Some Miscellaneous Ideas

By Paul Ford

Some ideas which came out of some programming and problem-solving exercises. Half-coherent.

I think a lot of the problems in making content work on the Web and on the screen boils down to having a real theory of how form works online. There's a work by Jay David Bolter called Remediation that seems to have some insights on this topic - the variability of form online - but I've yet to read more than its summaries. Argh.

One of the essays I have sitting on my hard drive is called "Mining your own data" and in a way it's my very soft critique against the Knowledge Management industry. My argument is that individuals solve an enormous amount of knowledge management problems on their own, without Ph.D.s, by creating desktop folders and app folders and email folders and so forth, and that the best KM would observe how people actually organize data on their desktops in an organization and allow them the same degree of flexibility with Organizational Memory data, and ontologies could grow out of that.

I just started to work on a tool to automatically convert a short story into a play, and I'm trying to see exactly what information must be taken away or added to the short story to make the play happen. It's pretty miserable and I've only spent about a day on it, but it's fascinating in that the difference between the two forms teaches me a lot about narrative.