Exellent observations

Weblog:		The inter-personal information manager (iPim)
Subject:		Exellent observations
Date:		2003-11-01 17:43:41
From:		vanderwal

I have been working on something called the Model of Attraction, which includes the idea of a Personal Info Cloud (essentially a rough cloud if digital information that the user has found or has created that follows him/her everywhere and is available when needed.) It seems like the iPIM is a needed resource. I not only use the PIM functionality in my PDA and phone, but use the Internet connection on these devices to check a forwarded e-mail to my self that has the meeting info or happy hour address and time. I also use the mobile Internet to hit my Amazon Wish List to verify that the book I am about to buy at a local store is the one I am actually wanting to buy or to add or remove a book from the Wish List that I have seen in a store and liked or did not like. I, like many others, want my information with me at all times. I spent time and energy finding the information, but it is no use if I do not have an easy means to retrieve that information when I need to use it. I started (what is now called) a weblog years ago to store ideas and information I found so I can have it at work and home. The current iteration only goes back to December 2000, but I still will search Google to find information only to have my weblog pop-up as the top choice with information from six months prior or longer. Oddly I had found that information previously and wrote a note to myself (and whom ever else may have an interest) using the vocabulary that works for me. It is a system that has worked, but it seems there should be a means to have a more personalized version of this that is even more accessible or portable than Google.

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Exellent observations
2003-11-03 12:59:45 Mark Sigal | [Reply | View]

Thanks for your detailed comments, and will give your Model of Attraction document a read. Specific to your comments, I am particularly interested in the question of how related content items get linked together. Clearly, in the optimal world, I or others in my trusted network can grab stories of interest, product listings, product reviews, manufacturer's data, pricing information, etc., pull them into our personal content store, and the logical linkages can autonomously be built between the different items pertaining to a context. One example is, “Show me the five items drive a buying decision on a given product.”

Today, this process can work pretty well manually, and occurs all the time on an ad hoc basis (e.g., ask a friend who recently bought a digital camera what they bought and why). It seems with better tools that more of this process can get automated (caveat: I am a heavy skeptic of applications that are overly dependent on AI type of functionality).

Making information more “magnetic,” as your slide presentation alludes to, seems to be the right way to go. Proving this out in the real world is largely (in my opinion) a question of finding the balance between:
1. Manual vs. automated procedures: algorithmic analysis of text within content/links between documents/aggregate maps of a user’s click steps vs. simpler techniques like user-defined key word stamping
2. Personal, inter-personal and global data sources: personal information vs. trusted network sources vs. Google search-able
3. Information abstraction models vs. optimized for a specific run time environment: Always on and accessible anywhere on any device or within any application just makes sense in the age of mobility and in a world where we all have multiple modalities (home/work is a simple once) and truly good information is re-usable, but there is the lingering question of when highest common denominator vs. lowest common denominator practices prevail. My posting on When client applications matter: http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/wlg/3819 speaks to this one somewhat.

Thanks again.

Mark

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