It was a quietly brilliant plan: Publicly proclaim my ardor for Uma Thurman and then--in the same post--make all six-feet of her swoon at the Indisputable Cleverness of my NoteTaker-as-metadatabase theory. After that, all that remained to be done was hunkering down by the phone on Valentine’s Day. (Yes, even the timing was given extensive thought.) But tragically, Uma failed to call. Granted, many of you did contact me about the Metadatabase Thing--and while I encourage you to keep sending those e- cards and letters, let’s be clear: None of you were Her of the Fabulous Face and the Non-Photogenic Feet.
And so, as the sands of Valentine’s Day trickled into the lower chamber, I felt a deep need to speak of my rapidly breaking heart: To reach out to others similarly scorned by Movie Stars Who They’ve Even Never Met But That Doesn’t Matter. After pouring my feelings into the Loathsome Middle-Age Diarist section of my NoteTaker notebook, I suddenly thought, Hey! This is a Swiss Army Knife-cum-Metadatabase. If I fail to use it as such, I’ve played to what was certainly Uma’s serious doubts about my discovery. Later, when she comes to regret missing this quicksilver opportunity to know me, I don’t want to have inadvertently handed her an easy excuse like “See? He opened up another application to find the solace of contact.” God knows, my failure to commit to a single application was the number one complaint of most of my ex-girlfriends--and as Yogi Berra once sagely suggested, who needs deja vu all over again?
And thus, for all three of you out there who regularly read these occasional screeds (hi mom, hi dad, hi sis!), let’s talk about the various kinds of online astral projection that are possible inside a NoteTaker notebook. However, at the outset, know that computer-predicated communications give lie to my geek stance, exposing me for what I really am--a digital dilettante; a gentleman tinkerer. Think of Thomas Dolby around the time of his first release; that’s me: She's tidied up and I can't find anything! All my tubes and wires and careful notes and antiquated notions. So yes--Science! indeed.
Here’s my theory about the distinction between Tech Conceptualists and Geeks--I call it the Mulder Test. Did you ever notice where Fox Mulder kept his cell phone? Yeah, that’s right: in his breast pocket. Fox was a dreamy kind of guy; all he ever wanted to do was Believe. He lived on Hegel Place, for god’s sake. Further, Fox seemed to sleep very little--and when he did, he always seemed to be about 15 feet shy of the bedroom. In short, Fox was a Conceptualist.
Now, remember those old Saturday Night Live skits featuring Nick Burns, the IT guy from hell? (Mooove!) Remember where he kept his cell phone? Yup, on a belt holster. Rather than cruelly riff on belt holsters being 21st Century pocket protectors (That Would Be Wrong), let’s simply observe that Nick Burns was undeniably a Geek. Thus, the Mulder Test is about cell phone stowage as techno-indicator. It’s sort of analogous to that replicant-determining thing Harrison Ford did in Blade Runner. And, no real shock here, you guessed it--I’m a breast pocket kind of guy.
Online communications primarily fascinate me for their psychological, sociological and philosophical implications; the whole complex business of packets zipping about the metaphoric aether comes in a distant second. Early in his career, William Gibson was asked to define cyberspace. He replied that it’s where you go during a really good phone conversation: Neither party remains at their respective end of the line--they meet somewhere in the middle. That, for me, is far more resonant than any real-world contemplation of what the Verizon Central Office had to do, switching-wise, to make my DSL possible. How’s that for Full Disclosure? Don’t you wish Fox News correspondents were equally forthcoming?
Keep my conceptualist status in mind. I’m going to be pointing out a number ways to communicate from within NoteTaker, and while I have my own biases, they are not necessarily The Most Technically Sound. If, reasonably, you need further deep-geek discussion about the relative merits of each way, feel free to talk among yourselves in the comments section. Me, I’ll probably have moved on to even newer possibilities--or at least telling Miss Sakamoto that she’s beautiful . . .
Alright, so I want to cry my heart out about Uma’s very personal St. Valentine’s Day Massacre--what do I need to do? Currently, there are two ways to embed communication capabilities in a NoteTaker notebook: web-based services and Java applets. Further, there are two ways to do said communicating: keyboard and voice. Over the past weeks, I’ve been hard at work at the Banzai Institute in the wilds of New Jersey, blowing up all manner of additive communications solutions for NoteTaker. The following are the ones that I personally like, although no doubt, there are other (and possibly better) answers out there.
Internet Relay Chat. SlashNet.org is a Java-based IRC portal. In order to use it within a NoteTaker notebook, create a new entry that features this URL: http://www.slashnet.org/java.php Double-click the NoteTaker @ icon to open an embedded browser that features SlashNet in all its useful and live glory.
To fully access all of SlashNet’s IRC features (and some of its channels), you’ll have to register a nickname and password--which, for typical Mac users, means getting down and dirty with that old bogeyman, the command line. Just click on SlashNet “Help” in the upper-right of the embedded NT browser and the resulting FAQ will tell you just what text command to send to the NickServer. Once past the culture shock, it’s all fairly straightforward.
After you become a registered user, just open up the Channels pane (which cooly floats of its own volition) and off you go. If you’re me, you immediately begin to search for channels called ScornedByUmaor Six-Foot-Blonde-Actresses-And-Smitten-Men-Who-Are-Eye-Level-With-Them.
Telephony. TheSwitchboard enables you to talk with friends, leave voice mail or instant message--all neatly within NoteTaker. See it as a kind of integrated Skype. To use it, create a new entry in your notebook with this URL: http://theswitchboard.ca/ Double-click the NT @ icon to open an embedded browser for TheSwitchboard.
The clean, well-designed interface will step you through the registration process and after that, all that remains is to jack-in your headphone/mic set. (Remember? The one you bought as part of your forthcoming podcast assault on the world?) Hello? This is Kevin Sheridan--could you please have Uma give me a call? I’m fairly certain she must have left an earlier message that my voice mail didn’t record . . . Hello? Hello?
SMS Messaging. Let’s say you’re working in your NoteTaker notebook and one of the tasks in your To Do section reminds you to contact an associate who’s in a meeting. In preparation for such a circumstance, create a new entry in your notebook and enter the URL of your mobile phone provider’s online SMS messaging site. I happen to have Sprint, but most major mobile providers feature online SMS messaging.
Hopefully you’re starting to see a pattern--that’s right, double-clicking on the NT @ icon will give you an embedded version of your provider’s SMS site. And--right again--you’re going to want to log yourself in. (In the event your mobile phone provider does not have online SMS, there are commercial, third-party sites that offer this capability; fire-up Google and search for them.)
Once these ritual preliminaries are dispensed with, all you have to do is type in your SMS message and then the recipient’s phone number. Press Send and voila: UMA: URGENT YOU CONTACT ME. MUST HAVE MISSED YOUR CALL. LOVE, KEVIN.
Online Conferencing. Sometimes a picture really is worth a thousand words. Circumstances often call for something more than IRC; something more multimedia. For these instances, there’s BabylonChat, a Java applet. By now, you know the drill--create an embedded browser featuring this URL: http://visopsys.org/andy/babylon/applet-demo/index-embedded.html and you’ll be able to fully explain yourself.
As brainy as Uma is, maybe it is necessary to draw her a picture . . .
The online conferencing space is rapidly becoming a crowded one and progressively more nebulous: Where precisely does conferencing stop and genuinely collaborative work begin? In deference to the growth of competing services, here’s a another (albeit commerical) site worthy of investigation: http://www.userplane.com On the home page, click the WebChat demo. And yes, if you look closely at the screen capture, that’s “Matt” asking me that ever-popular online question, R U Female? And if you think Matt was disappointed, imagine how my spirits fell when confronted with his obvious un-Uma-ness. Clearly, there was no need to even ask R U Uma?
At this juncture, the low-rent move would be to cue the swelling strings and the melodramatic backlighting; to confidently hold up a boxed version of NoteTaker and say, in my best Radio Voice, “IRC . . .Telephony . . . SMS . . . Conferencing . . . No other hierarchical, multimedia, freeform database product can offer you all this.” (Paradoxically, in addition to being low-rent, this statement would also be true.) However, I subscribe to Buckmaster Fuller’s strategy of winning arguments. He said the best way of convincing anyone is to simply show them a better way. Thus, all I have to do is be patient and wait for you to inevitably create an embedded browser with one of the above URLs. Time, a better way and your inherent curiosity are on my side.
That being established, the better idea at this point is to briefly explore the benefits of NoteTaker’s integration of online communication capabilities.
Content Creation and Revision. Online communications integrated with an NT notebook creates, enhances, revises and shares content. One-on-one conversations and virtual conferencing have the potential of providing information which NoteTaker can then deepen. They have the capability of adding to information that already exists within the notebook. Embedded conversations and conferencing can also impact information-in-progress, whether through structured revision or collaborative processes or by implicitly pointing the notebook author in new directions. And finally, integrated online communications represent an additional channel of notebook distribution, joining NoteTaker web notebooks and email or download copies of NT notebooks.
Enhanced Worklflow Via Platform Leverage. As the evolving focus of this site makes clear, NoteTaker can increasingly be seen as a platform in addition to being a database application. NT’s evolving ability to create, compile, organize and share content, along with the multiplying ways of accomplishing each of function, push beyond mere convenience to a seamless and sophisticated information processing. This allows the notebook author to remains focused on the work rather than its attendant logistics.
With sufficient computing power, an author could have tools and databases found in other parts of her notebook floating in palettes around a page containing a draft essay. There might be streaming video from The Washington Post on the rise of podcasting, a real-time online discussion board on podcasting, a list of online resources about podcasting, the latest RSS feeds that mention podcasting and--yes--Adam Curry on a live Internet phone call, with the author capturing his responses on the notebook page.
Possibilities like this make my pulse pound: It gives me an authentic taste, however small, of my personal Ur App--that computer-cum-data orchestra Tom Cruise “conducted” in Minority Report. Different data sets pulled into view and juxtaposed on-the-fly--only to be shoved out of the way when no longer needed: This is essentially what happens in both the film and when a NoteTaker notebook is surrounded by hovering information.
Just as word processing’s impact on prose went light years beyond the original intent of more convenient typewriting, the increasingly fluid manner in which NoteTaker is able to parse and combine information will change the nature of content in ways that “easier” doesn’t begin to articulate.
And this, of course, is the New New Uma Plan: By single-mindedly extending the usefulness of NoteTaker in undocumented and unimagined ways, we end up at a single image--me as an indie-budget version of Tom at that computer. Now all I have to do is get her to squint at me in just the right way, in just the right lighting and, hell, just call me Almost Tom. The trouble is, which one? Cruise or Dolby? I have a feeling that getting my call returned hinges on this very important distinction. However, the knowledge that I’m waiting for my breast pocket to ring unfortunately clarifies the situation . . .
The composition of this entry was made possible in part by There Is a Ghost from the album "Before the Poison" by Marianne Faithfull
Sunday, March 13, 2005 11:12:07 AM
I have been re-reading Suguru Ishizaki's 'Improvisational Design: Continuous, Responsive Digital Communication'.
Your
"Different data sets pulled into view and juxtaposed on-the-fly--only to be shoved out of the way when no longer needed: This is essentially what happens . . . when a NoteTaker notebook is surrounded by hovering information."
brings audience participation to his
"A designer's task when working with the model of improvisational design is to anticipate potential changes in the context and specify the communicative forms that design agents should perform according to their immediate situations . . . The designer's role is similar to that of a director of an improvisational dance performance: the director selects dancers with the desired expressive skills and coaches their performance through a rigorous practice." (p. 9)
Thomas
Posted by: L. Thomas Martin | March 13, 2005 at 11:16 PM