The Future of Personal Information Management, Part 1. William Jones

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      An informational settlement needs the metaphorical equivalent of both roads and walls⁷². “Roads”—in the form of search utilities and hyperlinks, for example, connect us to useful services and information (including the information in the settlements of others). Roads in the form of search engine optimization (SEO)⁷³ connect others to the services we want to provide and information we want to share.

      “Walls” have a roughly opposite function. We may erect informational barriers (with varying degrees of effectiveness) in the form of “do not call” lists or the “disallow” of a robots.txt file. We use encryption, password-protection, and verification devices such as CAPTCHA⁷⁴. We want to keep out the thieves, spammers and other unwanted intruders.

      Informational walls are also a way to keep our information “in.” Folders or tags, for example, if well-defined and consistently used, can provide a wall-like service in the partitioning of our information into useful groupings.

      Without roads we stay ignorant and isolated. Without walls we are vulnerable to disorder, intrusion and attack. But both are a curse as well as a blessing. One main road—Internet connectivity—brings us to a world of information but also brings us phishing attempts (“Urgent: Please update your account …”) and hateful computer viruses that destroy our personal information. A wall in the form of junk email detection may block us from noticing an important email message. We may even find ourselves on the other side of a wall of our own construction—unable, for example, to open an encrypted file we’ve created because we can’t recall the password.

      No PIM construct is purely “road” or “wall” but, instead, a mixture of each. This is true whether the construct is a supporting tool or technique, a strategy or an overall system of organization. Throughout this book, we’ll assess various constructs of PIM for their “road-like” and “wall-like” characteristics.

      For starters, let’s consider one of the most ordinary and widely used of PIM constructs: the file folder.

      How is a folder like a road? How is it like a wall? For good and for bad? The folder’s path is a kind of road (and aptly named as such). The folder’s representation in a containing folder or on the computer desktop is road-like. When things go well, we see the folder’s representation (e.g., a folder icon and the display of its name), recognize this as the folder that contains the information we seek and we open it to get at the desired information. By setting permissions for a folder we can realize a useful wall-like control over who can see and modify its contents. Also, folders keep our information grouped. Files and subfolders within move as the folder is moved. The grouping can be backed up or archived.

      For the bad, we sometimes forget the way, take a wrong turn, and then fruitlessly look for the information we seek within the wrong folder. Or, we fail to recognize the folder even though it is “right there” in front of us. In these cases, the road is poorly marked and the folder is more like a bad wall—hiding its contents and keeping us on the “other side” of our information.

      A recurring theme of this book is that, with the right tools and techniques of PIM, we can build roads and walls in our practice of PIM that work for rather than against us. Consider the fast, index-supported desktop search that is now standard on current operating systems. Evidence suggests that, at least for the return to documents and other files, people continue to prefer a road-like navigation through folders and subfolders⁷⁵. However, on those occasions when navigation fails, people can now turn to search as an alternate “teleporting” method of return⁷⁶.

      Furthermoe, consider the conventional file manager and its support for viewing and working with folder contents. The traditional model is perhaps too “wall-like” in the implementation of its features for file manipulation. We cannot easily see the contents of several folders at the same time. More recently, however, we now see support for “libraries”⁷⁷ and a outliner-like “in-place expansion” of folder shortcuts⁷⁸ as tool support that lets us break down the “walls” between folders in cases where we want to see a larger view of our information.

1.7 THE PLAN FOR THE REMAINDER OF THE BOOK

      The remaining chapters in Part I (“The Future of Personal Information Management, Part 1: Our Information, Always and Forever”) are as follows.

      Chapter 2. Some basics of PIM. How is our information personal? The six senses in which information is personal combine to form a personal space of information (PSI). How do we manage our information? PIM as the creation, maintenance and use of a mapping between need and information yields six basic activities of PIM. PIM is about minute-by-minute tactical decisions of keeping and finding. PIM also needs to be about longer-term meta-level strategies for maintaining, organizing, measuring and making sense of personal information.

      Chapter 3. Our information, always at hand. How do we manage when a device that fits in the palm of a hand affords access to a world of people and information that is by turns useful, entertaining, distracting and demanding? Through mobile devices, our physical and digital worlds meet—and sometimes collide. We’re always connected but always on call. How to avoid the dangers of multitasking “busyness.” How to really get “real” things done and, in the process, how to preserve precious memories for a lifetime and beyond?

      Chapter 4. Our information, forever on the Web⁷⁹. We must learn to live with, through and “on” the Web. Many of us look for ways to move from scattered “nomadic camps” on the Web to consolidated, permanent settlements where our investments in the management of our information pay off. We need help from our applications. How to transition from vertical, monolithic, “do everything” applications that fragment to horizontal, PIM-activity-centered applications that work together towards a common unity of personal information?

      Chapters in Part II (“The Future of Personal Information Management, Part 2: Building Places of Our Own for Digital Information”) are as follows.

      Chapter 5. Technologies to eliminate PIM? We have seen astonishing advances in the technologies of information management—in particular to aid in the storing, searching and structuring of information. These technologies will certainly change the way we do PIM; will they eliminate the need for PIM altogether?

      Chapter 6. GIM and the social fabric of PIM. We don’t (and shouldn’t) manage our information in isolation. Group information management (GIM), especially the kind practiced more informally in households and smaller project teams, goes hand in glove with good PIM.

      Chapter 7. PIM by design. What are some of the methodologies, principles, questions and considerations we can apply as we seek to understand PIM better and to build PIM into our tools, techniques and training?

      Chapter 8. To each of us, our own. Just as we must each be a student of our own practice of PIM, we must also be a designer of this practice. This concluding chapter looks at tips, traps and tradeoffs as we work to build a practice of PIM and “places” of our own for personal information.

      Some final notes and caveats:

      References to scholarly articles of direct relevance to PIM are grouped together into bibliographies at the end of both Parts I and II. Web references and non-PIM references for background reading are generally included directly in footnotes.

      I am an unabashed citer of Wikipedia (http://www.wikipedia.org/) articles when these are reasonably clear and objectively written. The interested СКАЧАТЬ