Making Information More Useful

This is mostly notes I jotted down after listening to the Jon Udell’s Interview with Art Rhyno. First of all, I think the concept of Interview with Innovator’s itself is a great idea. I plan to listen to more.

A few ideas worth noting from the interview:

  • The concept of Social Search and Discovery
  • Desktop Indexers (like Google desktop) taking advantage of structured metadata
  • Desktop systems could be intelligent assistants. They could find out more of what we do and help us.
  • Putting metadata directly into files so that when you move the file out of the desktop the meta data can be used too (Jon mentioned that this is in Vista)
  • Meta data creation at the time of content creation.
  • Collective as a trust network.
  • FOAF is a low barrier syntax.
  • We listen to certain people for certain reasons – Authorities in that space (example – Stephen Hawking in Physics) are more likely to carry trust. There are all sorts of reasons to listen to certain people on certain topics. There should be some flexible infrastructure. We assign authority for all sorts of reasons.
  • Freebase has a way of declaring connections. Very ingenious in the way it attracts you to do certain things.
  • We are entering the era of XML compound documents on the desktop.
  • Bi-directional objects that move freely between desktop and web.

Each one of these ideas merit their own blog entries and definitely require quite a bit of research. To me the fascinating parts of these conversations is how these simple observations provide useful insights. For example, Jon was talking about how del.icio.us tag recommendations (from not only your past bookmarks but also from the collective) may be a great idea to bring to desktop content.

I wonder if I am creating or saving a document, if the file dialog looks like the del.icio.us interface, whether I would pick a few tags? I do it for bookmarks now. Can a desktop agent do this automatically?