mostly research stuff
ever been teased for being a packrat…a magpie, a scavenger? well, remember a while back when i rambled about how we really are drinking from a fire hose?…if you’ve got short term memory problems (like drew barrymore), it was about the ‘how much information‘ project at berkeley…so yeah, serendipity, i stumbled across this very interesting project at university of washington called the “keeping found things found” (aka ‘KFTF’) project…
from their own site, “the classic problem of information retrieval…to help people find the relatively small number of things they are looking for (books, articles, web pages, CDs, etc.) from a very large set of possibilities…A follow-on problem also exists which has received relatively less study: Once found, how are things organized for re-access and re-use later on?…We refer to this as the problem of Keeping Found Things Found.”
they’ve studied everything from how we organize personal files and documents to emails and information from online resources, though their current focus is internet overload…you can read a large and recent study on the site (top link, it’s a PDF entitled, “refinding information on the web.”
…one of the things that schocked me: the second most popular method for keeping info behind bookmarking a website was emailing the info to one’s self - which nearly tied with ‘printing it out’ (who says that paper is an industry in decline? duh)…oh, btw, one super interesting person involved with the project is susan dumais of microsoft who is also involved in the hugely promising ’stuff i’ve seen’ project (more on that another day…i’m gonna go change my crusty guitar strings…)
this blog is mostly safe for work, though i sometimes throw around a 'fuck' or two. you'll find a bunch of my articles from CI Magazine, SCIP online, other research pieces and some other crap. enjoy. there's lost of content here related to getting information about, around, from and through people and organizations...
anon
March 10th, 2005 at 2:19 pm
you have a typo in the link to the PDF in the third paragraph: should be http://kftf.ischool.washington.edu/re-finding_information_on_the_web3.pdf
dave
March 10th, 2005 at 3:14 pm
thanks.
William Jones
November 20th, 2007 at 6:00 pm
I am happy to announce the release of two books relating to personal information management (PIM). The first book, “Keeping Found Things Found”, is meant to be for a broader audience of us folks who are involved in a daily struggle to keep on top (rather than buried by) our information. How can we manage more effectively? How can we build a world of information that helps us to better realize our goals and dreams in the physical world?
The second book, “Personal Information Management” with William Jones and Jaime Teevan as editors, is oriented more strongly towards an academic audience and features many of the same contributing authors as participated in a very popular special issue on PIM in the Communications of the ACM (January of 2006).