Exploring AquaMinds NoteTaker

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.

Pimp My Notebook: NoteTaker Metaphor Modification And Why a User Interface Should Be A Point of Departure and Not a Destination

Welcome to the Machiavelli Edition of Blogging With AquaMinds NoteTaker--it's Any-Means-To-An-End-Day, mousketeers! Particularly because the end in question is efficient, effective information capture and processing.

If you'll recall, just prior to my flirtation with the Talkies, I examined the myriad ways NoteTaker can be used as a database of other databases. Of course, this was a transparent and, in retrospect, pathetic plan to get Uma Thurman to notice me (which, by the way, forced her lawyers to rewrite the restraining order to include blogging). Desperately playing the Clever Card in my bid to impress her, I compared NoteTaker's ability to become a database of databases--a metadatabase, if you will--to those 400-plus special inserts that FiloFax sold at the peak of its Reagan-Era popularity.

And you know, I haven't been able to shake the appropriateness of that comparison--even if it was mine. It just goes to show you that Lust and Insightful Thinking are not necessarily mutually exclusive male modalities--despite what endless episodes of Ally McBeal would have you believe. I think I may have backed into one of those highly useful Idea-Objects--an abstract concept that, even though understood, can't fully be played around with until embedded in something that's generally comprehendible. (Those following along at home are undoubtedly bracing for the now-ceremonial wheeling out of the Richard Saul Wurman adage about only understanding something in terms of what you already know. And while this does have applicability, in truth, I'm intellectually strip-mining someone else this time around--Sherry Turkle, who talks about this concept in her book, Life On the Screen.)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

"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.

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 more than once and I knew how best to use my time in solitary confinement . . .

And so as I was sitting there, I decided to collide two ideas--just to see what sort of creative fission would be released. The first idea is that not only do weblogs not have to feature reverse chronology (and yes, I do tend to bang that idea like a gong), there is also nothing stopping blogs from treating time as something malleable.

What if I simply decided that the events/statements/jokes/confessions of, say, June 14, werenot carved in temporal stone, simply because the reigning Reverse-Chrono metaphor of online content management encourages such assumptions? What if on June 16, I went back to the June 14th posting and changed it? Not merely touching it up or correcting a typo or fine-tuning a reference. No, what if I put significantly new stuff in the June 14th posting? And what if other things written on June 14 were simply removed--ex cathedra--by me? What if the important thing about the June 14th posting wasn't the date, but the subject matter? Further, what if that subject matter was dynamic, changing from one day to the next?

Ending Radio Silence

I've been out-of-town and, alas, out of dependable Internet access for the past three days. I'm back and so is another slew of tips for blogging with NoteTaker and Ecto.

I productively spent some of the offline time further tweaking my blogging notebook (a report about that is forthcoming) and working on a post about using NT blogging notebooks as staging areas for blog content. It's a cool and eminently workable concept which tested very well yesterday. Here's a taste: What if a blogging notebook was comprised of links to the entries or pages of other notebooks? A blogging notebook comprised of pointers would always reflect the latest changes in the source notebooks. Hold that thought and now couple it with Ecto's ability to repost edited entries. For specific kinds of weblogs, this has major implications . . .

I'll be back later with a proper post.

Sunday, June 13, 2004 5:37:10 PM

Everything You Need to Know and Do to Begin Blogging with NoteTaker and Ecto; Well, Except for the Having-Something-To-Write-About Bit and, Okay, the Finding-Time-to-Post Part and--Look, Just Read This

Beyond the sexy industrial design, apart from the breathtaking innovation, Apple Computer's business model is based on the endless refinement of a single concept: Creating an utterly mediated computer experience for the user. This is why it has become a cult and this is also why, despite its recent embrace of Unix, Apple continues to be bitch slapped by Deep Geeks. As an Apple user who can trace his computing lineage all the way back to Lisa, this has always fascinated me. Two high-water moments in the history of Apple Mediation was the "There Is No Step Three" campaign that launched the original iMac and the beta build of OS X with default prefs set to show no desktop icons and and also to hide the dock (which, of course, proved to be far too much mediation for most user tastes).

I bring up mediated user experiences because I'd love to to tell you in friendly Jeff Goldblum-esque tones that there's No Step Three with regard to blogging with NoteTaker. But, hey, there is. And depending on how you count, maybe a Step Six, too. The good news is that (a) its not rocket science and (b) unless you change blog service providers, it's pretty much one-time-only effort. This also may help: While the process described below is not precisely plug-and-play, it will still earn you the aggressviely arrogant sneers of Deep Geeks--so, really, how hard could it be?

Case Study: My Blogging Notebook

Earlier today, I posted a screen capture of the NoteTaker notebook that provides the content of this weblog. While previous postings have emphasized the structure of a blogging notebook is situational and dependent on a variety of idiosyncratic factors, examining my choices regarding this blog's notebook underscores what needs to be taken into account when designing an effective staging area for weblog-bound information.

Self-knowledge is always to be recommended--but never more so than when planning a blogging notebook. Not only do you need to be sensitive to your blogging behavior--call it your informational biorhythms--but also what you want your weblog to encompass and, equally important, what you want it to achieve. By way of illustration, know that this is not my only weblog; I also have one that presently takes most blogs to task for getting trapped in metaphor and self-mythology. Clearly, the focus and scopes of these two sites are radically different.

Compared to this site, my other weblog seems to be presented in Panavision--it goes where my provocateur sensibilities take it. By contrast, this blog is extremely narrow in intent: Its laser-like focus is devoted exclusively to the ways in which using a connected NoteTaker and Ecto adds powerful capabilities to the act of blogging and deepens the result.

Oh, And One More Thing

Yes, that is a live-browser view of the TypePad controls panels you see embedded in the notebook's page, conveniently close to the entry being posted. I should feign hipster insouciance about this little feature, but, hell--how drop-dead cool is that? (There goes 20 years of cyberpunk posturing down the drain.)

Sunday, June 6, 2004 9:53:20 AM

Giving New Meaning to "MetaBlogging"

This is all very deconstructionist: The screen capture below illustrates the present structure of the NoteTaker notebook that's managing this weblog. While the JPEG is being posted now, detailed explanation will be found in a future entry. Right now I need another cup of coffee as I wrap my mind around the fact I'm writing about a picture of the thing I write with using the thing I write with . . .

Who says that Post Modernism is dead?

Sunday, June 6, 2004 9:29:26 AM

Notebook Structure: Mirror vs Parallel

In the previous post, I examined the impact of blogging behavior on the structure of a dedicated blogging notebook. And earlier, the current capabilities of the NoteTaker/Ecto AppleScript were outlined. These limitations will also affect the shape of a blogging notebook. For instance, it was noted that the NoteTaker/Ecto script only managed so-called "main entry" posts. This creates another structural quandry: Is the blogging notebook seen as simply driving those parts of the blog it can actually affect or should it be seen as a hard-drive-based archive/mirror of everything on the site?

Similar to the connection between blogging behavior and the kinds of sections in the notebook, the answer to this is situational. Personally, I see the blogging notebook as fully mirroring the content of its companion blog. My rationale goes beyond archival tidiness: The impresssive gathering and organizational powers of NoteTaker can be brought to bear on sidebar content if it is also contained within the blogging notebook. In this scenario, an addtional "sidebar" section is added to the notebook, with individual pages in that section associated with various sidebar content areas.

Blogging Behavior and Notebook Structure

Because it's an easier proposition--and thus much simpler to explain--let's discuss the structure of a NoteTaker notebook that's dedicated to a single weblog. In otherwords, let's assume that apart from possible background materials (more on these later), pretty much all of the contents in the notebook is mirrored by the blog--and no additional content is being provided by other notebooks.

A second critical assumption of this discussion is that you have a structured blog in place. By structured, I mean you have a (basic) plan that dictates the kind of material posted to your blog, you have (more or less) a timetable for posting and you've have standardized (somewhat) your approach to posting--i.e., you may have a period of rigorous research, the results of which feed a posting or your approach may be much more improvisational. All of these decisions and behaviors will affect the structure of a blogging notebook.

Overview: What The Current Script Is Capable of Doing

Before discussing the structuring of dedicated blogging notebooks, it's helpful to understand what the first release of the NoteTaker/Ecto AppleScript can and cannot do.

At this point in its development, the script enables you to chose either a text selection within an entry or the full entry itself for posting to a blog. The script further allows you to chose whether this posting is sent to Ecto for additional work or directly to the blog "as-is," using Ecto as a kind of conduit. (In either case, Ecto is automatically launched if it is not already running.)

The script creates a headline for the blog posting from the first full sentence of the NoteTaker entry. The script bolds the first sentence, drops the period from it and then begins the body of the posting with the second sentence of the NoteTaker entry. Further, the script retains the block paragraphing of the NoteTaker entry when it posts to the blog via Ecto.. Important reminder: That period after the first sentence is critical. The script will make a headline out of anything and everything prior to finding the first instance of a period. If you forget to use one, well, unintended and surreal headlines will result.

Creating Blogging Notebooks

Okay, you've got the NoteTaker/Ecto AppleScript running from within NoteTaker--now what? Well, for one thing, it's Decision Time. The NoteTaker/Ecto script is not dependent or based on using a single notebook to blog. But it may be saner to do so.

Technically, if you have half a dozen NoteTaker notebooks, you can quite happily post selected entries from each of them to a single blog site. Indeed, this strategy will be discussed later. But at the outset, it may easier (and more organized) to create one dedicated blogging notebook.

There are two distinct approaches to doing this: Simultaneously establishing a blog and a blogging notebook or creating a blogging notebook that mirrors a preexisting blog.

Friday, June 4, 2004 12:14:01 PM