2009-07-05
On Taking Notes
Yesterday’s note on Ephemerality was a bit of an experiment. During the day at OpenTech, I’d not really been taking notes, but I had posted a few observations to Twitter. For the talk by Gavin Bell, I thought I’d try to type notes directly into the official iPhone Tumblr app.
This was my longest experience with typing on an iPhone or iPod touch, and I think I could get better with practice, but I wouldn’t enjoy learning. Looking back, I’m not sure the piece holds together well, and that might be because I still find editing hard: moving the insertion point via touch and the loupe effect seem far more fiddly than the combination of cursor keys and Emacs keystrokes available on the desktop.
It’s also hard to insert links into a piece composed on the iPhone; task switching is of course more painful than it is on a (admittedly more powerful) full-size computer. I really felt this when I was trying to keep up. It also makes the finished report far less useful.
In summary, I think the utility of getting the text up on the web live, especially from an iPhone, is far lower than I’d anticipated, and that in future I’ll stick to taking notes on paper. If I did ever want to try and liveblog an event, in the way Jeremy Keith does so well, I’d have to use a full laptop, since then I’d have the space to edit, streamline and add links to a post.
2009-07-04
Ephemerality
[This was an experiment in live note taking. Please see the follow-up, On Taking Notes.]
Gavin Bell at OpenTech
What I want from the web in five years. Self documenting lives. Happy with the idea of throwing away information, like newspapers. Twitter and Flickr disagree- have archives including social data but not real time; Twitter don’t make available past 3500 messages.
Will I want fourteen years of data? Benefits of forgetting. Amusingly forgets the name of a book about someone who can remember years-old data but couldn’t summarise plots. Brains remember significant activities. Stuff that matters. What to forget?
Aggregation is key (meant here as grouping of items onto clusters, not my meaning). iPhoto events. Abstraction services- photos for upcoming, possibly in future grouped by friend. hAtom? Date based URLs. Favouriting etc. Social tools to prune networks and renewal of identity through new networks.
Finding significant enents. Overview of important events. “Abstracting it for you wholesale.” Favouriting and similar single-click methods of approval. Social bleedthrough- Friendfeed likes. Looking at the past. Twitter social atlas? Preserving context around content and favourites.
