Pensieve, Delicious and “trails”
About a month ago, IBM published a press release about a project for personal memory organization called “Pensieve“. There are a lot of similarities to MyLifeBits — its focus is on recording disparate types of information (business cards, photographs, timestamps, etc.) and then associating them together in the data store to ease retrieval.
That associative quality reminds me a lot of Vannevar Bush’s ”trails”. The reader wants to connect several documents together (or have it done automatically) so that they can be easily retrieved together later. I can’t wait for this sort of technology to be commonplace (though I wonder if it will need to be done with a monolithic application like MyLifeBits or PENSIEVE rather than a series of integrated applications like Flickr, Delicious, GMail, etc.).
And just finding this link for this blog posts gives an example of why I’d like this “associative” information organizer. Using delicious (a bookmark organizer that I’d heartily recommend to all of you), I wanted to connect the MyLifeBits link and the Pensieve link since there was such an explicit comparison there. But delicious doesn’t provide functionality for explicit connections (Vannevar Bush’s trails are still lacking, even for something as simple as links in a single service). Instead I’m forced to awkwardly create a unique tag (”cPensieve”) for the connection between them (that won’t recall lots of Harry Potter links as well). So to see all the projects I’d like to compare to MyLifeBits (there’s another called Daytum that’s also worth looking at), you can go to this link: http://delicious.com/npdoty/cPensieve
(This should fit into the next lecture, or whenever we talk about Vannevar Bush and MyLifeBits.)
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