Wonderful video discussion of personal organization methods
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SlashdotI recently watched an extremely enjoyable and inspiring presentation at Google by a researcher with University of Washington’s Keeping Found Things Found project. In the presentation, William Jones covers a wide range of organization topics, going beyond the usual folders vs. tags debate to a more comprehensive look at the how’s and the why’s of the ways people try to organize their information — and, more importantly, the ways people try to find their information again.
Clearly everyone knows computers still have a long way to go before they can match up with how our brains reference, process, and store information. There’s a huge impedance mismatch between how we think and how computers save, and the question is: must we “reinvent the desktop” from scratch (unlikely any time soon) or can we simply refine and enhance the metaphors already in place?
Years ago, I started spending a lot of time researching and investigating these questions. Readers of former incarnations of The Idea Basket will remember my “MediaVoom” mockups that showed a folderless metadata-based file storage system and next-generation interface. I also worked on couple of different Mac OS X applications that never got released — both providing features above and beyond the current Spotlight technology Apple has developed.
My hope is that OS X 10.5 “Leopard” that Apple will be showing off later this year will take Spotlight to a new level and will offer more ways to organize data besides mere name-based folders. I think Microsoft’s future plans for WinFS are also on the right track. But the jury is still out on just how effective any of this will be in getting users to add metadata to their stuff — because without user-supplied metadata, desktop search innovation and usefulness will remain limited and narrow in scope.
May 28th, 2006 at 6:30 pm
Great post, although I disagree about needing users to add meta data. That is not true at all.
What you have to recognize is that by building one relationship i.e. linking a document to a Person who authored the document you gain a lot. Why? Because you already have a lot of important information about the Person, which you can then use when looking for the file.
For example, if you have a CRM system you know what clients the person works with, what projects they are involved in etc. So by linking the document to the person you are also indirectly linking them to a whole lot more. And that stuff is very valuable.
There are numerous links like this that can be made automatically using what Microsoft is calling Meta-data promotion. For example for word documents you have Author, Template etc which can be used, for emails you have recipients and sender, for MP3’s you have things like Genre, Artist, Title etc… So you can get a lot of value automatically.