The Reminder is making its archives back to 2003 available on our website. Please note that, due to technical limitations, archive articles are presented without the usual formatting.
This spring I bought a beautiful new 20-inch iMac desktop computer. It has a 250 gb. hard drive. I have a laptop with a 60 gb. drive and my wife has the same. All together, this is hundreds of times more storage than was needed to send a man to the moon. Seriously. When Apple's first operating system was released, it would not even fill a floppy disk. Now our systems are huge and take up massive amounts of space. The same is true for Windows. As I troll through the various hard drives, e-mail accounts with stuff stored on them, iPods filled with files, assorted burnt CDs and DVDs scattered through my briefcase, my filing cabinets at work and the stuff on my computer desk, assorted online accounts for videos, blog writings, and pictures, I wonder what I'm going to do with all of this stuff, and, more importantly, how am I ever going to find the one certain file that I need? The problem with information online is that there are literally millions of ways that it can be organized. It is not like doing your laundry. When I sort my clothes, red clothes go in a red pile, jeans over there, and dress clothes separately. The same with organizing something like a library. The Dewey Decimal system that we all know from our school days has been sub-divided progressively over years into smaller and smaller chunks, but books only fit into one place. But online it doesn't need to be that way. For example, I can start at an online store looking for a new digital camera. I can go their camera pages and look around, but if I don't like what I see, I can usually reorganize the page, sorting cameras first by price, then by brand, then by size, and then all three together if I want. Almost any place online lets me work this way. But what about those files I have scattered all over the place? Just like the online stores, I can place tags on my files allowing me to search and sort them any way I like. Start with something simple like the online bookmarking service del.icio.us. When I save a page to del.icio.us, I can tag the page any way I want, with any number of tags. This way when I search through my bookmarks, I can first search for one keyword and all of the sites I have tagged this way come up. When I search a second way, some of the same sites may come up again because I have tagged them more than one way. This is a start. Apple machines have an application called Spotlight that is a desktop search engine. When I perform a search for files by the name of a specific person, it goes through all of my files, including photos, e-mail, documents, and whatever else I may have on my machine either for this person or that I have received from this person, or which even mention this person. Windows now has Desktop Search which will look through many of the same types of files. But how does this integrate with the data I have scattered across all of my machines and my online accounts? We aren't there yet, but we soon will be. Several companies are trying to design a meta-search tool that will comb through everything you give it permission to. While it can't find that CD you burnt and hid away in a safe place, it would be able to tell you the file you're looking for has been burnt off. Tagging is how we are going to find our stuff. To support tags currently means having to take the five seconds to attach a word to a file, but in the near future, files will tag themselves based on keywords in the document, though this may be a few years ahead of us. Right now, it is up to you to remember where you hid away that set of DVDs you made of your last holiday, but hopefully not for long. ([email protected]) Tech Notes runs Mondays.
