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

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relevance if we reflect upon the extent to which our interactions with our world are one step removed from direct experience and mediated, instead, through information items. In deciding to take an umbrella with us to work, we may check the Web for a forecast even before we look outside. In the other direction, many of the actions we take to effect change in our world (e.g., reserving a hotel room or delivering flowers for a friend in the hospital) are accomplished through an exchange of information items such as Web forms and emails.

      Are we entering a new “Neolithic” age of information? What would it mean to “settle down” in a digital space of information? The pioneers among us have already long had settlements on the Web in the form of personal (or “professional”) web sites. The rest of us are catching up. We may have one or several personal and professional web sites. We have Facebook66 accounts and LinkedIn67 accounts. We may even post our autobiographies to Wikipedia68. We can construct buildings or whole islands in Second Life69. A complete list of possibilities for the “settlement” of the Web gets longer with each passing moment.

      And this is just the beginning. As we shall explore in the coming chapters, we can readily mold our digitally encoded information environment through a proliferation of tools—some of our own construction, many more crafted by others but available cheaply or for “free.”

      Settling down on the Web in this manner need not mean a concomitant “settling down” in our physical world. To the contrary, many of us may already feel a greater freedom to travel with assurances that we can keep in touch through email, text messaging, tweeting and voice-over-IP (VOIP). A permanent locatable presence on the Web may engender additional freedoms of movement in our physical world. We can post changes of physical and email address. Our web presence may “speak” for us in many routine situations—keeping a boss notified of changes in project status, for example, or keeping family and friends informed of our progress on a trip. We can grant controlled, qualified access to our calendars. We can even, if we choose, “tweet” our movements minute by minute. There is a real possibility that, through our devices and our Web settlements, our information can function as a kind of alter ego—the Enkidu to our Gilgamesh70—speaking for us, protecting us when we are otherwise occupied.

      Nomadic cultures still exist. A nomadic way of life thrives, for example, in large regions of Mongolia. Mongolian nomads are pastoralists—they tend their herds of cattle, yaks, sheep and goats. But they do not farm. Traveling through nomadic regions of Mongolia one is struck71 by an absence of two structures so pervasive in an industrialized world: roads and walls. Travel through the Mongolian countryside is by jeep over open land and few roads are maintained outside of its towns. Likewise, outside of the towns in Mongolia, one sees few permanent vertical structures of any kind: no buildings, no walls, not even fences.

      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.

      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

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