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.

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.

Wham! Bam! Bam! Bam! In Search of the Lost Shortcut

Here we go again, playing the fool again.
Here we go again, acting hard again.
All right!
Well, I'm beginning to see the light!
I wanna tell you, ooh-oh-oh!
Hey, now, baby, I'm beginning to see the light!
--Lou Reed

This is an instructive tale about hubris, human interfaces and hidden helpful features. But let's start at the beginning. My entanglement with Apple computers goes all the way back to Lisa. Say Hello, indeed. It was love at first sight and from then onward, the soon-to-be Mac OS and I matured together and even made some very cool side excursions like reveling in HyperCard. Because I love to tinker, the jump from OS 6 to 7 and from OS 7 to 8 were more traumatic then they needed to be. But as a result, I learned most of the nooks and crannies of Apple's operating system and the importance of backing up. While on no occasion did I ever proclaim myself a Mac Deep Geek, I confess I thought of myself in those terms--secretly smiling about my secret identity.

A few years later, OS X entered the picture and (flexible, if nothing else) I scrambled aboard as a beta tester. Though business sense led me to keep my magazine OS 9-based, I personally never passed through the OS Luddite stage of other Mac users. I embraced the new interface and was not philosophically bothered by Unix living in OS X's basement.

Truth be told, however, my Mac Deep Geek appearances have become infrequent and much narrowed, like a superhero in retirement--think Mr. Incredible. I did not grow up with Unix and so my relationship with OS X is less deep. For a number of reasons (all of them my responsibility), I am essentially under house arrest at the interface level. Not for me (until now, at least) the deep juju of the Terminal. After all, the last time I seriously interacted with a command line was the C: prompt in DOS.

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.

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.)

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.

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.

Entr'acte The Most Important Thing Is the Thing Most Easily Forgotten

Brian Eno is responsible for that observation about Important Things and Memorability--it's one of his Oblique Strategies. It's particularly relavant because four weeks ago, this weblog hit the ground running. And in doing so--in the white heat and white light (obligatory Velvet Underground reference) of getting the word out about the NoteTaker/Ecto AppleScript--I made, well, some assumptions. Foremost among these was that visitors were either NoteTaker users or at least knew of it and had wrapped their minds around its concept. Recently, I had occasion to wonder if, indeed, this was the case. So before we resume the usual geeky-but-festive proceedings, let's play around with the idea of NoteTaker.

Relax: There will no mind-numbing litany of specs and features here. If that floats your boat, then AquaMinds has a very complete and well-designed website for you to visit. And besides, handing you a NoteTaker cheat sheet on a virtual platter does nothing to build character--better, instead, to ferret that stuff out for yourself.

No, let's do this instead: Let's ponder NoteTaker from about 70,000 feet--implications being sometimes more important than details. And remember, I'm not affiliated with AquaMinds, so my take on their product may not be theirs--my assessment is strictly ex cathedra (I love saying that in exactly the same way Gomez Addams loves speaking French to Morticia.) If I happen to stop mid-sentence, it's quite possible that the developers have determined my location and have broken down my door . . .

"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

Pay No Attention to the Man Behind the Curtain

Er, Just do your best to ignore any cryptic test postings you may find here. On occasion, as the NoteTaker/Ecto AppleScript is further improved, you may glimpse a little R&D going on. I'll do my best to keep it in the dead of the East Coast night and try to remove any evidence of testing having occurred by morning light--rather like Area 51, but oh-so-much-more banal.

Tuesday, June 8, 2004 11:39:36 PM

Visual Quick Start Guide To NoteTaker Blogging

Well, I fired-up a drawing program--so be afraid, be very afraid. Actually, the result is a fairly succinct distillation of the major things to keep in mind when you begin blogging with NoteTaker via the NoteTaker/Ecto AppleScript. The next posting will feature a step-by-step overview of what you need to purchase and how you should proceed--basically, all the other important stuff that would have disturbed the quiet Zen of the chart. Of course, there's nothing stopping you from taking a gander at the chart now in preparation for the next post--think of it as homework . . .

And remember: Double-clicking (© Microsoft) on the art will open a larger, more legible version. Be aware, however, that depending on modem speed, this may take a while to load. Sorry about that--I'll be optimizing the size later today.

Monday, June 7, 2004 4:39:33 PM

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.

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.

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

Once Upon a Time . . .

This weblog is designed to be proof-of-concept with regard to using AquaMinds' NoteTaker application and Ecto for directly posting entries to TypePad blogs. Additionally, it is intended to be an Index of Possiblities: Tricks, tips, work-arounds and enhancements that can be when working with these three applications.

The concept of blogging has resonated with the general public because, paradoxically, it's seen as the easiest way of creating a website--even though the real revolutionary breakthrough is that a weblog is a cheap and effective content management system.

Blogs have proliferated across the Internet with almost viral speed. But even though they are ubiquitous, there has so far not been a simple, feature-rich and powerful way to blog. At one end of the spectrum, professional blogging clients undermine the idea of blogs as "easy websites" by demanding significant levels of HTML knowledge and experience. At the other end, there are simplistic, WYSIWYG diary-based blogging clients that do little more than put a friendly face on weblog input screens.

But what if blogging could be pursued via a virtual notebook? A notebook that has the power to clip and save items from the Internet? A notebook that allows content searchs of itself? A notebook that can be structured to mirror the organization of the user's weblog? A notebook with entries that are transformed into blog postings with a mouse click?

What if this blogging notebook enabled a user to search the Internet from inside of entries, enabling her to gather information that can then be used in a blog posting? What if this notebook could also clip passages from other documents on the user's hard drive that could similarly be used in entries that are then seamlessly posted to a weblog?

This is what the blogging enhancements of AquaMinds NoteTaker promise to do. These capabilities are now made possible by an AppleScript that allows NoteTaker and Ecto, the premier blogging client, to interact with each other. That sudden draft you feel is the arrival of increased weblog ease and possiblities.