So far it’s warmer than expected and wetter. The transition from 2011 to 2012 was a happy one at the Vance’s with good food, music, Philly and gaming.

Yesterday afternoon I posted (another, having gone through this a few times over the years) post on eLance about interactive text on eLance. I got a reply from Zhu in China (Changchun, Jilin) who suggested doing it as Services  in the Mac context menu. This is not really what I wanted at all – the proximity of the controls is a huge issue in how useful they are. However, he sent me a screenshot to show me what he meant and the context command he was talking about had a keyboard shortcut attached to it…

This meant that we chatted and back and forth and developed this method, which he is now working on, with a prototype test due on the 7th – next week Saturday. It will do this (hopefully):

1) Select text.
2) Issue a key command such as command-§ (this refers to a command in the ‘Services’ menu called ‘Liquid Information’).
3) A panel opens up with the selected text pasted into.
4) User can now choose a command, like they do with liquid information interactive text Web, such as type ‘r’ to open the ‘References’ menu and then ‘w’ for wikipedia. Command is then executes.

Now this is of course very interesting indeed, and we’ll change the icon for Liquid to somehow incorporate the paragraph symbol § which I chose since it’s easily accessible on Mac keyboards (top left, though it doesn’t seem to be on Windows keyboards at all). This little symbol has a circle in it and it has swirling arms. We can do something logotype-ish here. And when we figure out the branding we’ll have our logo on all the Mac keyboards! What a way to make sure people remember what key to use.

Fingers crossed for the test version… Here is what I currently imagine it to look like:

1) User selects text.

2) User issues command-§.

3) The user can now type in keyboard shortcuts, such as r, then w, to open References, then Wikipedia. A single ‘enter’ does a search and shift-enter goes to the top search result. The search will initially be only through the users web browser but could also be in a custom mini-browser.

What do you think?!

“Email is great for staying on top of things, but I want to get to the bottom of things.”
Don Knuth

A picture can take a thousand words to render but some words there are no pictures for. No music. Nothing else has the compactness, clarity and illuminating power of the written word. Love, Hate, Understanding, Distrust, Compassion, Fear, Knowledge – all can be the painters and the musicians muse but simple words encapsulate them like nothing else.

Reading and writing is not an innate, ‘natural’ skill like enjoying a song or a beautiful scene. Reading is a learned process where years of practice and study pay off with explosive insight and powers of communication every time it is used.

There is a tangential problem with the fact that reading and writing is a studied skill and that is that we think we know what reading and writing and words are – since we have spent so much time and effort learning how to use them. We are all experts. We derive great benefit from the time and effort we have invested – so why should we question what the written word is and how we can use it – how we can interact with it?

We should, because we are not at the end of history.

Did the ancient Sumerian wonder if his marks of bales of hay could one day express his love? Did the quilled poet long for the day of electronic internet publishing? It would be beyond the powers of their imagination, it would be beyond any perspective they might generate. But all the innovations up til now happened. They happened in concert and co-evolution with the technology around them.

But now we are at a completely different stage of history. The history of the written word will now be written in software. Instead of a clear technological step forward, such as mans capacity to make sharp metal moulds which could reproduce printed text clearer, faster and over more copies than wood block printing, the innovation from now on in rests mostly in the imagination of the designers of text systems.

This is an arbitrary, slightly absurd, a little frightening but mostly incredible opportunity for improving the way we work through text to learn, think and communicate.

When Doug Engelbart demonstrated interactive text in 1968 he not only showed the world the ability to type and re-type, to edit to your heart’s content, but also how to express connections through links and so much more. Since then computers have increased in their capacity to process and store information many million fold.

The innovations we have seen since then are pitiful and lacking. It’s crucial that we exert serious effort to push the written word further along so that it may help us along in turn:

Words are recorded symbols, symbols through which we think and communicate. How flexibly and powerfully we interact with our symbols is how flexibly and powerfully we interact with our thoughts and those of others.

Interactive text then goes to the very foundation of knowledge work and what is more important than improving the way we work with our knowledge?

In the beginning was the word. There is still a long way to go….

I only have pieces of advice for the liquid information systems designer:

Take ownership of the problem, not the solution. Focus on the actual use. What does the user need to accomplish, not just in detail but also in terms of the bigger picture? Try not to hold on to pet solutions.

Assume you are wrong. Always. Learn what you can, question it, talk to people in different fields, never forgetting actual users. Question your assumptions and their assumptions.

The goal is to help knowledge workers understand the world and communicate what they learn clearly. That’s really the heart of it.

There is a “distinction between “knowledge workers” and other categories, such as clerical workers. Clerical workers use information—about, say, customer orders—to aid the smooth working of the company. Knowledge workers use information to change themselves.” http://www.economist.com/node/1489224 I am not convinced there is a sharp boundary but it’s worth thinking about how the job of a knowledge worker results in a change of the knowledge worker.

Clerical work is external – you can do clerical work at arms reach. You move this information over there, you arrange that to happen here. Knowledge work however, is immersive – the information you work with has to be processed in the knowledge workers brain.

The liquid approach will hopefully be useful to those who design Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and other knowledge augmentation systems for large companies where the whole systems are integrated and controlled. However, half of workers are employed by small companies (as defined by companies employing under 500 people in the United States (web.sba.gov/faqs) and these people cannot be expected to have the support of a knowledge work focused IT department. Innovation happens at the edge. Be the edge.

“The voyage of discovery is not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.”
Marcel Proust

This article from the NYT is interesting as it seems to reflect the dangers inherent in the complex, tightly coupled financial markets: Wind it tight, connect it deep and unexpected problems can quickly spread:

‘Statistics dictate that the vastly greater number of transactions among computers in a world 100 times faster than today will lead to a greater number of unpredictable accidents, with less time in between them. Already, Amazon’s cloud for businesses failed for several hours in April, when normal computer routines faltered and the system overloaded. Google’s cloud of e-mail and document collaboration software has been interrupted several times. “We think of the Internet as always there. Just because we’ve become dependent on it, that doesn’t mean it’s true,” Mr. Cheriton says. Mr. Bechtolsheim says that because of the Internet’s complexity, the global network is impossible to design without bugs. Very dangerous bugs, as they describe them, capable of halting commerce, destroying financial information or enabling hostile attacks by foreign powers. Both were among the first investors in Google, which made them billionaires, and, before that, they created and sold a company to the networking giant Cisco Systems for $220 million. Wealth and reputations as technology seers give their arguments about the risks of faster networks rare credibility. More transactions also mean more system attacks. Even though he says there is no turning back on the online society, Mr. Cheriton worries most about security hazards. “I’ve made the claim that the Chinese military can take it down in 30 seconds, no one can prove me wrong,” he said.’  http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/14/technology/arista-networks-founders-aim-to-alter-how-computers-connect.html?_r=1

“Email is great for staying on top of things, but I want to get to the bottom of things.”
Don Knuth

Same thing is happning to computing. the term ‘computer’ will come to mean less and less. We’ll have laptops (not laptop computers) and desktop workstations (not desktop workstation computers) as well as smart phones (as powerful as any desktop workstation computer of the 1990s), eBooks and many more devices which can all be technically called computers since they have input/output, storage and processing but they are less and computers to their users.

They are vehicles used to get to and navigate through information.

And they will come in astounding forms.