Lifehacker featured listit on its front page today. Thanks, Lifehacker! The list.it team have been avid lifehacker readers for a very long time! (We also now have 1700+ registered users!)
Speaking of the list.it team, we wanted to acknowledge the rest of the team for their hard work over the past four months; in [...]
First of all, what’s a good name for these kinds of applications? I am talking about MS Access, FileMaker, 4th Dimension, Kexi and so on. They are not exactly databases (they can be, but they’re more than that), they are not exactly IDEs (they sort of are, but that term is not specific enough), and [...]
Note to self: study more notes.
Over the past two years our group has built up a body of research about information scraps — those little bits of personal information you e-mail to yourself, jot down in post-it notes and notebooks, or keep in that miscellaneous.txt file. It’s been a wild journey, with a myriad of [...]
I’m composing the first of what I hope will be many posts describing information tasks that should be easy (ideally, point-and-click easy) but instead seem to be very hard (requiring programming). I post these in the hope of
finding out about tools that do make these tasks easy, or
fomenting thought about why these tasks are [...]
In 1981, Elaine Rich predicted in a paper called “Users are individuals” [1] that as digital information tools became increasingly capable, they would empower people to assume more tasks and responsibilities. This tendency would, in turn, drive a demand for better tools — tools that let people complete their tasks more easily, efficiently and [...]
If bookmarking on del.icio.us is fundamentally about personal information management — organizing and re-finding your own bookmarks — then it’s important to understand why users choose the tags they do. There are two major (possibly complementary) hypotheses for how tags are chosen: a social model (we’re influenced by what others on del.icio.us say) and a [...]
xOperator is a tool that lets you query your social-network-friends’ information (semantic web data) using IM. You write your queries in “english” interpreted according to AIML, the AI Markup language. Kind of like the pidgin we’ve explored for jourknow.
Leo Sauermann talked about Gnowsis, a “semantic desktop” built and studied several years ago. It’s like the old Haystack system, aiming to give people a unified repository of all the information they work with on their desktop, with categories, annotation, etc. Unlike haystack, they made sure it was bug-free and ran a user study in [...]