Trial By Fire

Documenting Ourselves

I stumbled upon a time-series of photographs taken by a Brasilian couple over the years from 1976 through to the present.  How can one help consider the context of your own life when seeing something like this.  It is the most personal example of the type of visual exposition of which Edward Tufte is so obsessed.

Without knowing these people, I am drawn into who they are, how they are changed.  The sharing of a mortal timeline of my own, though parallel and distant from theirs, stirs some kind of temporal sympathy.  Offspring, accomplishment, partners, friends, are suddenly drawn out in similar lines before me, and I am reminded that there is nothing that communicates so much information to us as another human face.

The web is the first repository of our shared lives, and there is no reminder so potent as this one.  What will happen when future technologies spread before us the passage of our ideas, aspirations, economies, personal lives, and politics in a semantic swarm of navigable canals more potent than we can imagine?

Chandler Suspense

Keep an eye on Chandler.  This has potential.

Kapor understands personal information management better than most.  To date, no personal information mangement tool has had the sophistication, elegance, and simplicity of the remarkable product, Lotus Agenda.  All other contenders either exhibit rigid database-like thinking or attempt to wax philosophical about the way we think.  Agenda was an insightful work of genius and remains so.

Chandler has more ambitious goals, but is born of the same need: to consolidate, share, organize, and re-organize the information we touch.  Right now, it's really a technical toy.  They're building the API, and even though it looks like it's moving slowly, they're meeting milestones as predicted, so I see some solid dedication and project management.  Building something so complex should take a while, it should require APIs and basic building blocks.  So, I'm certain they're on the right track.  My only fear is that it will, like Agenda, remain inaccessible to most people because it may be too abstract, or too elegant.  But, I'm keeping my fingers crossed.

Thomas Vander Wal has an interesting investigation going called Tools to Manage Information on Your Personal Hard Drive.  He says it's part of what's needed to manage "The Personal Info Cloud".  I'm not sure about what cloud he's on, but he seems sensible.  However, his list of tools highlights the current undifferentiated mess that typifies the collection of personal information and knowledge management tools.

When Chandler is closer to release, give it a try.  Help them out.  Seems like a great step in the right direction.