Everynow

We are living in a time where there are not only many concurrent realities existing at once, but our understanding of “Now” is perhaps broader and more broken than most any time since the Middle Ages started sprouting into the Renaissance. This is nowhere more prevalent in our understanding of the future, particularly the near future. Future technologies and future living have been part of reality in and around us for decades. But the time gap between the few edge cases who are living with what most consider future technology and life to when it hits mainstream is ever increasing.

The Future is Here…

This stretch of living with future technologies as a regular part of our lives and those who are not there yet, or even living a generation of reality behind all while living in the same culture is something I’ve called the everynow. Everynow started about 2004 as a tongue-in-cheek riff on Adam Greenfield’s everyware term use. Everynow is the breadth reality in William Gibson’s “The future is already here - it’s just not evenly distributed” statement from 2003, which is an idea many have discussed for years prior, but with out such nice phrasing.

Breadth of Adoption Reality

It seems the everynow is about 20 years in breadth.

For years it seemed it was about 10 to 12 years and it was nice to see it in Steven Berlin Johnson’s wonderful book “Where Good Ideas Come From”, he talks about the reality of ideas taking about 10 years from inception to getting them into relatively broad public use. When you think of internet based email in the 90s and the use of corporate email internally and out through internet gateways to better connect freely and more unencumbered, it took about 5 years for email to get to roughly 99% inside the organization (many organizations were much closer to that 10 year mark). But, in the last couple years in particular that 10 years.

Internet of Things

This past week with Tom Coates’ Twitter account for his house, @houseofcoates getting some mainstream media press the difference from what Tom is doing (and thinking and playing with for a very long time) rather echoes things like MisterHouse which started in the late 1990s using X10 devices and services and internet enabling them using Perl. The demo site for MisterHouse allowed those on the web to see the live status of lights, messaging, home music service, and things like window shade open status, but also for quite a while allows any of us to modify them right from the web. Tom’s long interest and work with his House of Coates is the latest iteration and extension of this and his long work on web of data and internet of things. (By the way Tom’s work is quite good and worth tracking down.)

The chatter around the Internet of Things, which is far from mainstream exposure and partial understanding is nearly 15 years old since its first usage by Kevin Ashton, really took off around 2002 and 2003. Bruce Sterling’s still incredibly valuable framing of the Internet of Things in his Shape of Things book from 2005 added the incredibly helpful concept of Spimes to conversations (actually he seeded this in 2004 in a SIGRAPH presenation, “When Blobjects Rule the Earth”), thinking through, and development many of us had been wading in for a few years.

Information for Use and Reuse on Mobile

Another example is around mobile… When I think about this mobile explosion that has “taken place recently” there is very little that is different from the thousands of handfuls of us living with smartphones in the early 2000s and thinking of the capabilities and potentials and building them and living them, all while the many many thousands of us were swimming in the same pool of live with the billions of others around us. Many of use in the U.S. and Western Europe felt we were deeply behind those living in Japan and Korea and their understanding and living the realities of living a life with mobiles that augmented their reality as the devices and services enhanced their lives lived with the devices in them. As we developed use of our web based information for use on internet connected Palm and other similar devices in the 90s

But, from a consumer and early adopter framing the reality of what is potentially doable in the future and having that in place and in use for some time know then trailing all the way back to those living in prior realities and the frustrations (although they think they are manageable, but not realizing how poorly the tools and services are working for them) is pushing that everynow to a very confounding nearly 20 years.

Getting Info into the Field with Extension

This week I was down in Raleigh, North Carolina to speak at National Extension Technology Conference (NETC) 2008, which is for the people running the web and technology components for what used to be the agricultural extension of state universities, but now includes much more. This was a great conference to connect with people trying to bring education, information, and knowledge services to all communities, including those in rural areas where only have dial-up connectivity to get internet access. The subject matter presented is very familiar to many other conferences I attend and present at, but with a slightly different twist, they focus on ease of use and access to information for everybody and not just the relatively early adopters. The real values of light easy to use interfaces that are clear to understand, well structured, easy to load, and include affordance in the initial design consideration is essential.

I sat in on a few sessions, so to help tie my presentation to the audience, but also listen to interest and problems as they compare to the organizations I normally talk to and work with (mid-size member organizations up to very large global enterprise). I sat in on a MOSS discussion. This discussion about Sharepoint was indiscernible from any other type of organization around getting it to work well, licensing, and really clumsy as well as restrictive sociality. The discussion about the templates for different types of interface (blogs and wikis) were the same as they they do not really do or act like the template names. The group seemed to have less frustration with the wiki template, although admitted it was far less than perfect, it did work to some degree with the blog template was a failure (I normally hear both are less than useful and only resemble the tools in name not use). [This still has me thinking Sharepoint is like the entry drug for social software in organizations, it looks and sounds right and cool, but is lacking the desired kick.]

I also sat down with the project leads and developers of an eXtension wide tool that is really interesting to me. It serves the eXtension community and they are really uncoupling the guts of the web tools to ease greater access to relevant information. This flattening of the structures and new ways of accessing information is already proving beneficial to them, but it also has brought up the potential to improve ease some of the transition for those new to the tools. I was able to provide feedback that should provide a good next step. I am looking forward to see that tool and the feedback in the next three to six months as it has incredible potential to ease information use into the hands that really need it. It will also be a good example for how other organizations can benefit from similar approaches.

Tools to Manage Information On Your Personal Hard Drive

I have been battling the management of information on my personal hard drive on my TiBook. This is one element in my Personal Info Cloud (a self-organized information system that is managed by me and is there to assist me when I need information). I have been finding that my organizational structure is lacking on my hard drive as I have cross-purposes for the information.

An example is I am writing an article and I need to track down a journal article I have downloaded to my hard drive in the past. I store research info on my hard drive in directories by topic areas, such as an IA/UCD directory holding directories on user testing, facets, interaction design, etc. There are times when I am working on an article or essay and have stored helpful resources in a research directory in that project's directory, as I like to have information in close proximity to what I am working on. For each idea I am working on I nearly always have an outline building in OmniOutliner format and at least one graphical representation of the issue at hand, done in OmniGraffle. These two or more data sources are the foundation, along with research that help me further formulate the ideas.

I have gone far beyond what folders can offer, even using soft/symbolic links does not help me greatly. These files need metadata so that they can be better stored for searching, but they also need a project home. The project home should allow for note taking and links to files that are on my hard drive as well as external hyper links.

I have a handful of candidates that have been suggested over this past week from friends at the IA Summit in Austin or once I returned home. I will be downloading and trying them beginning next week (post Christening).

The Candidates

I have already loaded Curio and been trying it for a little more than a week. The tool is not as integrated as I would like. I have not had success dropping PDF or OmniGraffle files into the Idea Space. The external files are held in an organizer, but I can not annotate these files in a more direct manner. The Idea Space is much like a lightweight OmniGraffle and OmniOutliner, which I have and are better tools. I do like the Dossier, which is a questionairre for each project, but I would like to have more than one available for each project as it currently seems is the limit.

James showed me his implementation of iView, which is mostly a digital asset management system. James does most of his thinking in a notebook (possibly a moleskin) and is filled with text and wonderful drawings to capture his ideas. James in turn scans the contents of his notebook into his laptop and uses iView to annotate and view his ideas. The digital assets can be annotated and then sorted and grouped. This seems like it would work for some of my information, but not everything for me. I have not had a scanner for about a year and have not been used to having our new scanner available again so that I could scan in my graph paper notebook.

Jesse brought up VoodooPad as an option. VoodooPad is built on a Wiki technology. I am not a fan of Wiki technology for group project tracking, but for self annotation and having the ability to link to files on my hard drive by drag-and-drop I can see the value. Tanya mentioned she had a similar system using a personal Wiki that worked very well for herself in new environments. VoodooPad may be my next try as I really like having the ability to cross-link ideas.

I have been trying StickyBrain 2 for a few months now, but I have not been fully dedicated to trying it. The initial idea behind StickyBrain works for me, but the interface and the junk preloaded in it have cluttered the interface before I even began. The interface to add info into StickyBrian is very nice as it is in the mouse-related menu (right mouse click for those with such devices). Content in StickyBrain can be categorized, but that can get out of hand. StickyBrain also as a search tool, but unless I have annotated the information correctly, I do not always do so, I can not find it.

Bryan suggested AquaMinds NoteTaker, which I have not seen in action, but the site does offer very good movies that explain how information is entered and how the too can be used. To some degree this is how I use OmniOutliner, but NoteTaker seems to have far more functionality. This will be one I try and compare to OmniOutliner.

Lastly is Tinderbox a note taking tool and idea organizer. Tinderbox's strengths seem to be based on getting this information on to the Web, which is not my initial need. I know a couple people who have been very happy with Tinderbox in the past, but I do not know if they are still using Tinderbox. I looked at this tool when I was thinking about a change from my vanderwal.net weblogging tool that I build, but I was not thinking in terms of finding a tool to better organize my digital thoughts and artifacts of thought.

Conclusion

I will be downloading these of the next couple weeks and I will be writing reviews on them as I try them. I have a couple articles and other items due in the next couple weeks so I may be texting by fire and not having too much time to summarize the results of my testing.

Building a Web Based E-Notebook

The Journal of Digital Information has an article on Implementation Challenges Associated with Developing a Web-based E-notebook by Yolanda Jacobs Reimer and Sarah A. Douglas. This Journal article seems to cover good research information on personal information aggregation. The e-notebooks discussed are similar to weblogs, but are means of storing information for personal retrieval. The bibliography included in this is one that is worth some digging also.