These are just some personal notes for verbalizing the issue of information overflow. There’s been a couple interesting followups in the past few days, so worth summarizing…

• URLs map time to space (well, into a non-linear, accessible dimension) – permalinks, archives ensure means that it’s all available – thanks to Google and the nature of the normal activity of web browsing (voluntary), doesn’t tend to invoke the same sense of digital guilt (see also, paradox of choice
• Normally, television (channel-surfing) has functioned in the same way – you don’t worry that much if you missed a show, or if there are other good things on. However, Tivo changes this relationship for many people. There’s a “queue” to go through. Note that current generation RSS readers linearize blogs analogously. This is bad.
  

  “I feel like I make things un-bold for a living now.”
  — Lane Becker

• Winer former the alternative model the river of news analogy. Bradbury calls it surfer style, which within conventional metaphors. My own comparative metaphor is the hose and the stream: the former works fine for drops, but is uncontrollable at larger volumes/pressure, while when dipping into a stream, you’re free to get as wet or stay as dry as you want. You’re not trying to catch last drop.
• MacManus follows up by with the term Aggregator Ambience, as a way of describing Continous Partial Attention (see also). I like the ambience metaphor from a lighting perspective because it suggests the manner in which one might turn up and down the dial.
• The rise of blogs (originally as filters), then aggregators (ostensbility as filters for filters, but not doing a good job), social networking (more filtering, but not working as well as they could, TBD) and techniques and sites (GTD, 43folders) dedicated to dealing w/ infoglut

Some more reference links:

• Wikipedia: Flow (psychology)

  

• K5: Getting Back To Work: A Personal Productivity Toolkit
• Structured Procrastination
• CNN: E-mails ‘hurt IQ more than pot’ (Five fast email productivity tips)
• Principia Cybernetica: Change and Information Overload: negative effects
• Wikipedia: Information Processing (see also: The Basic Period of Individual Mental Speed (BIP), Underlying IQ
• Cognitive strategies and design heuristics for dealing with information overload on the web
• Coping With Information Overload & Keeping Up with Your Profession
• How Much Information? 2003 (Berkely SIMS study)

I’ve been using ACDSee forever to vaguely organize my files, but I’ve been looking at tools on the Mac to do the same. The nice things about both these tools I’m looking at is they allow saving of catalogues (in my case, I’m interested in being able to use a single catalog across multiple systems)

QPict ($35)

• cheap
• very fast intial importing (instant access, backgrounds processing)
• keyboard everything, some customizable
• – keywording is funky (doesn’t parse commas, can’t add multiple keywords at a time?
• – no paned/organization view?

iView Media Pro ($199)

• cross-platform
• free catalog reader for redistribution of your categories
• Folder watching automatically imports files, but not subfolders? (I still like how ACDSee does things)
• As of 2.6.4, supports Spotlight
• Nice organization and info panes
  • – only one or the other can be active at a time
• – can’t click in and add metadata by typing
• – crappy keyboard commands

iView is pretty close to what I need, marred primarily by interface issues. Here’s my ideal list of things that a photo management app could do:

• easy-click editable fields
• Fully reassignable keyboard command
• PathFinder like ‘Drop Stacks’, and a toolbar to manipulate (tag, organize, etc) stacks
• Easy dynamic filtering (say in a bar at top — even more powerful when combined w/ drop stacks)
• Smart sets (creation of dynamic sets based on combination of metadata)
• Better views (like MSR Media Browser)
• Web accessible/programmable backend

I finally got on the flat-screen bandwagon and picked up a Dell 2005FPW this week ($450 out the door after some well-stacked coupons). Wow, wish I had done this earlier, so nice. (Not the best monitor ever, but still damn skippy).

• The screen is ultra-sharp, with a native res of 1680×1050 (WSXGA+). It uses the same panel as the new Apple 20″ Cinema Display, an LG.Philips with 7ms Tr and 9ms Tf, and 12ms gray-to-gray average response times (it’s fast, no ghosting, no blur).
• The screen is also ultra-bright. In a dark room, that means blindingly, eye-stabbingly bright. Turning the brightness down to 0 still feels like 80, and I had to knock down the color bars to around 60 and then pop some gamma in the video drivers to get it comfortable. In a darkened-room, there’s also backlight bleed, but in the day or in normal light, it looks really great. I’ll have to Spyder the thing to figure out optimal settings for day and night.
• I have a Sapphire Radeon 9800XT that had some problems w/ DVI locking and screen-blanking when rotating. The former I solved by checking the DVI frequency and alternate operation mode options, and the latter was a driver bug that’s been fixed in the latest Catalyst drivers.
• As you can tell, the screen rotation will increase productivity tremendously:

  

Overall, I’m super-happy with this thing. I was considering picking up the 24″, but that has a 1900×1200 resolution, and if I’m going there, I’m looking for something that’ll support HD (at least 1920×1080). There’s apparently some exciting stuff coming in the next few months, screen-wise, so we’ll see. Also, I reserve the right to wait for nano-emissive displays. 🙂

A large chunk of my waking hours this weekend got sucked in by Psychonauts, Tim Schafer’s (DOTT, Grim Fandango) new action-adventure 3D-platformer (XBOX and PC now, PS2 in June). It was really, really good. Some links:

• Psychonauts is only $29.99 for the PC (ooh, comes with some neat game-themed playing cards) – and there’s also a $10 mail-in rebate until May 1
• Razputin’s Domain – a Psychonauts fan/community site
• Psychonauts on GameRankings (see also Metacritic ratings
• The GameSpot Psychonauts Forum seem the most active
  • What everyone ELSE sees – using clairvoyance on everyone
  • What are your favorite lines?
• Psychonauts has an insane amount of depth, here’s a list of funny things to do that only begins to scratch the surface
• Help on collecting figments: Topic: Figment Help (RE: BEST GAME EVER)

(PS: the Gogglor in the Lungfishopolis was probably the funnest/funniest video game level I’ve experienced in a long, long while)

So, I did a crawl this morning. Here’s some videos online that are good (and some comments on things I saw that I liked – I didn’t have media/vip access and I didn’t feel like waiting in line for anything, but in general things felt more crowded and less fun than previous years, but maybe it’s me, as well):

• Killzone 2 – is it real, is it not? Who cares, it’s the best demo of the show.
• Enemy Territory: Quake Wars – looks more fun than Quake 4
• Marc Ecko’s Getting Up: Contents Under Pressure – I didn’t see much of the gameplay, and its sort of weird with the shooting thing. I think a pure graf game would be awesome (maybe its just from watching Style Wars too many times) — The Midway and Atari booths are actually a bit out of the way (off to the side of West Hall), but worth stopping by. The new Mortal Kombat and Gauntlet games actually look good, even the Area-51 PC port looks like an entertaining diversion
• Were they showing Spore there? I didn’t see it, but OMG
• Gears of War – OK, I wasn’t motivated enough to sit through the UT2007 or GoW line, but holy crap, if you thought the UT3 tech demo looked good, here’s what they’ve done with it
• Ultimate Spiderman has some really neat cell-shading/comic-frame action that looks great (Hulk looked fun as well, lots of smashing)
• Ghost Recon 3 – one-ups even America’s Army in its fetishizing of the US military
• Shadow of the Colossus – from the makers of ICO
• Blizzard, as usual, had an insanely long cinematic, this time for Ghost, their upcoming shoot and sneak. (not online, worth trying to catch on-screen at the UV booth (update: looks like some of the cinematic trailer is available here)

And there you have it. All in all, newer and higher resolution ways to shoot at and kill each other. So, all in all, rather good I’m too busy to play any games (serious time sinks), but if I do, I’ll probably bite the bullet about control pads (vs mouse+kb) and pick up some next-gen consoles instead of upgrading my PC. It’s just way cheaper.

Jane gets caught up in Microsoft’s new convergence vision. While the description is breathless, I have to agree that the Xbox360 most definitely is a part of a strategic play that extends far beyond gaming consoles.

If this diagram is correct (showing that Microsoft recognizes the power of an open-platform), MS could very well dominate in the living-room space. Of course, based on their continuing pushes with Windows Mobile and WMP probably means this is more marketing hand-waving than true sea-change. Still, the way the XboxLive Silver/Gold have been positioned is still ingenious and hints at some sort of cluefulness…

OTOH, Sony, continues to be, well, Sony – software and hardware units still at war with itself (the appointment of Howard Stringer doesn’t bode well). For all that people argue about Sony’s continued strong presence in consumer electronics, Sony’s “Sales Prevention Team” still seems to be in full effect, crippling otherwise brilliant gadgets with ridiculous proprietary formats and poor interoperability. (Everything cool about the PSP that you’ve seen, from web browsing to emulation is being actively fought by Sony. Even within brand — my spanking new Sony T7 shoots movie files that can’t be viewed by the PSP!)

(Nintendo’s Revolution, with availability of the entire Nintendo back-catalog is also ingenious, but it doesn’t look like Nintendo is necessarily interested in expanding into convergence-empire like MS is)

Guardian Unlimited: Galloway and the mother of all invective

The culture clash between Mr Galloway’s bruising style and the soporific gentility of senate proceedings could hardly have been more pronounced, and drew audible gasps and laughs of disbelief from the audience. “I met Saddam Hussein exactly the same number of times as Donald Rumsfeld met him,” Mr Galloway went on. “The difference is that Donald Rumsfeld met him to sell him guns, and to give him maps the better to target those guns.”

Here’s a local mirror of Galloway dressing down the panel. Definitely not your regular US Senate proceedings.

The Independent has a useful summary of the story thus far for those catching up.

Today kicked off the first day of this year’s Social Software in the Academy Workshop, with some fairly interesting discussions on how recent technologies have been affecting pedagogical practice, both in theory/abstract and in practice. Too much stuff to exhaustively comment about, so some brain dump:

• ssaw del.icio.us tag – I’m sure people will regret not agreeing to ssaw05 next year (maybe not, since del.icio.us is rev-chronologically listed
• Public wiki (that bombards me constantly w/ basic auth messages. urgh)
• The room was quite a bit more crowded this year, which unfortunately forced some really squishy seating. Those laptops get hot. Also, the wifi wasn’t bridged, which made Rendezvous Bonjour and SubEthaEdit a real pain. OTOH the food (and drink!) was stupendously good. Thanks, Todd!
• A very active, pretty healthy backchannel. Here’s a link to the final log
• Speaking of backchannel, Justin’s presentation was lots of fun (post video with animated hand action), probably my favorite of the day. As far as value, the breakout sessions and one on one discussions were probably the most useful
• Hopefully some SubEtha notes get online sometime

Also, the our panel tomorrow: Planning for Campus-Wide Integration of Social Software. I’m playing around w/ trying to Nicecast it, but would involve figuring out tunneling on SSH which isn’t working for some reason.