In this WorkFlowIdiom?, the knowledge worker is surfing the web randomly--well, not quite randomly; there is a research agenda in mind; maybe even a stated goal--recording various bits of information from the web that seem valuable, along with reflections on those bits of information. Example: GrokkingUML.
For example, recently (since 1999 or 2000), I (DanC?) use IRC (usually the #sw channel) and I paste excerpts and titles and URIs? into the channel, along with my reflections.
The benefits of this WorkFlowIdiom? are:
- There's a good chance that some of my TrustedCollaborators? will happen by for a spontaneous real-time chat about the topic. For example, one night I wondered how to do the equivalent of select distinct in XSLT; Hugo happened by and answered the question, since he had just spent the whole previous afternoon figuring it out. (ToDo: Hugo and I still owe the world an article in XmlHack? or some such about this).
- My IRC client keeps a log of all channels that I participate in; so I have the ability to FullTextSearch? (using grep/emacs) my BreadCrumbs? later. The log includes detailed information about time, down to the number of minutes between one thought and the next. I can also take this log, or excerpts from it, and put them in email or HTML/HTTP pages later. (don't fall into the trap of saying "email or Web page"; the Web includes email. hmm... what name should I use for this rant? how about OneWeb?).
The downsides are:
- I use poor-man's hypertext idioms for pairing titles with URIs?, and for excerpting, but these are lost to the machine, and they're ugly and hard to scan. InYourFaceUrls? and all that.
- IrreconcilableCopies?. Lots of us keep logs, but we don't tell the machine that we're recording the same thing in lots of places. I want a copy of the log for redundancy--and in fact, a log of what a particular user agent contributes to the web is an important artifact--but I want links to my log to be recognized as co-referring with links to anybody else's log of the same channel; e.g. I want links to them to turn purple.
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