashion) but I think innovation in the "write to the web" action is going to have to go through a couple steps of choice reduction and consolidation before we fully cross the chasm."
nb: emphasis mine
This is pretty much what I want to do in my own personal world of information. I want to pare down my data platforms to the bare minimum. I want 4-5 platforms maximum, which could be the following:
- Writing tool - my weblog and my paper notebooks (I still need both computer and pen)
- Ideas: Database
- Communication: Email
- Tasks: Outlook (or Chandler when it is finished)
- Reading tool: RSS Aggregator
Ideally I'd like to have just one app: one tool that rules them all. Not everyone would agree with me though. Andrew Chen is one person who believes we need specialist tools. Andrew writes:
"We need to make things "fun" for people to enter in the necessary MetaData in order for things to work. And to do so, we need more than just some generic one-size fits all data-entry method. That's why I think we'll need speciallized tools for each type of "fun" meta-data that people might want to enter."
I appreciate what Andrew is driving at and I agree it is fun to play with all the new Web toys that come out. But on the other hand... the amount of choice in web applications these days gives me a headache. There are just too many tools for a single human to grok. For example, every time I go to the Mozilla Projects webpage I feel a tremendous pressure of information... like a dam that's near bursting. Or when I go to the W3C site, I'm battered by giant waves of protocols and standards. Or when I go to SourceForge.net, I'm soon engulfed by the flow of web apps.
Yes I would be much happier with less information, less tools. It's why I'm so fond of the humble Web Browser, which is the nearest thing we have to a Universal Information Application. Sure it's not perfect, it's not a "smart" client. But hey, we can write in it. We can read in it. We can plug things into it (like Flash, or the latest Laszlo app). The Web Browser will suffice for me thanks... at least until Erik builds the Universal Text Box, in which case I want one ;-)
