Recent Speaking Engagements

I have posted the last three presentations I have given in the last five days. The presentations and a little about each presentation are available as follows: IA for the Personal InfoCloud from the IA Summit, Folksonomy: A Wrapper's Delight a panel at the IA Summit, and The Blog as Personal Knowledge Managment from a panel at the local Potomac Chapter of ASIS&T.

Some of the ideas and themes in these will bubble up here fairly soon. I am also speaking in Austin at SXSW Interactive Festival this upcoming Sunday. Stop by and say hello.

Two Sides of the Local InfoCloud

The Local InfoCloud (one of four clouds, Personal, Local, Global, and External) focusses on access to information that is based on location, as well as membership. These two elements are related, but also can stand on their own.

The Local InfoCloud often uses the Local Area Network (LAN) as an example of its properties. The information on the LAN is open to all that are connected to the network and in many cases have rights to access the information. The information is not organized by the user nor categorized by them. The need to be connected in an office to the LAN is not as important as folks can access by Wide Area Network (WAN) or through an Internet portal that will securely provide access. The Internet portal then allows a mobile user to access the information, which breaks the need to be in a certain location.

Conversely, a mobile user may have access to information based on their location. Projects like Urban Tapestries show what is coming with location-based information. Commonly location-based services have been tied to GPS navigation services in cars that explain with the closest ATM, parking garage, restaurant, etc. are located in relation to your current position. Interacting with digital repositories to provide a review of a restaurant that is accessible in front of the restaurant, or the history of a building when standing in front of the building is also part of the Local InfoCloud. It too is not user organized or user categorized.

The two most important properties of the Local InfoCloud are location and membership. Location is obvious, but membership is less of a obvious relationship to the local moniker. However, membership is often associated with joining with others that have a common interest, bond, or goal. Membership can be framed as a nearness of interests and exclusive of those that do not have an interest. The members have drawn together as they have that common attraction. The Internet connection easily allows this type of grouping to occur.

Stitching our Lives Together

Not long ago Jeffrey Veen posted about Will you be my friend, which brought up some needs to better stitch together our own disperse information. An excellent example is:

For example, when I plan a trip, I try to find out who else will be around so I have people to hang out with. So my calendar should ask Upcoming.org, "Hey, Jeff says he's friends with Tim. Will he be in New York for GEL?"

This example would allow up to interact with our shared information in a manner that keeps it within our extended Personal InfoCloud (the Personal InfoCloud is the information we keep with us, is self-organized, and we have easy access to). Too many of the Web's resources where we store our information and that information's correlation to ourselves (, Flickr seems to use. The advent of wide usage of RSS feeds and RSS aggregators is really putting the user back in control of the information they would like to track. Too many sites have moved toward the portal model and failed (there are large volumes of accounts of failed portal attempts, where the sites should provide a feed of their information as it is a limited quantity). When users get asked about their lack of interest in a company's new portal they nearly always state, "I already have a portal where I aggregate my information". Most often these portals are ones like My Yahoo, MSN, or AOL. Many users state they have tried keeping more than one portal, but find they loose information very quickly and they can not remember, which portal holds what information.

It seems the companies that sell portal tools should rather focus on integration with existing portals. Currently Yahoo offers the an RSS feed aggregator. Yahoo is moving toward a one stop shopping for information for individuals. Yahoo also synchs with PDA, which is how many people keep their needed information close to themselves.

There are also those of us that prefer to be our own aggregators to information. We choose to structure our large volumes of information and the means to access that information. The down side of the person controlling the information is the lack of common APIs and accessible Web Services to permit the connecting of Upcoming to our calendar (it can already do this), with lists of known or stated friends and their interests.

This has been the dream of many of us for many years, but it always seems just around the corner. Now seems to be a good time to just make it happen. Now is good because there is growing adoption of standards and information that can be personally aggregated. Now is good because there are more and more services allowing us to categorize various bits of information about our lives. Now is good because we have the technology. Now is good because we are smart enough to make it happen.

(Originally posted at vanderwal.net.)

A Look at iPIM and Chandler

There are two articles that are direct hits on managing information for the individual and allowing the individual to use the information when they needed it and share it as needed. Yes, this is in line with the Personal Information Cloud.

The first article, The inter-personal information manager (iPim) by Mark Sigal about the problem with users finding information and how the can or should be able to then manage that information. There are many problems with applications (as well as the information format itself) that inhibit users reuse of information. In the comments of the article there is a link to products that are moving forward with information clients, which also fit into the Personal Information Cloud or iPIM concept. (The Personal Information Cloud tools should be easily portable or mobile device enabled or have the ability to be retrieved from anywhere sent to any device.

The second article is from the MIT Technology Review (registration required) titled Trash Your Desktop about Mitch Kapor (of founding Lotus Development fame) and his Open Source project to build Chandler. Chandler is not only a personal information manager (PIM), but the tool is a general information manager that is contextually aware. The article not only focusses on Mitch and the product (due late 2004), but the open and honest development practices of those that are building Chandler at the Open Source Application Foundation for Windows, Mac, Linux, etc. distribution.

RSS on PDAs and information reuse

Three times the past week I have run across folks mentioning Hand/RSS for Palm. This seems to fill the hole that AvantGo does not completely fill. Many of the information resources I find to be helpful/insightful have RSS feeds, but do not have a "mobile" version (more importantly the content is not made with standard (X)HTML validating markup with a malleable page layout that will work for desktop/laptop web browsers and smaller mobile screens).

I currently pull to scan then read content from 125 RSS feeds. Having these some of these feeds pulled and stored in my PDA would be a great help.

Another idea I have been playing with is to pull and convert RSS feeds for mobile browser access and use. This can be readily done with PHP. It seems that MobileRSS already does something like this.

Content, make that information in general, stored and presented in a format that is only usable in one device type or application is very short sighted. Information should be reusable to be more useful. Users copy and paste information into documents, todo lists, calendars, PDAs, e-mail, weblogs, text searchable data stores (databases, XML respositories, etc.), etc. Digital information from the early creation was about reusing the information. Putting text only in a graphic is foolish (AIGA websites need to learn this lesson) as is locking the information in a proprietary application or proprietary format.

The whole of the Personal Information Cloud, the rough cloud of information that the user has chosen to follow them so that it is available when they need that information is only usable if information is in an open format.

Syndicated from Off the Top :: vanderwal.net

Welcome to the Personal Info Cloud

Welcome to the Personal Information Cloud.

In the digital realm we have various pockets of information all tied to clouds. The most commonly understood cloud is the Global Information Cloud, i.e. the Internet. There is a plethora of information in this Info Cloud, but often there is too much information and the users are flooded with information choices and most often can not control all the information is or could be useful to them. Often the focus with content creators and Information Architects is with getting the user and the information together. This attraction interaction between user and information is often were content creators stop. There is little heed given to how the user will consume and often reuse that information.

Personal User of Information

The Personal Information Cloud, or as it was initially stated in the Model of Attraction a rough cloud of information that follows the user, is the next step to understanding how to best create, store, and make information reusable. Two common information elements that are often reused are dates (calendar items) and contact information. Users often want to easily put a date into their calendar on their computer, which can then be synched with their PDA or mobile phone, so that they can remember when a street fair, dentist appointment, cocktail party, meeting, etc. is going to take place. Contact information is much the same to ensure the user will show up at the right place for a meeting, interview, cocktail party, etc. These types of information do the user minimal use just stored in a desktop computer, but have more value in a portable device that the user has with themselves when the time comes that they will need the information. Hence this portability of information that follows the user is the Personal Info Cloud