Exploring AquaMinds NoteTaker

Oh, And One More Thing . . . A true tale of a NoteShare-assisted Smart Mob

When I was going up the stairs,
I met a man who wasn't there.
He wasn't there again today,
I wish, I wish he'd go away.
--Hughes Mearns

Hey, man, thanks for coming. No, no--I'm over here. Don't even think about turning around. Just act natural and pretend you're waiting for someone. I'm deep in this doorway and I don't want to be seen for obvious reasons--the next blog entry was going to celebrate my Official, Triumphant Return to this cyber backwater. But, natch, plans once more haven't panned out: I've got more NoteShare-related news I want to share sooner than later. So once again I'm in stealth mode. I'll try to make this a brief as I can, and with luck, just maybe I can get out of here without calling attention to myself . . .

Last time I was here, I spilled the beans about NoteShare, AquaMinds' new, forthcoming application, remember? Well, afterwards, I began to wonder if I gave the impression that using NoteShare demanded a rigorous, well-planned workflow. Because though it can certainly deal with more meticulous approaches, its real power is its flexibility.

Technorati Tags: Collaboration, NoteShare, NoteTaker, Web20

Introducing AquaMinds NoteSharePssst--Hey buddy, can I share something with you?

Let’s just pretend I’m not really here--okay?

As you may have noted, this blog has been on extended hiatus. But also understand that for weeks now I’ve been preparing for my Big Return: One of those swelling-soundtrack moments, where I do my best Gloria Swanson/Sunset Boulevard impression: It was the blogs that got smaller. . . That sort of thing.

However, events have transpired to upstage my usual, appalling self-indulgence. Just as I was getting ready to once again talk about, well, me (we all have to have a hobby), I find myself obliged to address much larger, more important news.

My old buddies over at AquaMinds have let the cat out of the bag regarding a new, genuinely jaw-dropping product. (I call them “buddies;” they, on the other hand, usually refer to me as “stalker” or, more charitably, as “Cease-and-Desist Boy.”) Where was I? Oh yeah--I opened my Sunday New York Times in an attempt to ignore the biochemical and neural havoc from New Year’s Eve and there it was, this article by Jim Fallows about the Next Big Thing from AquaMinds. And until I carefully reviewed what I could recall from the previous evening--who I might have talked to and even how I managed to misplace my underwear while still wearing my tux--I was profoundly afraid.

Technorati Tags: Collaboration, NoteShare, NoteTaker, Web20

Plays Well With Others: How NoteTaker Has Deepened Its Web Connectivity

More volts!
I'm sucking the juice from the generator
More volts!
More volts!

More volts!
"More suck at the duct" my dictu
More volts!
More volts!
--Brian Eno
“I Fall Up”

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
--Arthur C. Clarke, "Profiles of The Future"

As I become an increasingly middle-aged hipster, an interesting distillation process is occurring: The relentless march of time is acting like an acid bath on my world view--eroding the softer, more insubstantial portions of my conceptual framework and leaving the titanium-hard truisms.

During my significantly misspent youth, I often wondered why the Previous Generation seemed to cling to cliches--but now, having morphed from revolutionary to ruling class--I clearly see that in many cases, I mistook naturally evolving philosophic minimalism for intellectual ossification. In retrospect, it seems quaint: Like futile attempts to prove the superiority of baroque art over, say, Robert Motherwell. Lots of stuff going on is not the same as smart stuff happening. (The corollary is that pretty stuff does not imply substantive stuff--unless, of course, you happen to be Uma Thurman.) Put another way, philosophic minimalism done properly is pretty much like holding four aces--you can be forgiven about not obsessing about the other 48 cards . . .

As NoteTaker matures, I’m beginning to sense a similar sort of focus on its own conceptual verities--Gather, Organize, Share-- along with a commitment to be singularly powerful in each of these areas. It’s NoteTaker’s four aces. To be sure, there are other metaphoric cards in the deck but, at the risk of echoing Orwell, All Cards Are Not Equal. This brutal, Darwinian observation, while decidedly not PC, is absolutely true--just ask the Two of Diamonds. I suppose a more gentle way of saying this is to observe the Two of Diamonds suffers from a Court Card Deficiency, but the weather here is ugly and I’m not feeling diplomatically charitable . . .

Honey, Has the Blog Been Fed? Transforming Google Mail Into a Research Database Embedded In NoteTaker

Now time and distance
melt away
No digital delay
And some things
can be written down
that we're too shy to say
Send me an email
that says "I love you"

--Neil Tennant/Chris Lowe

Yesterday, I had one of those 2001: A Space Odyssey Moments. You know--like the ape, downstream of touching the Monolith, looking at a bone and slowly understanding its tool-cum-weapon potential. In my case, however, the Monolith wasn’t that minimalist piece of alien alloy (which, in retrospect, resembled a high-end kitchen counter top), it was Google, the new mothership in town.

While it's already becoming fashionable to look askance at the burgeoning ubiquity of the Big Polychrome G, I've always perversely enjoyed the early days of any first-class invasion—whether Pod People, cicadas or Windows v.3. There's something Very Casablanca that appeals to me—the whole "We'll always have Paris" thing, respectively recontextualized as Earth, Our Gardens Next Summer and Cupertino. And let's face it, Google is beginning to resemble Thomas Jerome Newton's World Enterprises ("I don't believe it. I can't believe it. You have nine basic patents here. Nine! That's basic patents. Do you know what that means?"). But like Farnsworth, I'm not looking the gift horse in the mouth, content instead to queue-up at Google Labs to eagerly use the inevitable next step of the Occupation (which for a brief moment was GoogleX—presumably before the Apple legal department stirred and woke).

So you folks over in the Resistance might as well save the e- cards and letters; I'm simply not ready to be Turned at this point: See me as a Digital-Age Louis—content to play both sides in a state of amoral grace.

Do You Wanna Talk About It? How To Run Your Mouth (Or At Least Your Fingers) Without Leaving NoteTaker

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.

NT Audio Blog Proof-of-Concept

Welcome to yet another crazed bit of research from the Bansai Institute in the wilds of New Jersey.

Those early adopters among you will clearly see where this little experiment is headed, but Baby Steps First is advisable. While I'm loath to over-promise, I think the chance of further forward motion over the weekend is good.

From my perspective, I see the glimmer of an opportunity to regularly assault you in ways that push beyond scrolling text and yet remain NT-predicated. As Henry Frankenstein might say, "It's Alive!"

I expect that as NoteTaker-driven blogs morph into talkies, it may be the downfall of many Silent Era authors. So sensitive was I to this fact--and so anxious was I to avoid the fate of John Gilbert in the early '30s--I considered doing the proof-of-concept clip with a Greta Garbo accent, based on the fact she both survived and thrived in the talkies. But then I thought First Impressions being important, introducing myself in Audio Drag was clearly Not a Good Idea . . .


MP3 File

Friday, March 4, 2005 10:47:24 AM

NoteTaker As Metadatabase: Oblique Strategies For Enhanced Information Management (A Conceptual Road Trip)

A meditation on metadata, Uma Thurman, multi-solution applications, the American Film Institute, search engines, Keith Olbermann, information management, drug-addled trips to Las Vegas, regressive databases, writer’s block, recombinant software features, Brian Eno, embedded Web browsers, technology-as-Meat-Loaf-songs, the nature of blogging, Hunter Thompson, WebKits, Citizen Kane, pre-blogging, Myst, Web notebooks, camera obscuras, live chat inside a notebook, Alice in Wonderland, templates, The Matrix, and--oh yeah--NoteTaker; definitely NoteTaker . . .(Did I mention Uma Thurman?)

It's poetry in motion
She turned her tender eyes to me
As deep as any ocean
As sweet as any harmony
Mmm - but she blinded me with science
"She blinded me with science!"
And failed me in biology
--Thomas Dolby

Go to an extreme, move back to a more comfortable place
In which the Author grapples with the present Work

A confession: As unbelievable as it seems, sometimes I’m at a loss for words. And since much of my living is predicated on my ability to stare at a blank word-processor window and conjure-up something, these Now What? Moments can be more than disconcerting. After all this time, I’ve never worked out where the words actually come from and thus, at the start of every new piece of jangled prose, there’s an instantaneous crossing-of-fingers and the hope that my mental tuner is still able to pick up WRIT (Good morning, Writers! You’re listening to All Inspiration All The Time, and this one is going out to Kevin Sheridan in Washington, DC!).

My regularly occurring scrutiny of the authorial abyss has, of course, given rise to a craftsman’s superstition: I keep a deck of Oblique Strategies on my desk. I got my first set of these cards in 1975 and they’ve since become a serious and pricey collector’s item. This cool factor has necessitated a stand-in deck for everyday use; an easily available reissue.

The creators of Oblique Strategies, composer/producer Brian Eno and the late artist Peter Schmidt, describe them as “Over One-Hundred Worthwhile Dilemmas.” The cards are further categorized as “a set of possibilities.” They are intended to be used when a problem occurs in a working situation. I use them in this way: When I’m stuck, I draw a card and attempt to apply its advice to my work. The beauty of this ritual is that should every atom of my writer’s being rebel at what’s being suggested, I simply ask myself why the card is definitively wrong. Answering this involves articulating what the piece is about and where it’s going--which invariably jump-starts the prose.

Going Postal: Putting Email and RSS Feeds Inside NoteTaker

It’s snowing out there. Granted, it’s a Washington, DC kind of snow--so we’re talking about, what? two inches? In short, a Weenie Blizzard. But this is DC, an inherently multicultural town--and a city that also has traffic circles designed by a guy who really wanted to do Paris (architecturally speaking--to clearly differentiate him from Debbie’s very different relationship to Dallas).

So before calling me a wuss, let’s take a moment and plug all the variables into this brutal little equation: Newly minted diplomat from a sunny clime (with diplomatic immunity--ie, American laws--traffic or otherwise--don’t apply to him) while driving to his embassy encounters the first snow he’s ever seen and the first traffic circle (vicious merry-go-rounds of careening, high-speed metal-plastic-rubber). Comprehend? I like to think that driving in a DC snow storm has only one true soundtrack--Bowie’s Low, a CD that features “Breaking Glass” and “Always Crashing In the Same Car” (on reflection, there’s also “Sound and Vision,” sounding like ice-rink music).

Thus, when it snows in Washington, the city hunkers down, deeply afraid of itself. It’s time to make sure there’s scotch and firewood and a shopping bag full of DVDs (blessedly, the Age of iTunes has enabled me to continue shopping for music in white-out conditions).

Me, I’ve got Miles Davis’ Tutu angularly unfolding from the speakers, I’m staring at the steadily increasing amounts of snow outside the windows of Sheridan World Headquarters and, in the distance, I can hear the faint-but-tortured sound of colliding diplomatic vehicles. But I pay it no mind, for I am hard at work making NoteTaker even more useful for you--Reader Who Did Question My Fortitude With Regard To Snow Storms. This vehemently denied fact does not offend me because I know that by the end of this post, you will be so indebted to me, the guilt over doubting my steely resolve in blizzards will nearly drive you to suicide.

Pulp Blogging: Getting Stuff Into NoteTaker (In Which Mr Sheridan Takes An Inordinate Amount of Time Getting To the Point, Gambling the Tips Are Worth the Ride)

Well I got this guitar
And I learned how to make it talk
And my car's out back
If you're ready to take that long walk
From your front porch to my front seat
The door's open but the ride it ain't free . . .
--Bruce Springsteen
“Thunder Road”

The holidays are finally over and once more I’ve miraculously survived. True to tradition, the year-end celebrations often had dodge-ball dynamics. This time, however, I somehow managed to miss the commemorative Last Standing tee-shirts. They must have been handed out when I was in the middle of that six-hour drive to Philadelphia (usually a tad over two hours at my admittedly lawbreaking pace). Or while I was doing that weird Kramer dance around the strewn pieces of my nephew’s new Transformer army. Or maybe as I swarmed Fresh Fields with the rest of the free-range crowd on a kamikaze mission to pick up the turkey (no, wait--that was Thanksgiving; or was it?).

In retrospect, I’m actually thinking of pitching Fox on making The Holidays the premise of next season’s 24: Kiefer Sutherland racing against time, grappling with last-minute shopping, running out of wrapping paper, et. al. As an elevator pitch, I actually think it’s quite compelling . . .

But as usual, I digress. With all the festive horror behind us, it’s once again time to get down and geeky with all the blog-ish things you can do with v1.9 upgrade), here are the simple rules:

I cheerfully stitch together NT blogging solutions, often blowing up things along the way ("So You Don’t Have To" ^TM). The price I extract for this basically useful service is your acceptance of my luxurious disregard for linearity. After all, Time and Logical Progression are highly overrated concepts. As I see it, my mission is to ensure that this blog’s utility ultimately outweighs its off-the-meds, free-associative self-indulgence. In short, it’s pretty much the same implicit deal that’s struck when listening to a Robyn Hitchcock CD.

Today's Tangelo Tip: Hybrid Solution or Devil's Spawn?

It's like this: I'm in the midst of overhauling the structure of my blogging notebook in preparation for the next installment to this, the techno-equivalent of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. And, as I was working out the pre-fab structure of my newly minted page-per-day approach, well, my attention wandered down to my desktop's dock. Lurking there was a brace of Graphic Visualization Stuff, including the NovaMind and the superlative OmniGraffle (which has produced most of the charts on this site).

I looked at the simple outline I was creating in NoteTaker and then at the GV Stuff. I looked at the GV Stuff and then at the NT outline. And even though I realized I was meddling with things Man Was Meant To Leave Alone, the urge clearly had me--there was no going back: I had to see my NoteTaker outline in glorious Technicolor and CinemaScope.

You Can Never Have Enough Dubious Insularity

A quick update--I finally got around to testing the most recent version the NewsFan RSS aggregator and it also failed my simple-yet-critical cut-and-paste test. Remind me to send a case of Scotch to the folks over at NewsFire in appreciation of their standing as the only rational news reader on my computer.

Coincidentally, NewsFire has just released a v.4 update which can be found here. If you agree with my frustration with RSS aggregators that do not support simple cut-and-paste, download NewsFire and give it a spin. The developer should be given all the encouragement that can be mustered.

Friday, December 10, 2004 12:00:04 AM

You Can't Get There From Here: The Dubious Insularity of Most RSS Readers

Accidental discoveries: You gotta love them. The possibly apocryphal history of Happy Accidents includes Ivory Soap, Silly Putty and the fact Ben Stein is funny. Unfortunately, however, there is also a long list of Uh-Oh Revelations: Asbestos-related respiratory ailments, the unintentional hard-drive havoc of a certain Apple updater and the possibly career-morphing trauma of the delayed understanding that Reply All isn't like Reply.

Add to this latter group the hypocritical insularity of many RSS readers. But before I lurch ahead with my idea-cum-rant, let's note the changed structure of this post. Usually our Quality Time here takes the form of an over-caffeinated episode of Columbo. I tend to shamble around the Observation Du Jour, rumpled and spouting seeming non-sequiturs. But by the end of the post, some previously uppity technology turns out to be the culprit--pretty much like Patrick McGoohan, if he were downloadable or thought to be a "solution."

I bring this up because I had originally intended to file one of these classic Colonel-Mustard-In-The-Library-With-The-Candlestick entries, but I tripped over a widespread, navel-gazing school of RSS content management. So let's approach this post in reverse order: First, the point I wanted to make, followed by the bloody nose meted out by most of my RSS readers.

Bell-and-Whistle Siren Song: Does the Street Always Find a Use for Things?

Now here's something that, like a fly in amber, may forever be encased inside the Intriguing Idea category. See it as a way-cool NoteTaker grace note; a toy surprise at the bottom of the AquaMinds box.

All of the semi-documented app-launching text commands in Safari work with the embedded NoteTaker browsers I've recently been exploring. By typing the following into the address field of an embedded NoteTaker browser, the self-evident applications are launched:

addressbook:// ichat:// sherlock:// ical:// mailto:ADDRESS

However, because NoteTaker is not designed to be browser-centric, I'm not certain how these techno-echoes of Safari can be turned to my very specific and esoteric blogging advantage.

But stay tuned: Much like that old playwriting example, a gun has been introduced in first act--and you just know it's going to somehow be used by the end of drama . . .

Wednesday, December 1, 2004 12:08:15 PM

Future Shock: Beyond Yesterday's Tomorrows

No Future.
Punk Manifesto, circa 1978

During Thanksgiving--no doubt abetted by the extravagant cigar and the fine single-malt scotch--I resumed pondering blogs and their overly defined place within the time-space continuum. Recently, I ranted about the crypto-fascist temporality of current blog structures, but somewhere between cutting a V into the cigar crown and searching for wooden matches, it struck me that blogs (as currently crippled) are not temporal enough for those who buy into their Reverse March of Time model.

A typical weblog is the ultimate review mirror: This is what I've previously written, in the order I wrote it. But it's pretty useless for signaling authorial intent. In other words, while it does a too efficient job letting you know what I wrote last Tuesday, there is is no elegant way to communicate what I plan to post next Tuesday--and the Tuesday after that. In order to do so, I'd have to create an instantly and automatically archived post about, well, the future. And while the National Archives building informs me that The Past Is Prologue, forcing visitors to dig through historical content to discover what next week promises is conceptually dissonant; a weird online exercise in Back To the Future.

May The Blog Backgrounders Be With You: Another Use For The Blog Book Concept

I've finally gotten around to exploring another promising use for the previously discussed Blog Book. Imagine the idea being brought to bear on a specific, potentially complex topic. The weblog and site references in this type of blog book would be tightly integrated aspects of a single argument. This variety of blog book would be less 3-D blog roll and much more a literal backgrounder that could be used to efficiently reference a complex topic without having to skim its surface within a weblog post.

No Getting Jiggy With the Architect: Assumed Blog Behavior As Weblog Reality

There are levels of survival we are prepared to accept . . .
As you adequately put, the problem is choice.
The Architect
The Matrix Reloaded

The most important thing is the thing most easily forgotten.
Brian Eno / Peter Schmidt
Oblique Strategies Card

And how could it be so wrong
When it was so right?
Lloyd Cole
"I'm Gone"

In the wake of my circumlocutious posting about Miles Davis, jazz authenticity, studio composition and--oh yeah--blogging, I've continued to ponder its implications. Which goes to show that even left-field rambling can trigger logical and argumentative dominoing that end at surprising destinations.

An embarrassing product of a Jesuit education (certain members of the Society are still blushing at the dubious achievement of me), I nevertheless had Big Intellectual Fun in school and am particularly grateful that the concept of Right Questions being more important than Right Answers was driven so deeply into me that it merged with my DNA.

It's a simple and somewhat obvious thing, but also enlightening in a Zen-like way: Perfectly correct answers to Wrong Questions paradoxically result in the self-satisfied adrenaline rush of being Absolutely Right at the same time you are Utterly Wrong. But being a pleasure-seeking species, we rarely look beyond that satisfied high. This goes far in explaining many--if not most--of humanity's screw-ups: Smartly reasoned responses to thoroughly stupid queries.

Archiving Revisited (Or How I Learned To Start Worrying and Love Second Thoughts)

I'm not predisposed to revisiting previous work. My relationship with writing is a bit bipolar: Massive focus up until publication and then, well, I wish the work luck and success Out There and turn my attention to the next nascent prose at hand, thinking little--if ever again--about the finished piece. I suppose my philosophy about my own stuff is like the old Frito Lay tag line: "We'll make more."

Earlier today, however, as I was preparing to add MarsEdit and BlogAssist to the sidebar resources, one of my earlier riffs caught my eye--the one that pointed out NoteTaker could also be used to archive the actual posted blog entries as proof against some sort of Blog Service Provider Armageddon. In retrospect, it's basically my weblog version of Dr. Strangelove's subterranean plan for survivors.

Blog Content and All That Jazz:NoteTaker and the Mixdown of Meaning

A major benefit of engaging in multiple projects is the instances of cross-pollination between disparate gigs. When not holding forth here, I'm involved in other endeavors both more and less Gonzo. One of these involves jazz titan Miles Davis--and most recently, I've been focusing on his so-called "difficult" 1968-75 period.

Time has been good to this stage of Miles' artistic evolution: What was once incomprehensible to many is now seen as groundbreaking as the other phases of his career. Central to Difficult Miles is his use of the recording studio as a compositional tool (something further built upon by Brian Eno). I explored this over the past weekend, by examining the 18 tape edits that give shape and structure to "Pharaoh's Dance" from Davis' Bitches Brew. (So no, my involvement with other projects is not to imply I actually have a Life.)

Pulling Over For a RSS Stop:In Which the Notions of Info Scrapbooks and Wannabe Wire Services Are Called Into Question

The half-dozen of you who regularly subject yourselves to this idiosyncratic mix of confession, ire, observation, pop cultural critique and--lest we forget--tech tips regarding the use of NoteTaker as a muscular weblog client have come to realize that while I love the concept of blogging, I am less enamored with its usual executions.

For various and sundry reasons--many of them strewn across this site like the debris field of crashed conventional wisdom--my take on blogging is that it has rapidly settled into an an ongoing, online ontological opposition of itself. (Three bonus points for that piece of grandstanding alliteration, plus an additional point for it actually meaning something in addition to going for the cheap laugh.) Translation for those of you awake for less time than me (and with less coffee): Blogs are houses divided, with their rapid techno-evolution juxtaposed to the bizarre fussiness of their seemingly instant, hidebound "traditions."

In the main, the capabilities of weblogs are expanding at an impressive pace, even while the actual act of blogging remains suspended at the point of its initial brainstorm: Hey, we can create online diaries or superseded lists of information with this! It's pretty much as if the concept of websites was still rooted in the online conventions that took shape at inception of the Mosaic browser--even though CSS, XML Java and were available. Okay, not really--but truer than not.

Blog Books Redux: Organization As Meaning

A couple days downstream of invention's white heat/white light, I'm considering blog books (think blog rolls on steroids) in a more tactical fashion.

If the main reason to focus the power of NoteTaker on blogging is to deepen nearly every aspect of that process, shouldn't the same be true of NoteTaker-based blog inventories? And yes, while the aforementioned proof-of-concept did an excellent, gleamy-spandex-and-ray-guns job of demonstrating that blog rolls could be Significantly Different and Flexible when fueled by NoteTaker, let's face it: In the adrenaline-rush of Hey, we can do this!, I'm afraid I opted for nothing much more than a gratuitous, tech victory dance in the blog end zone. And while "Ha! Top This, You Bastards!" does have a certain joie de vie about it, I think we'd all be better served by further examination under, ahem, Adult Supervision.

The Street Finds a Use for Things:Thoughts on a Multiple-Part, Distributed Blog

Even if you've skimmed random parts of this site, it's pretty obvious that I don't like leaving well enough alone. I like repurposing--no matter whether it's seemingly rigid concepts or straight-forward, narrow-focus software solutions. French philosophers call it "bricolage," but me, I think William Gibson's savagely smart one-liner, The Street finds a use for things, more directly gets to the heart of the matter.

And interestingly, when the Street has its polymorphous way with something, it often changes the paradigm in question. Think about spreadsheets. The Street decided that numbers didn't necessarily need to go in all of those cells and, further, words on spreadsheets could be more than signage--they could just as easily be content. In essence, the Street highjacked the spreadsheet and turned it into a powerful, sortable to-do list. And in doing so (1) Personal information management was born and (2) Excel, as if suddenly becoming aware of its hitherto unsuspected multiple personality, began to helpfully include list wizards that both blessed and domesticated the highjacking.

Rockin' Roll: Proof of Concept Blog Book

It's like this: I just can't let theories just lay there. To see precisely how it would work, I lashed together a proof-of-concept "blog book," leveraging NoteTaker's embedded browser feature and its ability to output an HTML/Java notebook.

So pretend that this is a weblog sidebar and right around where the (yawn) blog roll should be, you find this:

Page Through My Favorite Blogs Here

Thank you, thank you . . .For this evening, my work here is done . . .

Monday, October 11, 2004 6:08:48 PM

Cataloging Your World: Creating "3-D" Blog Rolls

Blogging with NoteTaker via Ecto2 or MarsEdit raises the question of how NT-driven weblogs work with NoteTaker's own ability to create web notebooks. The easy, knee-jerk answer to sagely intone "Right tool for the right circumstances," which implies that NT blogs and NT web notebooks can't or shouldn't be combined. Recently, however, I thought of a powerful, integrated use of the two.

Making Like Ford Prefect: Putting NoteTaker/Ecto Blogging To Work

I'm home, Dear--did you miss me? Well, no matter. I can tell you did, regardless of that valiant struggle to remain as nonchalant as Zaphod Beeblebrox reunited with Ford Prefect on the starship Heart of Gold. So don't try that hypercool "Ford . . . oh, hi" with me.

I've been busy with Other Things lately--to paraphrase John Lennon, Life is what happens while you're busy blogging. Something true and more serious than clever when you ponder it. And downstream of Other Things, I've also been struggling with a monster post that's still not ready to be unleashed on the world. However, in the middle of bashing it into a more compact shape, I thought of something shorter and equally useful to say (which could also neatly serve to break Radio Silence). And so here I am--no doubt forcing some off you to make good on bar bets made to others of you regarding the rumors of my creative demise. So pay up and then listen up . . .

The idea of roving intergalactic reporter Ford Prefect, far from being a suitably arcane and annoying pop-cultural reference, actually has a lot to do with this post. I've come to realize that I need to pay closer attention to the "leveraging" part of the standing slug under the title of this weblog. There's stuff that NoteTaker inherently does that stands quite apart from the whole Blogging Thing; stuff that when disseminated via the whole Blogging Thing is amped up, creating a classic parts-greater-than-the-whole instance.

Armageddon Week Continues: More Fun With NoteTaker Archiving

Appearances to the contrary, I have not become a techno-survivalist. While I proudly practice "safe computing," I'm not particularly obsessive about it--a couple of backups a week and I'm good to go. Thus, I'm at a loss to understand why I'm suddenly having so much fun archiving my blogs with NoteTaker.

I suppose part of it is the fact that as a genuine NT freak, the clipping service feature has always been a full-fledged obsession with me. It's allowed me to cruise through cyberspace at adrenaline-pumping speed, happily whacking to a notebook page pretty much anything that captures my attention. I then review, weed-out, distill and reorganize at my convenience. Put it this way: The Internet is an information and knowledge smorgasbord, I'm wired to be perpetually hungry and NoteTaker, in effect, has given me an infinitely large plate. So out of my ways, boys--I'm going back for thirds! My dependancy on the NoteTaker clipping service is so total that I find myself trying to Cmd-click while reading the ink-and-paper interation of The New York Times.

And let's face it, while I call it "archiving" in the context of blogging, NoteTaker is simply doing its indispensable Clipping Thing. (In the words of newly fashionable Cole Porter, "do do that voodoo that you do so well.") Perhaps it's simply the fact that archiving is inherently Clipping With A Cause that fascinates me so. The psychological syntax of archiving is "saving this is useful," whereas with straight-forward clipping it's more a more a matter of "saving this may be useful." Whatever it is, all I know is that it's damn satisfying to archive--much as Northwest coffee satisfied Agent Cooper.

Dealing With Your Intellectual Kodak Moments:Building and Leveraging Better Archives

"Memories. You're talking about memories!"
--Harrison Ford
Blade Runner

Over the course of a multi-decade career, I've come to realize that, for organizations, there's something more toxic--and more insidious--than Not Invented Here: it's the proudly touted Invented Once. This is stealthily toxic because it gives the illusion of embracing innovation rather than resisting it--even as it poisons progress. It's the Hero Story enterprises tell themselves, hoping to once again catch lightening in a bottle--but in reality it has the hermetically sealed sacrosanctity of a religious reliquary. Put another way, if you think a prehistoric fly embedded in amber is wondrous, just ask the insect its opinion . . .

Oops--drifting already. If I ever needed proof of the massive resistance to caffeine that's I've built up over the years, this is it. Nearly a full pot of coffee in me and the patented Sheridan Drift Factor® is still in effect . . . What that first-paragraph amble is trying to say is that I've recently revisited my idea about using a NoteTaker blogging notebook to also (and very cleverly, I might add) archive final-draft posts as they appear on the weblog. Upon second and third thoughts, I've refined the concept. Call this Invented Again--the progress-friendly antidote to Invented Once. (Even though I do drift, it's usually in the right direction.)

Here, in no real order, are some additional observations on archiving posts within your NoteTaker notebook. (I suggest you revisit the linked entry cited above to refresh your memory about the mechanics of creating archival clippings.)

NoteTaker Support of Blog-Based Publication Structure and Workflow (Repeat After Me: The Web Is Publishing, Not Broadcasting)

Hey, wait a minute--yeah, you! The one who glanced at the head and said to yourself, "Jeez, I don't have an online publication; I'll check back tomorrow." Well, you don't want to do that for three reasons. First, your parents always told you to try new things to broaden yourself, right? Second, this posting is an meta-story--a natural convergence of NoteTaker blogging advice and many of the themes running through this site. And most importantly, it features a Full-Color Chart--and at the end of the day, who doesn't like a good full-color chart? So hang around--this posting might be up your alley after all.

But having said this, I also advise you to settle in. We need to take a philosophical side trip on our way to the tips. No, strike that---we don't need to, but we really, really should. It's always bothered me that most tech-tip resources are weirdly context-free. The supposition, brutally valid as it is, seems to be that the Enter key does the same thing whether you're writing the Declaration of Independence or Mein Kampf. Which is unfortunately true.

Very Personal To My Dim "Friend:" The Easy Way To Create Links in Entries and Posts

While we wait for the American visitors to recover from fireworks smoke inhalation, the unpleasant aftermath of the dodgy potato salad left too long in the sun and the startling revelation that Barry Bostwick--who played a politician on Spin City and also starred in The Rocky Horror Picture Show--looked more naturally at home in the midst of the patriotic hullabaloo than, well, everybody who's running for president this year, here's a simple but very effective tip regarding entry and blog links.

(Note: For those of you still in school and bitterly complaining about studying William Faulkner, applied analysis of his works will one day enable you to write monster sentences like the lead of this posting. I assume that's glee you're trying to contain.)

The current challenge of blogging with NoteTaker is that it's not yet WYSIWYG--to which I advise patience; who knows what lurks around the corner. In the meantime, however, using Tagging Service as a helper app allows you to easily insert HTML tags with keyboard short cuts. So far, so good. But an additional stumbling block occurs when pasting a URL into a Tagging Service-created link--that is, if you dimly persist in using Safari (or other default browser) to laboriously copy and then paste into the link tag. (Someone very, very close to me was actually doing this for a longer period of time than he will admit to before, well, his brain engaged--but identifying me him will would only cause embarrassment.

Tired of Punctuationless Heads? Try This Ungrammatical Work-Around!

While off the air, I amused myself with massaging the various technologies this blog obsesses about. The results will be popping up in the future. Call them tiplets, if you will; the the tapas of postings--small-plate strategies which can add up to a workflow feast.

If you've been here before, you know that the NoteTaker/Ecto AppleScript uses the first sentence of the entry as the headline of the posting. There is an important proviso: To be transformed into a headline, the first sentence must end in a period: it serves a trigger for all of the headline-making machinations happening below the surface. And, after the first sentence has been made into a headline, the period is dropped, the making the head, well, more head-like.

What I've described is a Good Thing: It allows both NoteTaker entries and the blog postings which they create to share headlines. But, because no system is perfect, it may seem to prevent the use of headlines which end in other kinds of punctuation--and in truth--I also had resigned myself to sedate, non-gonzo heads. At least until I started messing around with the process.

I occurred to me that because the headline-making part of the script it truly fixated on that first period--and because, afterward, that period is dropped--what would happen if it put a period after a terminal exclamation point or question mark in the first sentence? What happens is that it works! While looking slightly odd in the head of the notebook entry, it gives you the flexibility to end your headlines in some other than an implied period.

"That Tip About Archiving Was Really Dope!""Well, There Is Another"

Sorry Yoda; Sorry George; Sorry Eminem. No--wait! After the last two Star Wars films, it's George who should be apologizing to me. So, sorry Yoda; sorry Eminem. (Name another tech-tip site that begins posts by groveling to muppets and rappers in the same breath--it may not be much, but, hey, it's my market strategy.)

After yesterday's posting, some refining experimentation ensued. We all have an ultimate goal--for Arthur's court, it was the Holy Grail; for Stephen Hawking, it's the Unified Theory of the Universe; for Morpheus, it was The One; and for me, well, it's doing whatever it takes to remain inside the NoteTaker application as much as possible. My confession--the one that's been struggling to get out for about two years now--is that I view NoteTaker in pretty much the same way guys who watched X-Football see their La-Z-boys: Armed with remote controls and preplanning, few if any unnecessary extra-chair trips have to be made. That's basically me and NoteTaker. (Has anyone else noted the stylistic similarities between the capital "Z" in the center of La-Z-boy and the capital "T" in Notetaker? It's a sign, I tell you . . .)

So after my revelation about archiving blog posts in the same notebook that created them, I naturally wanted to see if this could be accomplished while remaining snug inside NoteTaker. (In La-Z-boy terms, this is probably the equivalent of wondering how the swank minibar built into the arm rest could be automatically refilled. An often overlooked corollary to that old saw about Power is that absolute comfort also corrupts absolutely.)

The Formal Absences of Precious Things

The title of this post is a William Gibson image from All Tomorrow's Parties (he gets genuine hipster bonus points for naming a novel after a Velvet Underground song). It refers to the empty windows of closed jewelry shops--the dramatically lit black velvet drapes are still in place, but the gems have been removed. (To blog is to write, to write is to try to do so well, and this Gibson phrase is good writing: descriptive, evocative, resonant. While you may not achieve Gibsonian perfection, as a blogger, it's something you should aspire to.)

But great writing or not, what's that cyberpunk scene-setter doing at the top of this post? Well, formal absences of precious things is nothing any blogger wants to contemplate with regard to his or her weblog. Let's be honest here--if you're doing it right; if you're actually breaking an intellectual sweat when it comes to posting to your blog, you're spending a great deal of time and effort making it smart and--paradoxically--seem effortless. But what if all that work went away in the space of a computing cycle?

We're not talking doomsday scenarios here. In case you missed it, wrap your mind around this recent item about Weblogs.com. The word that immediately sprang to my mind was Yikes! Blog today, as it were, gone tomorrow . . . The formal absence in this instance is the rigorous syntax of your former blog's URL--and, well, you're in a better position to tell me about the missing precious things.

And yeah, the whole Weblogs.com thing will sort itself out; Dave Winer may relent. Or maybe there's a point being made here--who knows? After all, Bruce Sterling has noted that all effective blogging is performance art. So perhaps the Incredible Disappearing Weblog Site is the the equivalent of Laurie Anderson laced into skates, the blades of which are frozen in a block of ice, playing her violin on a street corner until the summer sun frees her. Or maybe not. But it is a cool theory.

The patented Sheridan Roundabout Point ® that's being made is simply that shit happens--even in cyberspace. If it's not the seemingly petulant actions of a founding father of blogs, then it might be a virus unleashed by a blog-hating hacker that takes down weblog servers. (If that ever happens, and only diary sites are targeted, I'm really, really gonna need an alibi--so, preemptively, I was with you, okay?) Or, far less X-Files, it may simply be the error of Fly-By-Nite Blogs--a provider that offers low fees because, among other things, it is casual in its approach to backups.

What's Direct-To-Blog and What's Not (Part Two)

The gratifying number of visitors to this site in its first the three weeks is forcing me to grapple with asethetic/communications issues that will affect its proof-of-concept status. Thus, as my own niggling perfectionism occasionally outpaces the current performance of the NoteTaker/Ecto script, I'll let you know. It's not so much, "Don't try this at home" as it is something along the lines of "Here's how to further tart-up your blog."

In the first installment of this random series of Tell-All, I pointed out that I post everything on this site as direct-to-blog, using the NoteTaker/Ecto AppleScript. And a good thing too: If I breathlessly encouraged you to use the script and yet created this blog in another way, you would be right in acting like angry villagers in a Frankenstein film. So, yes: All posts to this site are first written a entries in a dedicated NoteTaker notebook, the structure of which has been discussed earlier. And using the additional helper applications I've also described, all of the text formatting and links are also created within the NT notebook entry--but as HTML tags.

(NoteTaker does feature WYSIWYG text formatting and HTML conversion, but--currently--only for its highly useful Web notebooks. It also has an elegant link maker that works within notebooks, between notebooks and also functions in Web notebooks--but, again, currently not when sending to copy to Ecto.)

How the Pieces Fit Together: A Visual Review

We've recently covered a lot of ground that has much to do with stitching together meta-applications from the parts of separate ones. Perhaps this is why I've been stifling the urge to scream It's Alive! It's Alive! each time I launch NoteTaker and NoteTaker launches Ecto. The story of my life: I set out to be Cary Grant but somehow became Colin Clive . . . Enough of my paltry problems.

Below is a chart that quickly and efficiently reprises the past few postings. Think of it as Page 2 of the virtual handout that started here. As always, double-clicking (© Microsoft) on the art, opens a larger, more legible version. Depending on your on the speed of your connection, this will happen instantly--or you may have time to begin a book. (I recommend Stranger Than Fiction, Chuck Palahniuk's new collection of essays.)

I'm wondering if a future improvement to these charts--yup, I go back and change things on this blog with impunity--may be to create image maps from the illustrations--but I need to workout the implications of TypePad creating thumbnails of them. Would the links work in miniature, like some sort of Barbie Dream House webpage? So many loopy ideas, so little time.

Sunday, June 20, 2004 2:01:32 PM

AppleScript Shortcuts: Additional Convenience for Notetaker Bloggers

Make no mistake about it: Using NoteTaker as a powerful and flexible blogging client is a newborn capability. So young, in fact, the AppleScript which connects NoteTaker to Ecto has not yet reached the status of a 1.0 release.

This means that the situation is both fraught with possibilities and limitations. Possibilities are prevalent because the circumstances are so fluid. Everyone is still working out (a) what is possible in terms of AppleScript and (2) what is genuinely useful for users. For now at least, the NoteTaker/Ecto combination has created the most powerful and deeply featured blogging client available. Others such applications may be developed, but right now the field belongs to NoteTaker/Ecto.

Because of this, much of the initial exploration is improvisational. Early Adaptors are pretty much pressing buttons and noting what happens. And, increasingly, this experimentation is focusing on the classic (and classically American) Could/Should dichotomy: So great is the power of NoteTaker, there may be things that are now become possible that have no real-world benefit for a weblog--at least not now. It's a matter of not knowing we want something until we work out that it can be done. This improvised exploration will undoubtedly become part of the feedback loop that, in turn, will help refine the NoteTaker/Ecto script.

At the same time, improvisation will also begin to map the current limitations of the NoteTaker/Ecto script. How do you know something won't happen until you try to do it? Note that limitations are not bugs. We aren't talking about malfunctioning or underperforming advertised capabilities. Rather, it's those situations where users have boxed themselves into an operational corner; where the immediate response is "Look, I just need to be able to do that"--whatever that is. And it may be that what's being asked for is eminently doable--in time. But when you really, really, really want to do it now, well, that's just not the answer you want to hear.

Moblogging: Mo Hassle, Less NoteTaker

Once again I'm in Digital Nomad mode: On the road and grappling with industrial-strength, attention-shattering stuff. So the postings of the next few days may be closer to randomly occurring shards--pretty much like dispatches from the Front, which, given the nature of this trip, they are.

Prior to reporting in, I stared at my Clie NX-80 (to differentiate it from my 12-inch PowerBook, I call it God's Other Machine). I thought about how I had the foresight to not only set up my TypePad moblogging account, but also to test it. I also thought, well, I'm mobile, and, yeah, I have a blog, and if I file from the road, I suppose I would be moblogging, so . . .

But then I thought again. I'd need my Clie, the Sony 100 collapsable keyboard (the quiet realization of my lifelong James-Bond-Gadget fetish), the wireless card for the Clie and probably my messenger's bag to carry all of this expensive stuff. And then I looked at my PowerBook, Zen-like in it's Incase bag, ready--in one housing--to do what the other four things were valiantly trying to achieve, only in miniature. And, okay, the Clie has a built in camera--big deal, there's room in the outside pocket of the Incase for my Canon Elph. (And what, precisely, am I using the thing for, beyond proving that I can post photos from my table at Starbucks? The very idea of lining up a shot of Anonymous Coffee Teen preparing a Vanilla Latte bores me as a concept--so I can imagine how interested you're going to be.)

Email In Blogs: Maybe Not Snow or Rain, But Sometimes Compatibility Can Complicate Things

In general, the idea of weblogs is still overly narrow (see yesterday's post for a taste of My Favorite Rant). Feedback to a posting is still seen to come primarily in the form of visitor comments. And while most blogs dutifully feature an Email Me option, there is no seamless way to integrate email with blogging: Annoying cut-and-paste seems to be the only way. And, as usual whenever I stare at weblogs, I simply ask "How come?"

In making it easier for blogs to incorporate real-time comments than email responses, weblogs once again speciously suggest that when they are not busy being diaries, they are a broadcast medium--or at least a weird, nonprofessional's idea of broadcasting. Imagine that your only effective response to a radio show with which you took exception was to call into the show. While you might be encouraged to write the station, all mail was treated as some ambient, after-the-fact focus group thing; not seen to be directly engaged in dialog with the broadcast content. That's pretty much my take on how email currently relates to blogging. And, again, I'm here to say it doesn't have to be this way--especially when using NoteTaker in concert with Ecto as a powerfully enhanced weblog client.

Theoretically, NoteTaker should do a bang-up job handling mail; it has proven itself many times over as a peerless organizer of multimeda content. And after all, what's email but one more medium to be thrown into the mix?

Blogging With a Virtual Virtual Notebook

Sometimes being left to one's own devices can be both productive and clarifying. Over the weekend, I had occasion to spend way too much time in environments where wireless Internet access was not allowed. Not being smart enough to have anticipated this little wrinkle, my trusty 12-inch PowerBook was with me--albeit useless for posting purposes. After I finished hyperventilating, I told myself I could handle doing time in an Access Free Zone--even though secretly, I knew these circumstances had broken better geeks than me. However, I had seen The Birdman of Alcatraz