I spent last weekend at the 2012 PIM workshop, located at CSCW 2012. This was the 5th such workshop. Appropriately for its setting, this one focused on “PIM in a socially networked world”—i.e., the aspects of PIM emerging in the interactions between multiple individuals. The focus clearly highlighted the distance between two different notions of [...]
Today I gave a keynote at CIKM 2011. I argued that in addition to all our work on tools the process information for users, we should also be looking at tools that make people better able to apply their innate information processing talents for themselves. I talked about the following tools that reflext that idea, [...]
A couple of days ago Adam Pash at Lifehacker posted a criticism of “everything buckets”—applications aimed at gathering every kind of information you work with into a single place. I can’t resist responding as the article touches on some of the issues that have framed my past 15 years of research into information management. It [...]
When someone describes a person as a “messy” or “tidy”, we can instantly guess something about their appearance, their personality, and the way they organize their physical and digital artifacts – around the house, office, or on their computer(s). There is little disagreement around these definitions, and many stereotypes (both positive and negative) are commonly [...]
While Situational Awareness (SA) theory [1] has primarily been applied to analyzing how people act in highly time-critical military and industrial roles, such as how fighter pilots assess their aerial and tactical situations to decide what maneuvers to make, it may also serve as a useful theoretical model to inform the design of future personal [...]
Our list.it note-taking plug-in for Firefox got a very nice review in the New York Times from the ReadWriteWeb blog today. This tool has been our research group’s most successful by far, with over 14,000 users at last count. I find this both surprising and wonderful. Suprising, because when you look at the tool, it [...]
Prompted by an interesting essay posted by Jim Stodgill, I’m wondering whether any has tried (and whether it is even possible) to measure the actionable utility of our various ambient information sources (twitter, blogs, status updates). By actionable utility, I’m trying to carve out the obvious entertainment utility (we certainly like hearing from our friends [...]
“We’ll resume our regular schedule in Week 18.” I should ask you non-Norwegians: did you ever use week numbers for anything? I probably haven’t since middle school, when our lives revolved around the official holiday calendar for public schools and kindergartens in the Bergen municipality. Either way, it appears that Microsoft Outlook will show you [...]
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 [...]