Boxes and Arrows: Comments by Patrick Dubroy

Patrick Dubroy — Sun, 11 Mar 2007 18:49:20 GMT

You’re right, the desktop OSes are finally giving us some better ways to manage our information. The problem is, it’s too late. For a lot of people (myself included), our personal information isn’t sitting on one computer. We’re using web-based email, Flickr, Del.icio.us, etc.

I deliberately didn’t go into that much technical detail in the article, but I think the real solution is going to need to deal with data that is distributed across many machines and web services. It’s really almost just an extension of semantic web ideas.

Patrick Dubroy — Wed, 28 Feb 2007 17:23:31 GMT

Kevin, I think you’re right—I do see Microformats as being part of the solution. As I mentioned in my earlier comment, there are several semantic web technologies that could be helpful in this area.

Patrick Dubroy — Thu, 01 Mar 2007 22:13:00 GMT

BumpTop is definitely cool. I would say that it is approaching things from the opposite direction though. I am interested in creating in the semantics of the objects, in defining a sort of vocabulary in which you can describe and interact with them. If this were in place, then BumpTop (or any other interface) could be used to manipulate and organize the objects.