Comments on Why does everything suck?: Most Of The Data We Save Will Never Be Useful Agai...

another good article. Im pretty disorganized, so t...

2008-03-28T03:13:00.000-04:00

another good article. Im pretty disorganized, so thanks - I feel better now.

I agree for most parts, but I think you have to di...

2008-03-26T04:48:00.000-04:00

I agree for most parts, but I think you have to distinguish between highly networked data and such data purely for your private (as in "not visible to others") use.

Since you already brought up del.icio.us, I think this is one example where it is not pointless at all to save a bookmark *even* when you yourself are never going to retrieve it again. Users of social networks and aggregator sites can see what other ("smiliar") people have saved and can find content which may be of higher value for them than a hit on google. So although the act of saving away a video, a (public) note or a bookmark on the Web may not turn out to be useful for yourself, it may still be useful to other people. This is what drives "Web 2.0" afterall.

By the way, there is a research project going called the Nepomuk Semantic Desktop, funded by the European Union, which aims at providing a solution to the context problem, by figuring out what concepts are "active" during certain tasks and relating them to other concepts you have used before (from your Personal Information Model). However, I don't see it being used by the casual user anytime soon, but it's an interesting approach.

Welcome to getting old in IT. Every generation has...

2008-03-25T12:08:00.000-04:00

Welcome to getting old in IT. Every generation has had this realization and every time the new generation of innovators completely (and IMO, rightly) ignore the legacy archive in favor of developing new tools to generate even more data.

It's fun watching greybeards complain about not being able to read their thesis done on punchcard, unisys, burroughs, wordstar, whatever.

Yes, computers and tech keep getting more robust and you'd think maybe THIS TIME we could figure out how to make it all work together. And there are entire enterprise class solutions aimed at trying to keep a business's legacy data useable. But as the young innovators keep pushing, we just increase the complexity by magnitudes making it more and more unlikely that we will ever wrangle our legacy of data together in any meaningful way.

I hear you. I too have been on a recent quest for ...

2008-03-24T16:38:00.000-04:00

I hear you. I too have been on a recent quest for this. I have been using Evernote (www.evernote.com) for a couple of years now as a single silo for most of my stuff. It is very strong at data mining to get back at your notes, or clips etc. It still lacks the kind of 'context' you are talking about. It can link to a file, a site etc, but it is up to you to manually add what ever context you think is relevant. Some people are also trying to use a mapping program like personal brain (www.thebrain.com) to achieve similar relationship links.
I think we are a long way from the kind of solution that will truly solve this problem however.