Where's My Memex?

[d f tweney]

The Tweney Review: Where's My Memex?
http://dylan.tweney.com/2008/05/12/wheres-my-memex/

Living online, it’s easy to get overloaded. Tools designed to simplify
communication, like Twitter and Facebook, somehow wind up turning into
extra inboxes you have to keep an eye on lest you miss something. RSS
feeds proliferate and multiply. Channels of communication that once
seemed intimate (IM, SMS) turn into high-volume streams of data that
need to be managed alongside email, news, notes and more.

It’s easy to lose track of the big picture in this flood of data.
That’s why systems like Getting Things Done are so appealing to
techies: We like the idea that if we take an algorithmic approach, and
apply it systematically enough, we can get this flood of information
under control.

I’ve been a lackadaisical user of GTD for about five years now,
focusing on two basic processing principles: if you can do something
in two minutes or less, just do it now; and store everything else in a
single place so you always know where to turn for your action lists
and notes.

That latter principle is what’s been causing me trouble lately. I use
a paper notebook, partly because I relish the satisfaction of
physically crossing things off my to-do lists (shouting “Victory!”
while you do that is a good way to give yourself even more of a
charge, though it will draw looks in the office) and partly because
writing things down helps me encode them into my synapses better.

More importantly, I am often in meetings where I need to take notes,
whether that’s the daily news budget meeting or an interview with a
source. If you’re a technophile like me, I’m sorry to inform you that
taking a laptop into situations like that is still generally
considered rude, or at the very least odd. It’s also distracting. When
interviewing people, in particular, you want your notetaking to be as
unobtrusive as possible, and sliding a notebook or tablet PC out of
your shoulder bag and tapping away at it is the exact opposite of
unobtrusive.

So a paper notebook it is. The problem: My notebook is completely
incapable of syncing with my computer. It’s a pain to move notes into
a more usable electronic form, and sorting to-do lists requires
recopying them from time to time. Worse, my notes aren’t particularly
searchable. British scientist Michael Faraday used a complicated
indexing and cross-referencing system to make his scientific notebooks
more searchable, but I don’t have the time or the inclination to
maintain such a system, especially when I believe that computers
should be able to do this for me.

Some possible solutions: I could use a system that captures digital
“ink” as I scrawl it on the paper, but that requires special paper and
seems a little dorky for everyday use. I could photograph or scan
every page of my notes, as Microsoft researcher Gordon Bell does, or
as MIT professor Ed Boyden recommends doing in his provocative essay
“How to Think.”

A new online tool, Evernote, promises to make it easier to keep track
of those digital images as well as web clippings, notes, and even
email messages. It even does OCR on images you upload, picking out
bits of text in any image and turning them into searchable
alphanumerics. I just started testing out Evernote, so it’s still too
soon for me to say how it works, but I’m excited about its
possibilities.

Still, the scanning/photographic part is still a bit awkward: I need
to have a scanner on my desk, or somehow improve the lighting and use
a better camera. My iPhone’s 2-megapixel sensor isn’t particularly
well-suited to digitizing notebook pages, as I have discovered through
experimentation.

What I need is a compact camera that takes good pictures of documents,
in any light, and then automatically — ideally wirelessly — uploads
them to my computer (or perhaps my Evernote account).

And after that, I need a dead-easy system for searching and retrieving
those images, along with all my other emails, Word docs, RTF files,
and more. I’m sure Google is working on this for a future version of
Google Desktop, but in the meantime, any suggestions?

-30-

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http://dylan.tweney.com/2008/05/06/yahoo-is-the-hometown-hero/

"Folks here were never that psyched about the idea of Microsoft buying
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http://dylan.tweney.com/2008/05/05/wireds-gadget-lab-podcast-is-6-in-itunes/

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That's
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