I had an interesting discussion with my student Katrina Panovich today. I’m intrigued by the way people use twitter for “ambient awareness”—watching what goes by, but not worrying about what they miss. I find this paradoxical—if you don’t care about missing stuff, why watch at all? Especially given that each arriving tweet provides some degree [...]
Last April we presented results at CHI 2009 about how people used List-It, our open source Firefox plugin when it was released in September 2008. Since this initial study, we’ve had quite a few more users – we just hit our 13,000th registered account on September 1st, 2009! More importantly, more than 600 people have [...]
For non-programmers, spreadsheets are usually the option of choice when it comes to keeping track of non-trivial amounts of structured data. This is seen in all kinds of settings ranging from the business world to public administration and academic research. Spreadsheets, however, can only capture one kind of data structure: separate tabular [...]
A month ago Stefano Mazzocchi published an interesting article on data reconciliation (detecting when two identifiers refer to the same item, and merging them) where he advocated a more centralized “a priori” approach (trying to keep the identifiers merged at the beginning). I posted a response arguing the value of a more anarchic “a posteriori” [...]
Stefano Mazzochi used to work at our SIMILE project here at MIT, where we explored the use of RDF and Semantic Web tools for the sharing of knowledge. He has since gone to work at Metaweb and, it seems, become much more friendly to their “top down” approach of trying to create a centralized repository [...]
Wednesday morning Katrina, Michael, Greg and I presented our paper, “Note to Self: Examining Personal Information Keeping in a Lightweight Note-Taking Tool”, to a packed room at noon in the “Personal and Public Information” track at CHI2009 . This paper describes our first study that we conducted with our List.it note taking tool in September [...]
Stephen Voida presented “It Feels Better than Filing: Everyday work experiences in an activity-based computing system”. ABC deprecates the folder hierarchy in favor of a mechanism for associating files (and other objects) with specific activities. The user specifies which activity they are undertaking, and the system materializes the items ssociated with that activity. Activity [...]
list.it v0.4.0
The list.it team is proud to announce the release of list.it version 0.4.0. We’ve been working hard on it and we’re ready to release it to you!
Most of these features were strongly influenced from feedback from our users. If you have any feedback of your own (feature suggestions, bug reports, questions, comments) please contact [...]
We just completed the first phase of moving list.it to being its own independent open source project by moving the codebase to a project called “list-it” on Google Code. The entire team has switched over to using this repository for our main development, and so you will see our changes as they happen. (We have [...]
We are very happy that our paper on a study of our note-taking tool, list.it, which we conducted in September 2008 has received a nomination for best note at CHI 2009!
My co-investigators Michael Bernstein, Greg Vargas and Katrina Panovich and advisors David Karger and mc schraefel and I are very pleased at this nomination, and [...]