magpie's shiny things

In a recent issue of Forbes mag­a­zine (May 7th, 2007) sev­er­al authors wrote short essays on the nature of net­works. One of which (titled “90 Years of Networks” by Amanda Schupak) includes a nifty lit­tle time line of sig­nif­i­cant events in the his­to­ry of net­works and net­work­ing. In the 1991 spot she includes the following:

Finnish pro­gram­mer Linus Torvalds kicks off open-source move­ment, a sort of wiki of com­put­er code, with a plea for con­tri­bu­tions to Linux oper­at­ing system.

Note care­ful­ly the wording.

Open source is now described as being wiki-like rather than a wiki being described as being open source-like.

Please don’t be tempt­ed to exclaim — but that’s a tau­tol­ogy! a wiki is a sort of open source project. You’d be miss­ing the point. This is about par­a­digm and analo­gies, not about hier­ar­chi­cal typed-classification sys­tems. The more famil­iar object is being used to describe the less famil­iar object. In the view of this writer a wiki is more famil­iar to her read­ers than open source.

That grind­ing sound you hear is my world view rub­bing up against the curbing.

PS I’d love to give you a link to the arti­cle but in the three days since I pulled it up to read, it has dis­ap­peared behind the for-pay wall. pfft.

I’ve been mess­ing about with GTD for about 6 months and the ben­e­fits have been immense: A clean inbox at least a cou­ple of times a week, the dis­ci­pline (and per­mis­sion) to skim and file email with­out think­ing that I need to ack every sin­gle FYI that cross­es my screen, gro­cery lists that actu­al­ly reflect meal plans…

But it does­n’t quite fit and I haven’t been able to fig­ure out why. I work like mad — there’s always some­thing next on the list and I get the wid­gets cranked. Some days… oth­er days it’s just an over­whelm­ing sea of ran­dom tasklets swim­ming around my note­book and fail­ing to coa­lesce in my brain. I end up spend­ing a cou­ple of hours read­ing lol­cats just to avoid the reel­ing sen­sa­tion I get every time I open my con­text lists. Continue read­ing “Getting Too Physical in GTD”

Peter Moreville con­tin­ues to drop peb­bles (boul­ders?) into my intel­lec­tu­al pond. This morn­ing it was Social Network Analysis. A short piece sum­ming up how he found him­self con­nect­ed to a net­work of peo­ple study­ing, well, net­works of peo­ple and how they both inter­sect and build the infor­ma­tion net­works that that they are oper­at­ing in. A tasty overview of his route from a pre­sen­ta­tion through a book and on to sev­er­al peo­ple. You are invit­ed to fol­low along through the linkage.

Why the hell did­n’t I meet this guy when I was in grad­u­ate school? Oh yeah, wrong school — I went to UW. (Yup I have one of the last Masters of Librarianship degrees ever grant­ed. I think it’s cool.)

In a pre­vi­ous post I talked about Adam Greenfield’s essay “All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace” as an impor­tant com­pan­ion piece to Moreville’s Ambient Findability.

In his essay Greenfield also describes the haz­ards of allow­ing engi­neers to design the inter­ac­tions between humans and tech­nol­o­gy iter­at­ing the com­mon under­stand­ing that we the users are, at the moment, pret­ty roy­al­ly screwed.

I have to quib­ble with one state­ment that he makes- sys­tems designed by engi­neers always fail their end-users even when (not -unless- as Greenfield says) those users are the engi­neers them­selves. Just ask any­one who pounds code for a liv­ing how they feel about the bug database…

I’ve looked at a cou­ple of e‑book read­ers in the last month. So far noth­ing com­pelling has appeared. This morn­ing I had the though that the thing that will make me buy an e‑book read­er is:

mar­gin­a­lia

I love to write in books but I don’t any­more because mar­gin­a­lia influ­ences sec­ond read­ings too much. If I could cre­ate mar­gin­a­lia, (and under­lines, and high­lights, and snarky lit­tle com­ments, and …) that I could then show or hide depend­ing on what I’m try­ing to do at the moment I would be a long way to per­suad­ed that an e‑book read­er was in my future.

Or how about the abil­i­ty to pass around the mar­gin­a­lia that we cre­ate — I could send you a file and you could add my notes as an over­lay to your notes on your copy of the text? How cool would that be? (How cool would the data set of twen­ty or thir­ty sets of mar­gin­a­lia for one book be? ooo the pos­si­bil­i­ties for analysis…)

Well, mar­gin­a­lia and a tech­nol­o­gy that is read­able by some­one with lousy eyesight.