Rhett Brown — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 16:45:19 GMT

Some branches of inquiry that your article inspired when I read it – that’s a compliment, by the way ;)

1) When discussing information accessibility and portability, one invariably strays into “universal object format” territory, and some interesting thought has been done on that subject. We have different formats – because we have different applications – because we have different users – who have different ways of thinking about the data they care about. Is there a useful meta-meta data format that will allow ANY information to be uniformly described, stored and delivered in a way that is useful to ANYONE? To realize your vision, you need that.

2) Personal data are weird – they don’t organize exactly like objects and tasks in the physical world. With data, we use applications and tools in part to achieve useful groupings (“Recent documents” lists are a good example) but we don’t find the hole we were digging last week by grabbing the shovel we used to dig it. It is somewhat intuitive to group information by what we do with it and the tools we use to manipulate it…

3) Are tags and labels universally useful? Maybe, but there are other ways to approach organization. In a perfect implementation of what I call the “Google Mail Vision”, you would have only 2 classifications for your data – “visible” and “not visible”. When you want to see data that is in the “not visible” state, you search for it to make it “visible” (in a search results list). What if the data itself does not contain search-able bits that are intuitively useful for searching on directly (e.g. compressed media, or music and picture files)? Currently, you bandage on a fix in the form of a tag or grouping that will immediately come to mind when you are looking for those data. But one day, your search tool might be smart enough to fingerprint and relate your data across many dimensions (e.g. English language and audio, emotion and imagery, etc.) and show you useful results without you having to pre-organize it. I see the benefit in combining that with tags, but there is a point of diminishing returns. You end up searching for tags and within tags anyway…

4) In my opinion, this brings into focus a somewhat perpetual issue in the development of humanity – we have and always will advance our ability to collect more and more information. We then develop methods for storing and processing that information, and as a species, one of our primary methods is specialization within societies. But the kicker is that until an individual can physically exist forever, he or she will always be forced to decide what to store and process PERSONALLY. Thus, we must each devise a unique methodology that implements certain tools and information taxonomies, spending time to organize either in front of the process (i.e. creating folders and tags for browsing) or on the back end (i.e. searching). In my HUMBLE opinion, this means the affliction of disorganization is most effectively treated by pruning the set of data you are trying to organize. That strategy even works great for life away from your computer!

Thank you for the article…

Boxes and Arrows: Comments by Rhett Brown