magpie's shiny things

Some days it pays to fol­low the bun­ny trails. Having just fin­ished Peter Morville’s Ambient Findability, I wan­dered down the web trail and found a snarky lit­tle thing he wrote for the O’Reilly web site called UFOs and there way down at the bot­tom I found a ref­er­ence to Adam Greenfield’s “All Watched over by Machines of Loving Grace” — pays to read the foot­notes and cita­tions, no? Greenfield’s essay should be required read­ing to accom­pa­ny Ambient Findability.

I liked Moreville’s book, but I found his child­like delight in the rise of the always find­able future dis­con­cert­ing. I have that typ­i­cal intro­vert’s gut reac­tion of “hey, I don’t want you all to find me…” (Which Moreville alludes to/admits to in the UFO essay if not in Ambient Findability.)

Greenfeild’s essay bal­ances this delight in the pos­si­bil­i­ties with a dose of real­is­tic consideration.

Continue read­ing “Loving Grace”

I’ve added a blogroll to the site. Not, I can hear you think­ing, much in the way of news now is it? Prolly not.

I’m try­ing some­thing a lit­tle dif­fer­ent. Rather than the end­less­ly grow­ing col­lec­tion of links that I see spawned by vora­cious read­ers adding every­thing inter­est­ing they find. I’m going to keep the main blogroll to 5 to 10 sites at any time. Look for them to change every month or so.

Meanwhile enjoy a selec­tion of shiny good­ness from:

• //engTech
• Colour Lovers
• HorsePigCow
• Slashdot Book Reviews
• Susan Mernit

I’m pret­ty much a paper based GTDer; I just get along bet­ter with cel­lu­lose and ink. But for those of you who pre­fer to get things done elec­tron­i­cal­ly, over at Lifehacker, Gina has a nice arti­cle on the basics of set­ting up the var­i­ous parts of a GTD sys­tem in GoogleNotebook.

A sim­i­lar set­up can be cre­at­ed in a OneNote note­book using one sec­tion for each of the five basic cat­e­gories. The only hitch in this approach is that in OneNote you can’t share only one sec­tion of a Notebook. So you can’t give oth­er peo­ple access to your InBox with­out giv­ing them access to the rest of your notebook.

I don’t use OneNote for my Inbox so shar­ing isn’t an issue.

If your col­lec­tion of stuff is as big as my col­lec­tion you may want to divide your sys­tem into five note­books rather than using sec­tions in a sin­gle note­book. This solves the shared/not shared Inbox prob­lem and if you’re work­ing with real­ly large files over a net­work allows for some improve­ment in performance.

Once again the nag­ging ques­tions of on-line iden­ti­ty, authen­tic­i­ty, and dis­am­bigua­tion have come across my radar screen. Josh Clark over at GlobalMoxie post­ed a cou­ple of times this last week on both Spock and Wink. //engtech had a guest post on rep­u­ta­tion man­age­ment by Tim Nash ear­li­er in the month, and claimD and openID have shown up in most of the top tech blogs at some point in the last quarter.

We’ve already seen some of the pre­dictable con­se­quences emerge. Among them: iden­ti­ty theft for both prof­it and revenge, fir­ings for on-line activ­i­ties that don’t fit corp. images, and the iden­ti­ties of anony­mous par­ties (unin­ten­tion­al­ly) revealed through third parties.

Now I’m wait­ing to see what the unin­tend­ed con­se­quences of this on-line iden­ti­ty cri­sis and the attempts to fix it will be. Stay tuned.

This morn­ing I read Dan Russell’s series of essays on sense­mak­ing. Dan is a sort of meta/mega sense­mak­er. He tries to make sense of how peo­ple try to make sense of things. These essays won’t take you long to read and they aren’t hard to grasp.

But you may have on of those aha moments. I did; and now there is a new sign on my bul­letin board that says:

How to Make Sense:

1. Define — what was the ques­tions again?
2. Collect — who knows?
3. Organize — where does this go?
4. Iterate — lath­er, rinse, repeat.
5. Do — now what?

Now I know what it is that I actu­al­ly do all day. Explaining why I should get paid for it is anoth­er matter…